by Casey Wilson
In late July, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent threatening letters to states that have legal marijuana laws in place to expand his crusade against cannabis.
But now, the states he threatened are standing up to Sessions and revealing all of his embarrassing mistakes.
by Jack Delaney
Since July 17, Bitcoin prices have climbed nearly 40%.
That's because the Bitcoin community seems ready to adopt a new system that can support additional transaction capacity.
by Stephen Mack
Our latest round of stocks to buy now is heavy on tech.
These stocks capitalize on legal marijuana, tailwinds in the biotech industry, a race to build a supercomputer, and the urbanization of the tech industry.
Don't miss out on these gains.
by Shah Gilani
In 2008, the biggest banks in the Western world were being bailed out by their governments. Barclays, however, raised billions of dollars on its own to fortify its balance sheet and sidestep the inconvenience of having its executives' compensation and bankers' bonus pools subject to regulatory dictates.
Now it turns out that not everything was what it seemed.
Barclays Plc. (NYSE: BCS), the holding company that controls Barclays Bank Plc. (NYSE: BCS-PD), and four former top Barclays executives have been charged with fraud relating to how they raised the money that saved the bank and their paychecks from government oversight.
Whether they were just trying to save taxpayers money or their compensation packages will now be determined in criminal court.
But in the court of public opinion, the verdict's already being tallied.
Get caught up on what they did and how, and then cast your vote here: guilty or innocent?
Get caught up on what they did and how, and then cast your vote here: guilty or innocent?
Many investors believe that rising rates are bad for real estate and, by implication, for Real Estate Investment Trusts, or "REITs" for short. So they're starving themselves of badly needed income by lightening up their allocations or abandoning them entirely.
That's a huge mistake – if you understand how to pick the right REITs.
Contrary to what a lot of investors believe, REITs have historically done well when the cost of money is increasing. Between 1994 and 2017, for example, there were nine time periods when interest rates rose by more than 1% (or 100 basis points in trader speak) as measured by the 10-year U.S. Treasury note.
Six out of nine of those times, REITs provided positive returns despite the fact that those rate changes were roughly four times larger than the measly 0.25% hike Yellen just made and the three additional hikes she says she's going to make in 2017.
What most people miss is deceptively simple.
Namely that there's a big difference between a sharp rate spike in the mold of Chairman Paul Volker's 1970s "torpedo" and the slowest interest rate normalization in history that's now Yellen's legacy until, apparently, the end of time.
The former is a mechanism designed to shut down inflation and rein in speculation, while the latter is intended to maintain all the things policy makers believe free money makes possible – an improving labor market, consumer spending, and overall demand.
To paraphrase legendary executive and former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, "lemme show ya a chart"…
After last year's election, a number of pundits had predicted that a Trump victory would usher in a new age for coal and crude oil in the U.S.
Renewables, like solar and wind, would be used as alternatives only in certain regions of the country – or so these pundits suggested.
Well, it's hardly worked out that way, even with the more recent decision to cut the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord.
Renewables are soldiering on, and the reason why is simple (and market-based)...
by Ashley Moore
These Master Settlement Payments from the Big Tobacco companies can pay you up to $8,300 per month, even if you've never smoked.
Better yet, all of this monthly income is tax-free, allowing you to keep even more of your money in your pocket.
Here's how to cash in on this unique income opportunity...
Late last week, crude oil prices took a nosedive. WTI (West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark crude rate for futures contracts in New York) declined 4.8% on Thursday, fueled by massive overnight (and overseas) sell-offs. That translated into a 7.7% dive for the week to date.
If there has ever been a better example of the tail wagging the dog, I haven't seen it.
As you've seen me say before, swings in oil prices often have less to do with market dynamics and more to do with paper traders – people trading futures, options, and other hedges. Of course, what does happen in the actual market may be the initial prompt for how such derivatives are played.
This time, however, we had an avalanche of events that magnified the impact.
Here's what happened - and where oil is heading next...
Markets spent last week watching the Republican Party eat its own and reject seven years of promises to repeal the broken Obamacare bill while the Democrat Party that destroyed the American healthcare system celebrated. For the moment, investors chalked this cynical display of political paralysis as typical Washington dysfunction and left markets relatively unscathed. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shaved off only 1.5% or 317.90 points on the week to close at 20,596.72 while the S&P 500 dropped by 1.4% to 2343.98. The Nasdaq Composite Index lost 1.2 to finish the week at 5828.74 in the wake of a flurry of Elon Musk tweets designed to distract Tesla investors from that company's massive losses and broken promises.
Who says that the narrative of nonsense that dominates our public discourse is limited to Washington, D.C.? But investors will soon run smack into the reality that Obamacare imposed crippling costs on consumers and businesses that contributed to the worst recovery in modern history. With no prospect that the yoke of this ruinous legislation will be lifted off the backs of the American people for the foreseeable future, markets are likely to turn from irrational exuberance to rational sobriety very quickly.
Blue-chip tech stocks were some of the biggest growth catalysts for the bull market we exited in January. That was the longest bull market since World War II, which lasted six years.
Now we've entered a bear market. And it's sent the Nasdaq down 17% from its July highs.
Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) are already down 11% and 26% this year, respectively.
