I’ve been thinking about starting a stock market prediction business. Clearly, there is a huge market for timely and accurate information of this type, and just as clearly, predicting the future is much easier than dealing with the realities of whatever is actually happening at the moment. If investors could know what’s going to happen next, they could develop a plan to deal with it in the present. Maybe Wall Street could help me get this new business up and running!

What’s that? Wall Street institutions already spend billions predicting future price movements of the stock market, individual issues & indices, commodities, and hemlines. Really? Is that right also? Economists have been analyzing and charting world economies for decades, showing clearly the repetitive cyclical changes and their upward bias. Funny then, or strange would be more accurate, that the advice generated by the oracles of

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One of the ingredients for "bubbles" is the quest for the home run. Investors look to how much they wish to gain rather than to risk and reward. What happens when this quest intersects with a major downturn in an asset class? The Foreclosure Boom: Donald Trump Our local papers have featured ads from Donald Trump, explaining how you can profit from the foreclosure explosion. This article, while a few months old, is typical of what is happening. It is from Seattle, a pretty strong housing area which we visit four times a year for board meetings. But not to fear, capitalists, because one man's misery is another man's meat. In the same issue of the P-ITrump University"," a class where Trump promises "If you're not a millionaire by December 2008, you didn't attend my foreclosure workshop." Yes, that's right. Your struggling neighbors who are losing their homes in the subprime fiasco, are easy ...

I know we have a lot of readers who subscribe only by email and hence do not come to the website itself, but just as an fyi sometimes we run polls and/or there are comments made by readers that you are missing out on ;) Anyhow in this week's poll we asked 'What is Your Long term View on Commodities?' With 97 respondents 16% responded that this is just the latest in a series of bubbles 84% responded that in 5 years we are going to wish we could buy at these prices Now, I assume there is sampling error because I fall more in the latter camp so most blog readers who were less biased probably are leaning to the latter answer after reading the blog or as most humans do, prefer to read sources that agree with their own viewpoints - hence we attract more people who already came to the blog with ...