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INVESTORS who like to take an opposing view to the rest of the market can make significant profits, but it does take nerves of steel to take a contrarian position and stick with it. To do this successfully, you need to understand a little more about how this works, so here we explain the basics. So what is contrarian investing? Contrarian investing is [...]

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INVESTING can be a curious business at times, one minute you can be on top of the world and making money without lifting a finger, the next you can be in a real slump and wondering why you bother with it at all. For most of us, the majority of time we have investments is [...]

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IF THERE is one thing to remember about history, especially political and economic history, it is its ability to repeat itself time and again without people learning the lessons of the past. Take the current economic situation with the eurozone countries desperately trying to get themselves out of the mire, without any of them losing face or seeing an obvious ‘winner’ to come out of this difficult [...]

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WITH THE imperfect political solution arrived at in the US over the contentious debt ceiling averting the threat of default and the resultant turmoil, it has recently been the turn of the Europeans to provide all the drama in the ongoing soap opera that we call the financial markets. For reasons that are largely irrelevant [...]

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HAVING an adviser to keep a check on your portfolio is ideal – you have someone who will keep track of what is happening, make decisions on your behalf, if that is what you agree, or explain to you why you should make the decision he or she is recommending. The one thing that it [...]

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World markets are continuing to rise and fall like yoyos, but in recent weeks the trend has been downwards. Yes, there have been times when markets have rallied, but the rallies have not been sustained. There is just too much bad news in the wider economic community for any significant rises to stick. The unflatteringly [...]

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The name is Bond, Corporate Bond…or Savings Bond, or Gilt-Edged Bond, or Junk Bond – OK, this is getting silly now. When we think about the best way to get an income from our hard-earned cash, many of us will think about bonds. This makes sense – a bond is simply a product that you [...]

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Getting older. Yes, it is happening to all of us, but some will accept the inevitable more gracefully than others. Thing is, as we go through life and age – whether gracefully or disgracefully – it is not just the colour of our hair or how many wrinkles we are gaining that we have to [...]

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Economics has more in common with physics than you might imagine, since the statement “what goes up, must come down” applies equally to both disciplines. The accepted wisdom is that when markets have rallied significantly over a period of time, the chances are higher that they will fall than rise, the question is just how [...]

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Honestly, I would have expected to have seen some sort of clear and probably negative trends in the markets by now, this is not the case. The dow jones has continued to soar to new heights following on from the financial crisis, news seems to be somewhat positive in the financial markets yet when we [...]

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Was the recent rally real or just a Trojan horse sucking investors in to the markets before it was time? That’s the question being hotly debated by market watchers right now. At one point last Friday stocks on the Dow Jones Industrial Average appeared to be heading towards their heaviest losses since July 17th. However, [...]

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Emerging market investments appear to be in the news once again as a cautious appetite for risk returns to the global markets. Not so long ago emerging markets – such as those known as the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) – were all the rage. However, once the global financial crisis took hold [...]

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Optimism appears to be returning to Wall Street following the release of some log-awaited key United States data. The data – which involved United States banks as well as the country’s unemployment figures – sparked a rally in US stocks. Investors were pleased that the much touted bank stress tests did not throw up any [...]

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