Archive for 'Finance'

Financial reform closer to becoming law

  After months of debate and negotiations, the financial reform bill that President Obama and the Democrats really wanted to put in place is now completed and will go through the House and Senate before the President will sign it in to law. Their goal is to have the President do that by the 4th [...]

Canadian dollar stays strong, but prices still high

  The Canadian dollar (CAD) has been relatively stable for a while now and has been hovering just below parity with the US dollar (USD). The CAD has been in the $0.95-$0.99 range for some months now with only short periods out of this range. Some parts of the Canadian economy are impacted negatively by this strong [...]

How to profit from a volatile stock market

How to profit from a volatile stock market

If you are someone who follows the stock market, even if you are not invested in it then you would have noticed that in the last week or so, it has been extremely volatile. The largest change came when the Dow dropped almost 1,000 points before it recovered 2/3 of it in the same day. [...]

Taxes aren’t everything

Taxes aren’t everything

When I speak with various company executives and it appears that the company’s home base is not situated where their supplier or market is, I like to ask them why they decided to situate their head quarters in the location they did. Other than the most obvious reason (the fact that it is where they live and/or grew up), [...]

New $100 bill coming next year

New $100 bill coming next year

Beginning February of 2011, a new U.S. $100 bill will be introduced in to circulation. This new bill follows updates to the $5, $10, $20 and $50 bills that began in 2003. The reason for the changes and updates are for security purposes to defend against counterfeiters. Most advanced nations update their currencies every so often to try [...]

Canadian dollar to stay around par with US dollar

Canadian dollar to stay around par with US dollar

The Canadian dollar has been hovering close to par with the US dollar for some time now and many experts are saying that it will continue for the foreseeable future. There are even growing thoughts that it will surpass the US dollar and might reach levels of $1.15-$1.20 USD for every Canadian dollar. If it does [...]

Learning from the housing crisis

Did you ever think you would see an article that has ‘housing crisis’ in the title but is actually based on good news? Well, if you did, then you were right because this article is all about good news. I recently read an interesting report in the LA Times (click here to read it) about how home owners in [...]

Obama and uncertainty

Since President Obama announced his health care plan and every subsequent serious discussion he has had about it since then, the market dipped led by the pharmaceutical industry. Also, since he announced his plan to reform the banks and place a levee or tax on them, the market sank led by the banking sector. Why is this? I [...]

Are January blues a sign of things to come?

In the first part of this month I wrote a post about the “January effect’, click here to read it. It discussed the significance of the first 5 trading days of the year, specifically how it has historically been a fairly accurate predictor of how the stock market will do for the rest of the [...]

Little known fact about stocks

Have you ever seen those brief business reports on your local news that sum up the days’ stock activity? Many times when they focus on a particular stock they talk about how the company released its earnings and they were better than expected. Good news right? Then they go on and say the stock was down [...]