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Posted
Apr 17 2008, 03:28 PM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Google shareholders had to be thrilled by the stock market's reaction to the company's first-quarter earnings report on Thursday afternoon.
And nobody could have been happier than Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Each saw the value of his stake jump about $2.2 billion in less than an hour as the stock jumped 17% to $526.50.
The stock took off after the company beat Wall Street estimates on revenue, net income and earnings per share for the first quarter and crushed just about all concerns that Google's business might be peaking.
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Posted
Dec 19 2008, 03:41 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
A story at USA Today -- "Mortgage rates at 37-year low: Average 5.19% for 30 years" -- disrupted our partner blogger J.D. Roth's vacation reverie. All of a sudden, J.D., who's not an impulsive guy, is thinking about refinancing his home. He checked Bankrate.com and found a low rate of 5.085%, which would reduce J.D.'s payments to $1,111 and save him $275 a month. But wait. It could get even better, he wrote in a post at Get Rich Slowly.
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Posted
Mar 16 2008, 07:37 PM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
The proposed sale of Bear Stearns on Sunday to JPMorgan Chase for $2 a share, or $236 million, will keep litigation lawyers busy for years as enraged shareholders seek to recover anything from the disaster.
The losses from Bear Stearns' demise are shocking, so shocking that Asian and Australian stocks tumbled on the news. The dollar was fallling. Crude oil jumped over $111 a barrel, and European shares were expected to open lower as was the U.S. stock market.
From a peak price of $171.52 in January 2007, Bear Stearns managed to lose 98.8% of its peak market value of $20.2 billion in less than 15 months, all because the company bet everything that the housing market and the markets for securities backed by subprime mortgages wouldn't break. It did
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Posted
Jan 06 2009, 05:22 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.
Credit unions exist to help their members. Commercial banks exist to enrich their shareholders.
You read that right. That's why credit unions often have better interest rates on both loans and deposits. Commercial banks are businesses. Their sole purpose is to figure out how to make more money from customers (you). Interest rates on accounts are often very low (or nonexistent), and they always try to sell you new products.
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Posted
Apr 03 2008, 05:53 PM
by
Jon Markman
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Bummed that you missed the skyrocketing advance of credit card vendor Visa when it debuted as a stock last month? The 50% move higher in the shares in the first few days paid for a whole lot of shopping sprees among shareholders, you can be sure -- and they could pay with cash, not plastic.
Well fret no more, because this crazy market is giving you another shot right now with the shares of the company behind a different credit card issuer: American Express. And the author of a brilliant new book about buying super-discounted stocks says this is one idea you should definitely not leave home without.
Vitaliy Katsenelson, a Denver portfolio manager whose cagey Active Value Investing was published last year, says Amex is one of the “cleanest” financial stocks you can buy right now, not to mention one of the cheapest. Its value is down, he says, because it is mistakenly lumped in both with banks and with companies that will suffer in a recession. He says that, to the contrary, Amex is in the virtually the same business as Visa and Mastercard, whose own shares are up a stunning 406% since they debuted in mid-2006: They just take fees from merchants and earn interest on cardholders’ balances.
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Posted
May 20 2009, 03:35 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
The housing market and housing starts are still facing deep and intractable problems. Mortgage rates may be low, but bank standards for home loans are higher. No financial firm wants to be stuck owning more houses that have been foreclosed upon. Developers won’t build what they cannot sell.
Homes are also less likely to sell in the future as unemployment rises toward 10%. If joblessness goes into the double digits and stays there for several quarters, a recovery of the housing market will be nearly impossible.
The only group that seems to have confidence in a recovery in housing prices is vulture investors who are taking advantage of home values that have dropped 50% to 60% in some markets. According to The Wall Street Journal, the vultures often go house-to-house looking for the best prospects. The paper writes that “some are spending their days looking for deals in far-flung suburbs and staking out courthouse auctions.”
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Posted
May 14 2009, 08:18 AM
by
Andrew Rosenbaum
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
What happened to our economic recovery? Recovery was supposed to be right around the corner, right?
The Federal Reserve and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner keep telling us that things will definitely get better soon -- the Fed says growth should start in the third quarter of this year.
But the most important indicators of that recovery are going in the wrong direction. Retail sales are down. The housing market is stagnant. Mortgage rates have moved higher.
Where are those "green shoots" of recovery that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is always talking about? Have they gone brown?
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Posted
Dec 29 2008, 01:53 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.
If you're a saver, the Fed has rained on your parade. It dropped interest rates and introduced "quantitative easing," two things that will make interest rates plummet.
Here's how to protect yourself.
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Posted
Jun 29 2009, 11:13 AM
by
Catherine Holahan
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 Are human beings hard-wired for financial folly?
Yes, according to an article in this month's issue of Scientific American. Behavioral economists and scientific researchers interviewed by the magazine say human brains simply can't account for inflation.
According to the researchers, humans suffer from a biological flaw called "money illusion." To put it simply, our brains get excited when we receive large sums of money, even when prices have increased sufficiently to prevent any real gains in purchasing power. The human mind is simply fascinated by more money, even when it's not worth any more.
If you've followed the markets at all in the past year, you probably know this intuitively; people buy when it seems like everyone is buying and they sell when it seems like everyone is selling. We are motivated by fear, greed and, perhaps above all, group-think. It's in our DNA.
So how do we make sound financial decisions when our very brains may be conspiring against us?
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Posted
Oct 17 2007, 07:22 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner blog Five Cent Nickel . On the heels of my confession that we take our own treats to the movie theater instead of buying them at the snack bar, I thought I’d throw out another one: I cut my own hair. I’ve been doing it for at least 10 years. I don't have special skills in this area. I simply give myself periodic "buzz cuts" with inexpensive clippers. My current weapon of choice is a Remington Precision haircut kit I picked up at Wal-Mart for less than $20 a couple years ago. I buy new clippers every three or four years, so it costs me a grand total of about $7 a year. In return for this minor investment, I save myself the expense of 12 to 15 haircuts per year. Splitting the difference, and assuming $12 a haircut, including tax and tip, that works out to $162 per year, or $155 after factoring in the cost of the clippers. Extrapolating over a decade, this turns into a nice little chunk of change. On top of this, we buzz our kids’ hair in the summer. With four
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