The stock market’s a great place to invest for the long haul, but the rollercoaster ride sure does get old sometimes, doesn’t it? That’s why I’m always looking for stocks that can enrich shareholders with as little volatility as possible. To find them, you generally have to… Read More

Looking over the most recent short-interest data, a very unusual company jumped out at me: EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC). Short-sellers are increasingly convinced the storage giant is headed for a fall. In the last two weeks of April, they boosted the short position in EMC by 18%… Read More

#-ad_banner-#Investing in tech stocks can be quite tricky. The biggest players such as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Hewlettt-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) are struggling to find growth. The industry’s smallest players can post impressive growth in short stretches, but they can also plunge in value… Read More

What would you do with $10 billion? That’s the tough question posed to a handful of CEOs every year. These executives must redeploy that much money every year, trying to find the right mix of acquisitions, share buybacks, debt reductions and dividend streams. How they spend it is largely a function of where that company is in its life cycle. For ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM), the prodigious profits have a clear purpose. The energy giant topped the list of America’s most profitable companies and usually focused on stock buybacks. Exxon’s share count… Read More

What would you do with $10 billion? That’s the tough question posed to a handful of CEOs every year. These executives must redeploy that much money every year, trying to find the right mix of acquisitions, share buybacks, debt reductions and dividend streams. How they spend it is largely a function of where that company is in its life cycle. For ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM), the prodigious profits have a clear purpose. The energy giant topped the list of America’s most profitable companies and usually focused on stock buybacks. Exxon’s share count fell for eight straight years before rising a bit in 2010. Profits were spread over 6.8 billion shares back in 2002, yet ExxonMobil has bought back two billion shares since then, leading to a 29% reduction in the share count. #-ad_banner-#Why did the share count rise slightly in 2010? It’s because the oil giant deviated from the game plan a bit, making a few stock-based acquisitions in the natural gas sector such as the early-year acquisition of XTO Energy. Assuming ExxonMobil will once again focus on stock… Read More

#-ad_banner-#Years ago, when my cousin Andrea was in law school, she and my dad were talking about the “hottest” area in the law — water rights. This was probably 15 years ago and today Andrea is one of the nation’s leading experts on the death penalty. Dad and I were… Read More

Before the first word was uttered in the national health care debate, a significant change was put into motion to remake the U.S. health care system. It was nothing short of revolutionary, and the first major elements of that change are about to go into effect. Few… Read More

#-ad_banner-#Coffee chains like Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX) get the lion’s share of press when it comes to the $7 billion fresh coffee market. And up until now, the company has focused primarily on the chain’s retail side of the coffee business. What investors haven’t realized is that 86% of coffee drinkers… Read More

How does a $500 million company become a $1 billion company? The same way a $10 billion company turns into a $20 billion company: One dollar at a time. Investors have a lot of ways to count those dollars, or, more specifically, they have… Read More

Success breeds confidence. When it comes to investing, that’s not always a good thing. Some investors see a rising portfolio and start to figure out ways to keep their returns moving higher. The simplest way to magnify returns is to borrow money from a broker and re-invest those funds, a practice known as “investing on margin.” Yet, when investors have started to buy more and more stocks on margin, they often set the stage for cascading declines in the stock market as margin calls beget yet more selling. That’s why you should be… Read More

Success breeds confidence. When it comes to investing, that’s not always a good thing. Some investors see a rising portfolio and start to figure out ways to keep their returns moving higher. The simplest way to magnify returns is to borrow money from a broker and re-invest those funds, a practice known as “investing on margin.” Yet, when investors have started to buy more and more stocks on margin, they often set the stage for cascading declines in the stock market as margin calls beget yet more selling. That’s why you should be concerned that investing on margin is back in vogue, whether you are doing it yourself or not. #-ad_banner-#A lesson not learned On March 9, 2000, the Nasdaq index moved up above 5,000 for the first-time ever as investors put increasing amounts of money into scorching tech stocks. Part of that was fueled by a then-record $275 billion in funds that investors had borrowed from their brokers. Many of these investors were leveraged to the hilt, right up to the maximum allowable borrowing limit of 50% of a portfolio.   That high level of… Read More

Who doesn’t want to buy a stock and see it become a multi-bagger — one that delivers not just a double-digit gain, but triple digits or more? But to find one, it means having to think differently when approaching a stock. In the early years, these companies often have big… Read More