APO

Apollo Global Management Llc C

Stocks

This Top Dividend Stock Just Got Even Better

On Monday night, telecom giant Verizon confirmed that it’s selling its Yahoo! and AOL media holdings to private equity firm Apollo Global Management.

Verizon’s willingness to sell while taking a $4 billion-plus hit shows its eagerness to get out of the media and digital advertising space and re-focus on where the growth really is: 5G.

Here’s what you need to know… .

Read more...

Trading Strategies

The Long and the Short of It: The Recession Is Handing Us Rare Profit Potential

We're already in the middle of a deep very recession.

The market's Thursday selloff, fueled by concerns about reopening the economy and a resurgence of COVID-19 infections, simply brings stocks more in line with an unpleasant economic reality.

The resurgence of fear and uncertainty will push investors to the sidelines again.

This will create new opportunities for "smart money" – investors who know how to play the long- and short-term impacts to maximize gains.

Today, we're going to look at a little-understood industry positioned to reap massive gains because of the Coronavirus Recession...

Stocks

The Top Dividend Stocks to Own This Week

While the House vote on Trump impeachment is driving headlines today, a Senate vote is still extremely unlikely to pass.

More meaningful news comes out of the United Kingdom, and it’s drawing our attention to the top dividend stocks this week.

The Bank of England held interest rates in place during its recent policy meeting.

Facing the departure of the U.K. from the European Union, the BoE released a weak economic outlook for the nation's economy.

Its decision to keep interest rates steady falls in line with the number of other central banks that will maintain lower interest rates to bolster economic growth.

Read more...

Stocks

How to Play the Private Equity Game Without a Million Bucks

Last week, we looked at how financial companies are feeling the pain of lower fees.

But I hinted at one group of financial companies that is not feeling the pain.

It's one of my favorite groups to own. So when the market sold off last month and these stocks began falling towards a Cost of WAR of less than 1, I was pretty excited and ready to break open some bubbly.

Unfortunately, the decline halted and stocks have rallied back, so I did not get a new opportunity to buy them. The numbers are getting there, and I hope that before too much longer I can send Heatseekers members the call to arms with buy recommendations of these powerhouse firms.

These financial companies are private equity firms.

It's hard for most of us to invest directly in a private equity fund, since most require you to be an accredited investor and have minimum investment levels of millions of dollars. However, we can buy shares of private equity firms and reap the benefits of the high returns they earn.

Let's take a look at exactly how to do so...

Trading Strategies

Why I Think One of America's Greatest Investors May Be Digging Through My Mail

Howard Marks, one of the wealthiest investors in the United States, just released his newest investor letter, and in it, I find a few ideas that are eerily similar to what you and I have been talking about for months: Index investing is a dangerous, expensive Wall Street con. 

If you're not familiar with this battle-scarred (and unreasonably wealthy) veteran of the markets, Marks fought his way through both the equity and bond markets for over 40 years.

He also happens to be an extremely incisive writer, with his book, "The Most Important Thing," considered a must-read for anyone looking to achieve success as an independent investor.

In his latest letter, he takes on index investing, an approach that I frequently call a silly waste of time if you're beyond middle age and don't have four or five decades to build your wealth.

Ironically, it was Marks' University of Chicago professors who birthed the idea of index investing in the late 1960s. They saw it as a way to ensure you never underperform the Dow Jones Industrials or S&P 500, as well as never pay ridiculous management fees. (So much for that idea…)

But what most investors don't understand about indexes – and what I want to show you today – is that indexes didn't become popular because the returns are phenomenally good…

… rather, it's because the active managers have phenomenally good salesmen working for them night and day to sell the pipe dream of low-risk, high-return indexing to regular, unsuspecting investors…

In other words, the active managers are phenomenally bad...

Trading Strategies

Don't Pay a Wall Street Hack for Your Research; These Tools Can Get the Job Done for Free

When it comes to our investing toolkit, all we really need at our disposal are the hammer and the nail.

In other words, you don't need fancy bells and whistles to find undervalued companies ripe for market-crushing profits.

You don't need a broker who's probably ripping you off, and you especially don't need a Bloomberg terminal that costs $24,000 a year and takes up half your office.

All you need are the basics, most of which are free, publicly available, and right at your fingertips.

That's right: Independent research does it every time.

I've mentioned here before that publicly available 13F filings are one of the best tools retail investors can use to find unreasonably lucrative investment opportunities and gain and hold a profitable, sustainable edge.

I like to dig through these documents filed by money management firms every quarter to see exactly what the Wall Street bigwigs are buying and selling, as well as measure how well they're performing compared to the previous quarter.

By doing that, you get an exact picture of what the best and, let's be honest, worst investors are doing with their clients' funds.

And over my more than 27 years in the markets, I've dug through enough financial filings with my shovel and hard hat in tow to understand the most important lesson in investing...