Saturday, April 26, 2025
The rate of home purchases has slowed dramatically. Since the start of the year, mortgage rates have doubled from around 3% to more than 6%. The affordability of homes has plummeted, as have sales. Yet individuals and families still have to live somewhere, so slowing home sales will benefit companies with residential rentals. Here are […]
The combination of rising living costs due to inflation and crappy stock market results have many people rethinking their retirement plans. Here are a couple of recent excerpts from the financial press. This headline comes from CNBC: 25% of Americans are delaying retirement due to inflation, survey finds Then there’s this excerpt from a Wall […]
An intriguing way to hedge your portfolio’s downside risk for essentially no cost is by using a put spread collar. A large zero-cost put spread collar was placed last week on the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) The trader sold calls and used the proceeds to purchase a put spread. The position will give a […]
Editor’s Note: In today’s article, guest contributor and Chief Income Strategist of The Oxford Club Marc Lichtenfeld gets controversial… In fact, he may even lose some friends. You see, Marc argues that eventually the government handouts are going to stop. And we’re going to have to fend for ourselves – especially in a market like […]
High inflation has become a driving force in our lives. It’s challenging to invest for income and keep up with inflation, especially outside of commodity-focused investments. We have to take an extra step to ferret out investments that will perform well while inflation stays high. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve will need higher interest rates to […]
Through the first five months of 2022, the energy and utilities stock market sectors are the only ones in the black. And the energy returns dwarf the 3.8% posted by utilities. The other nine S&P-defined sectors are negative for the year, with five sectors down more than 10% and three down more than 20%. With […]
The pace of existing and new home sales has started to slow dramatically. Sales of existing homes fell 2.4% for April compared to March, and were down 5.9% to a year earlier. New home sales fell even harder, with April sales off 16.6% compared to March, and down 26.9% year-over-year. Rising mortgage rates thanks to […]
Self-storage real estate investment trusts (REITs) own, operate, and manage mini-warehouse storage facilities at which people pay to store items they do not need immediately, but do not want to discard. Recently, investors have not stored these shares for safekeeping in their portfolio. Instead, they have sent the stocks of self-storage operators straight to the […]
In a market like this, share prices are down across the board, and high-quality monthly income stocks become great bargains for investors focused on the long term. While there are many choices for income investors to grab a great deal on dividend-paying stocks, I like to use these market correction opportunities to pick up shares […]
Options are commonly used as hedging instruments, especially options on indexes and ETFs. The iShares MSCI EAFE ETF (EFA) is a popular asset allocation ETF which invests in stocks in developed countries ex US. As such, it makes for a good product to hedge with (using options), since it tracks the global equities market fairly […]
