All posts in Trades

Brace yourself. The time of year for holiday sales fliers is here. Next week will bring both Thanksgiving and the mania that is Black Friday. As we head into the most important week in retailers’ year, let’s consider just how the industry has done so far in 2018: As you…

When you think about stock investing, picture it as a world seen through bifocal lenses. There are those looking at what is directly in front of them: the short term, next quarter, a single product launch, etc. Then, there are others looking beyond to long-term growth, research and development and…

When the dust settled from the midterm elections, President Donald Trump did something both shocking and inevitable: he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Occupying a contentious tenure from the start, Sessions passive-aggressively clashed with Trump by recusing himself from the Russian-meddling inquiry. Now, Sessions’ loss can be your gain as you…

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” —Vladimir Lenin This week saw the House of Representatives flip to Democrats, the firing of Jeff Sessions, a mass shooting in L.A., and fires spread throughout California. Lenin sure had his share of wild weeks. But every…

Gold has been in a rut for years now. It simply isn’t moving higher or lower. This is a relatively new state of things. Take a look at the past two decades of gold prices: The yellow metal rallied almost incessantly until peaking at 1900 per ounce in 2011. After…

October was a volatile month for stocks and many investors are probably hoping November approaches something closer to normal conditions. While market volatility may be helpful to active traders, it generally is not what long-term investors like to see. Keep in mind, most people (and funds) own stocks and count…

The video game industry has historically been extremely cyclical. Investors tend to only focus on the industry when a new console launches. 2018 might go down as the year that changes. According to Super Data Research, monthly sales figures throughout much of this year have already surpassed console-launch years. That’s…

It almost causes a double take whenever you hear about a new gadget or tech device that has instant popularity, yet it isn’t from Apple… or even Samsung. But that’s exactly the case with Fitbit. Even with its hit popularity, however, Fitbit has been struggling to reach true profitability for…

It’s been exactly two weeks since Canada legalized marijuana. And we’re less than one week away from states like Utah voting on it. So, we find ourselves in a strange middle zone for the industry. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this has been one of the craziest markets…

Over the weekend, IBM announced a monster $34 billion deal to acquire open-source distributor Red Hat. According to IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, this is all about the cloud, estimating it as a $1 trillion industry. Right now, IBM is in a battle with Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Alibaba, and Microsoft for…