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I've been trading for almost two decades (it'll be 20 years in July), and I've seen markets go though numerous contractions and expansions. Every time we hit a slow period, people think the market is dead and never coming back. It always does. To make a consistent living in this business...

Some guns are so smart they know how to pull their own triggers. Those are the ones you really have to watch for.

No amount of money is enough when you have a lousy boss.

Europe’s Tobin tax distraction "James Tobin was a friend of mine, my mentor, and, for a brief privileged period, co-author. Tobin would not have been pleased to see his proposal repurposed in this way." Interesting article by Berkeley Economics Professor Barry Eichengreen...

Current market value of McDonald's is about $100 billion. If they cut their operating earnings in half and gave it to the employees as increased wages, stock price would also fall (at least) by half. Including the effects of operating leverage (since a big chunk of permanent wage increases...

If that were true, then support for Obama among Catholics would be going up. Instead we see support among Catholics for Obama falling from 54% to 35%, the largest decline among any group in the country.

That's not how political strategists look at it and they're pretty good at counting votes. They look at whose vote this will change in the upcoming election. In other words, they start with a baseline of which groups voted for whom last time around and then measure the shifts. That's the most...

Catholics don't like what they perceive as meddling in the church by the government. A recent poll report on local TV news said that 58% of Catholics in California disapproved of the Obama administration's handling of this issue. That doesn't mean they're all going to vote against him, but it...

The general public's reaction isn't really important on an issue like this because most people aren't affected by it. There's only one group that cares about this issue. Approximately 25% of US voters are Catholic. To most of the other 75%, this is irrelevant. Last election, Obama carried the...

This is a great find. It shows how insidious the FTT is, reaching deep into everyone's pockets in ways that people wouldn't expect.

The aftermath of WWII created a unique situation in world history. 1945-1965 established the US as the leading manufacturing country in the world, not because of our manufacturing prowess, but rather because of our military might. At the end of WWII, the US had 5% of the world's population and...

They may be unionized, but I don't know how much power they have in those other countries. In California, the unions make it nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher, so the number of them keeps growing. The procedure to fire a teacher in Cailfornia takes about five years and costs over $1...

According to the California Department of Education the average per pupil expense for the 07-08 school year was $8,594. This puts California just below the national average of around $9,000 per student, and well below states like New York and New Jersey who average around $12,000 per student...

There's been a huge change since I moved to California 20 years ago. Back then, when Companies started-up in Calfornia, they stayed and grew their business in California. Not anymore. California has become an "incubator." Companies start here to gather brains and money, then build the business...

The more detached I am from money, the better I trade. When I started trading almost tweny years ago, I was always afraid of losing money. Fear caused me to do things I wasn't supposed to do (exit too early, stay in too long, etc.). It took me over a year of trading and a lot of anxiety to get...

I thought the letter from the 9 countries were the ones that were willing to use "enhanced cooperation" to introduce the FTT. Perhaps I was reading too much into it. Anyway, I'm happy that Finland is against the FTT. I hope the Netherlands officially comes out against it, too.

Prices have come down considerably, but well-located houses, especially near the ocean, sell quickly. A house two doors up the street from us went up for sale recently and was sold the same day it came on the market. Prices near the ocean are about 25-30% lower than they were in 2007, but...

I've lived in California for 20 years, and things have changed a lot in that time. We used to have one of the highest rates of business formation in the country, especially technology, but that isn't true anymore. The state has lost 1.3 million jobs since 2007 and business are leaving the state...

More crazy politics. First Finland signs the "letter of nine," then they turn around and insist on all 27 countries for the FTT. It's still good news, though. Of the EZ countries, Malta says that they'll only support the FTT if it's global, the Netherlands will probably come out against the...

California has a large economy (GDP) because we have a large population (>33M), but the "GDP per capita" is somewhere around 10th in the country and sliding downward. I heard we got passed by Minnesota last year.