Baltimore – (TFN): Hallelujah, the markets work! You have no idea how happy I was this morning when I opened the Wall Street Journal and found an article detailing Goldman Sachs shareholder anger at the recent bonus payouts.

Now, I don’t care who makes what. That’s between bosses and their worker bees. But I do get a little peeved when Uncle Sam tries to tell some worker he can’t get paid per his contract.

Before you go shouting about how Washington saved Wall Street and therefore we, as taxpayers, get a say over pay, let me ask you this. Does your mortgage company tell you what color to paint little Johnnie’s room? Does your car loan provider tell you how fast to drive? Does your health insurance provider tell control your diet?

Didn’t think so.

If some congressman came barging in this office right now, demanding I slash my pay, his goons

November 18, 2009
By Gary Grimes
Please understand that this article is about more than safeguarding your money; it’s about saving you headache and heartache. It’s about giving you peace of mind.

Before I explain, please allow me to ask a few questions:

Have you given much thought about the money in your banking accounts lately? Do you know if it’s safe?
Have you thought about what might happen if your bank fails?
Did you know you could be left in the lurch for days, weeks, even months before you get your money back from the FDIC?
What happens if the FDIC can’t cover your funds?
How do you find a safe bank to protect your deposits right now?

I hope you’ve given these questions some serious thought.

I have to be honest: These questions were about the farthest things from my mind until about a year ago, when …

(AP:WASHINGTON) Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says the economic recovery “could be a little choppy” and it’s going to take a while. Geithner told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that bringing back jobs and the confidence of investors will be the real test of recovery. He declined to say whether the recession is over, saying economists will figure that out years from now.

Recent encouraging news in the economy “shows that _ when you act with force _ you can stabilize a crisis like this,” he said in the interview that will air Sunday.

“But this is going to be a different recovery than in the past because Americans are going to have to save more. A lot of damage was caused by this crisis. It’s going to take some time for us to grow out of this. “It could be a little choppy. It could be uneven. And it’s going to take

Data Call Technologies Inc., best known as one of the fastest growing members of the Digital Signage (DS) community, offers a wider range of digital signage related products than most people are aware of.

First and foremost, of course, is the company’s well-known ability to provide compelling content to help draw viewer attention to digital signs, thus increasing their effectiveness. By adding continuously updated weather, news, traffic, sports, financial, or other eye-catching elements to digital signage, DCT has changed the way people look at advertising. In fact, DCT Chairman, Jim Ammons, who also helped invent the first live wireless sports feed with the Associated Press, believes that digital signage is the single most explosive industry today and will change not only advertising, but the Internet itself.

But the company also provides other less known associated products and features that support its

The inflation/deflation debate is hot… It crackles and pops like a pine fire. But it gives off little helpful light. Abe Lincoln may have read by the light of an open fire. But when we tried it, we singed our eyebrows. It made us suspicious of Old Abe; maybe he wasn’t quite as truthful as he pretended to be. Later, we realized he was a mountebank. But that’s another story…

Today, we light a candle and try to interpret the shadows on the wall…

Yesterday, the Dow fell 81 points. Gold dropped $5 to $1009.

Will the feds succeed in causing inflation? Or will they fail? Will the dollar continue to go down? Or will it prove to be a safe haven currency in a time of deflationary trouble?

According to the papers, the feds have already done it. “Fed says recovery underway,” says a headline from yesterday’s press.

Another headline tells us that

This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Richard Beales (The New York Times): Exuberance defies sober new reality, September 17, 2009. Is irrational exuberance back in the markets? Evidence abounds that it may be. With financial chaos abating, the return of risk appetite in stock and lending markets is logical - up to a point. But risk-taking that aspires to the boom-time norm, rather than a more sober new reality, could be premature and dangerous.

• James Grant (The Wall Street Journal): From bear to bull, September 19, 2009. Grant argues the latest gloomy forecasts ignore an important lesson of history: The deeper the slump, the zippier the recovery.

• John Hussman (Hussman Funds): Strenuously overbought, September 22, 2009. Our measures of market action

Investing Without Trailing Stops: Here’s Why 75% of Stocks Are a Sucker’s Bet

by Alexander Green, Advisory Panelist

A couple weeks ago, I explained why it is imperative to run trailing stops behind your individual stocks.

Sell stops ensure that your capital is protected and your profits don’t slip through your fingers.

However, one subscriber took me to task, saying that a trailing stop guarantees you won’t “sell at the top.”

Quite true.

However, “selling at the top” and its corollary, “buying at the bottom,” are not realistic investment goals. Here’s why…

The Danger of Selling High and Buying Low

For one thing, you never know the top or the bottom until you’re looking in the rear view mirror. And given enough time, all-time highs and lows are usually exceeded.

For example, you may sell a stock at its 52-week high – not a good

It’s one of the first rules in the book of mainstream economic wisdom: a country’s economy is the thermometer which “reads” its stock market’s temperature. If financial conditions are heating up, stocks rise; if they are cooling down, stocks fall. Were it so simple — millionaires wouldn’t make up a measly .15% of the global population.

Obviously, there’s a major flaw with this logic; namely, it isn’t true. Time and again, stock prices smolder to near boiling even as economic growth chills to the bone. (The opposite also holds: Stock prices cool down even as the economy is on fire.)

Take, for instance, Germany’s main stock index, the DAX 30. On August 13, Europe’s number one economy reported a .3% rise in gross domestic product (GDP) — Germany’s first quarter of growth since January 2008. Soon after, the …

We face the fourth quarter with hopes of reform and rebuilding paired with an obvious and earned distrust for the government, Wall Street and the mortgage and banking systems. Between bankruptcies, bailouts and layoffs, some feel that we hit the bottom of the worst economic storm since the Great Depression, and that the next step is to make sure we don’t let history repeat itself.

President Barack Obama threw stern words at Wall Street this morning, reminding it of the irresponsible behaviors that drove the U.S. into recession and warning not to fall back into reckless habits. On the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history, President Obama warned the bellwethers and big names not to anticipate anymore government bailouts.

“We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess at the heart of this crisis, where too many were

Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) Chief Executive Officer John Mack will step down and be replaced by Co-President James Gorman, who has been running the company’s brokerage and overseeing its merger with Citigroup Inc.’s (NYSE: C) Smith Barney unit.

The 64-year-old Mack will remain as Morgan’s Chairman when Gorman, 51, takes over the CEO post on January 1, the company said.

Mack came under criticism as he scaled back Morgan’s risk profile even as rivals like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) regained momentum as the worst economic downturn since World War II began to wane, according to the Associated Press.

“Gorman has really earned his stripes,” Anton Schutz, president of Mendon Capital Advisors Corp., which owns Morgan Stanley shares, told Reuters. “He did a great job at Merrill, he’s doing a good job at Morgan Stanley, and the timing for a