Question: How do you know ahead of time when a garden-variety correction is about to turn into a bear market rout? Answer:  You don’t. I would love to tell you that there is a tried and true way to make that distinction ahead of time, but there isn’t.  At best, you can look at past...Read More

Back in December, I recommended that readers “watch their ash” when investing in tobacco stocks.  In their hunt for yield in a seemingly yield-less world, investors had bid the price of most tobacco stocks to levels that no longer made sense. Tobacco is a no-growth business and an industry in terminal decline.  As a case...Read More

2013 had one of the best Januaries in recent history, only to hit a rough patch in the first week of February.  Though the markets were due for a breather, events in Europe were the trigger. The two European countries most likely to cause the next phase of eurocrisis—Italy and Spain—both had potentially destabilizing political...Read More

Last week, I wrote about the Barron’s Roundtable, commenting that its members rarely agree on anything.  I want to point out again that this is precisely why I enjoy reading the Roundtable comments every year.  Right or wrong, its members are anything if not independent, and this is what makes them valuable. In the second...Read More

Though it has been derisively been called “the river of no returns,” Amazon.com (Nasdaq:$AMZN) can call “scoreboard” on its critics.  Amazon is the last man standing of the generation of companies that rose to prominence during the 1990s tech boom. Sure, plenty of the dot-com darlings are still alive and well and generating more revenue...Read More