Investors seeking a balanced combination of portfolio stability, monthly income, and share price appreciation generally turn to dividend stocks. These are shares of large-cap, blue-chip companies in “boring” areas, such as the financial, energy, materials, industrials and consumer staples sectors. With only so much innovation to be done at this point in the corporate life cycle, these companies opt to return…
Ten years ago, Congress and the White House enacted a law to deter insider trading on Capitol Hill and increase public transparency, but controversies over Congressional stock trades persist and the requirement to provide prompt public disclosures is often ignored by lawmakers. The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or STOCK Act, mandates that members of Congress, their immediate family…
Higher oil prices mean higher share prices for these stocks. Most of the best-performing stocks of 2022 up to this point are highly exposed to the red-hot energy market. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent oil, natural gas, coal and other commodity prices soaring, creating an earnings tail wind for many energy sector stocks. Stocks that are highly correlated to oil prices…
These seven commodity stocks offer at least 3% dividend yields. Throughout the 2010s, commodities were left for dead. The great Chinese super-cycle ended, and as demand for copper, steel and other building essentials diminished, the whole commodity space went into an extended hibernation. By about 2019, most commodity stocks barely showed a pulse. But things have changed. The pandemic and…
Gas prices topped $4 a gallon Sunday and are headed higher as oil hit $125 a barrel early Monday after briefly flirting with $140 in overnight trading as the White House considers an import ban on Russian energy. The escalating war in Ukraine is playing havoc with world currency and commodity markets and that is most commonly felt in the…
These long-term ETFs offer diversification and a low-maintenance strategy. In 2022, it can be hard to keep up with all the volatility in individual stocks. Thankfully, a lot of research shows that “active management” that involves trading in and out of positions frequently can often cause more harm than good. In fact, about 60% of active managers underperformed the S&P…
At less than $10 per share, these stocks won’t break the bank. The S&P 500 is off to a shaky start to 2022, but the market pullback has created some potential buying opportunities. A stock price under $10 can be a red flag for investors that something is seriously wrong with a company, such as a broken business model or a…
The large-capitalization S&P 500 index generated a total return of 28.7% in 2021, while the Russell 2000 small-cap index total return was just 14.8%. Bank of America analyst Jill Carey Hall says small-cap stocks became about 9% more attractive relative to large-cap stocks from a valuation perspective last year, and small-cap stocks are now cheap relative to large-cap stocks “across every metric…
Private equity has recovered to pre-pandemic levels following a superb 2021. Private equity firms have made a stellar recovery from the global pandemic. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2021 deal volume surged 48% versus the same period of 2020. And in just four quarters, private equity activity returned to pre-pandemic levels. The tail winds of low interest rates, socially conscious investing and…
If you want to get into the NFT craze, here is what you need to know. The cryptocurrency king Bitcoin has had a rough start to the year, down roughly 6.9% since the beginning of 2022, but the non-fungible token, or NFT, market is booming with investors, institutions, companies and celebrities piling into the digital tokens as their value steadily trends upward. NFTs’…