The currency this legendary investor expects to triple in 10 years

Posted February 20, 2012 at 11:15 pm

via NewsMax

International investor Jim Rogers said he doesn’t have U.S. stocks or the British pound in his portfolio, which includes euros, dollars, renminbi and precious metals such as gold and silver.

“Everybody’s having a wonderful time running the printing presses,” Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings, said in a television interview with CNBC in Singapore. “The way to protect yourself at a time like that, historically anyway, has been to own real assets. Those are my longs, and currencies.”

The Standard and Poor’s 500 Index has gained 8 percent this year, while the S&P GSCI index of 24 commodities has climbed 6.4 percent and gold 11 percent.

Rogers said he expects more currency turmoil as global central banks inject stimulus into the economy through quantitative easing and investors should buy commodities “when that happens.”

“Probably none of us are going to own any paper money at all ultimately, but that’s later in this decade, because paper money is becoming very suspect everywhere in the world,” he said. “I don’t own any U.S. equities,” he said, adding “I don’t own the pound sterling, although I do love the U.K. a great deal.”

While the pound is up about 2 percent against the [continue]…

Add Your Comment | 0 Comments

Investor’s appetite for risk is growing (not a bad thing either)

Posted February 20, 2012 at 2:16 am

by Christine Hauser

In a Wall Street universe populated by marquee name stocks, the lesser known entities are the stars of the rally so far this year.

The Russell 2000 index, which tracks stocks with a small market capitalization, is nearing its record high with a rise of about 11 percent in the year to date. That outstrips the Russell 1000 index that measures Wall Street’s large capitalization stocks and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index that measures the broader market.

The surge in the so-called small-cap stocks — companies whose total share value is $3 billion or less — indicates that investors’ appetite for risk is growing as signs of recovery persist in the United States and euro zone leaders make progress in containing the debt crisis, market participants say.

After investors drained more than $15 billion out of small-cap stocks last year, the largest amount since 2007, they have sunk about $2.4 billion back into those equities so far this year, according to data provided by Lipper, a Thomson Reuters company.

“It is a decent confidence barometer,” said Scott Wren, a senior equity strategist for Wells Fargo Advisors. “Investors are confident enough to buy some of these small companies, betting that the U.S. economy is going to continue to grow.”

Most of that money poured into the small-cap stocks in the seven days that ended Feb. 8, the last tally by Lipper. During that time, the Labor Department reported a gain of [continue]…

Add Your Comment | 0 Comments

The “Green Acres” effect

Posted February 20, 2012 at 12:55 am

Via Reuters

* U.S. goal is to create 100,000 new farmers

* $1.8 billion in U.S. loans to beginning farmers in 2011

* Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota top states for new farmer loans

* Specialty crops, organic food a focus

by Carey Gillam

Dan Pugh wishes he had a bigger tractor and his wife Laura worries about their chickens in the winter weather. But as new farmers putting down roots in rural Missouri, the Pughs are counting on more rewards than regrets in trading their city lives for the country.

A better quality of food and life are among the factors that caused Dan, 47, to leave a career in sales last year and move Laura, 48, and their two young children to 50-acres (20 hectares) of rolling pastureland they call Honey Creek Farm.

The Pughs will plant their first crop of organic spinach and lettuces in the next few weeks on ground they tilled behind the barn they converted into a two-bedroom home. They are shopping for sheep and hogs. And though their first hives of bees mysteriously died, Laura is determined to develop a successful honey operation as well.

“The whole food and farming system is so out of whack,” Dan Pugh said. “We want better and we can do something to help other people eat better.”

For those who remember the American TV series, call it the “Green Acres” effect. Fueled by an economic downturn that has curtailed the upward mobility of many corporate jobs, general dissatisfaction with suburban stresses and growing discontent with what they see as the ills of industrialized agriculture, thousands of families across the United States have left suburban cul de sacs and headed to the countryside – forging a new demographic of family farmer.

The U.S. government is not only monitoring the trend, it is [continue]….

Add Your Comment | 0 Comments

Guide to the markets for 2012

Posted February 16, 2012 at 3:41 am

by Paul Novell

I love the online format of this piece, the included audio and the slide presentation format.

This piece includes a lot of valuation data and a lot if information on dividend yields. It also has a great section on economic indicators.

Grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and enjoy [continue]…

Add Your Comment | 0 Comments

Still riding Apple’s profit wave

Posted February 8, 2012 at 12:55 am

by Michael Dawson

In January of 2007, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone.  As we now know, the iPhone wasn’t simply another cell phone.  Many now associate its introduction with the dawn of the mobile computing era.  Apple really threw down the gauntlet last week as it became the number one PC maker.

Apple reported record quarterly sales of 15.4 million iPads and 5.2 million Macs, giving the company over 20 million sales of dedicated personal computing devices (distinct from its sales of more than 37 million phones). Gartner reported HP’s worldwide sales for the fourth quarter to be 14.7 million, while Lenovo and Dell sold 12.9 and 11.6 million units, respectively.  – Apple Insider

A few months after the iPhone’s announcement in 2007 I saw a TV commercial that convinced me that there were dollars to be made investing in this area.  The commercial stated that “From Africa to Asia the next billion cell phone users will be here by 2010.”  That sounded like opportunity and I began investing in mobile related stocks.

As many people did at the time, I initially invested in [continue]….

Add Your Comment | 0 Comments

The tailwind for stocks this year is this

Posted February 6, 2012 at 10:35 pm

by Nikolaj Gammeltoft, Inyoung Hwang and Whitney Kisling

The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index’s best start in 25 years is doing little to restore Americans’ confidence in the stock market.

The benchmark gauge for U.S. shares has climbed 6.9 percent in 2012, the most since it rose 14 percent to begin 1987, data compiled by Bloomberg show. It traded at an average of 14.1 times earnings since the start of 2011, the lowest annual valuation since 1989.

More than $469 billion has been pulled from U.S. equity mutual funds over five years and New York Stock Exchange volume slipped to the lowest since 1999.

Pessimism is taking a toll on the securities industry, where more than 200,000 jobs were lost last year, even as U.S. unemployment declines as the economy accelerates. Sentiment is the worst since the early 1980s, when 17 years of equity market stagnation gave way to the biggest rally in history.

“Investors are scared to death,” Philip Orlando, the New York-based chief equity strategist at Federated Investors Inc., which oversees about $370 billion, said in a telephone interview on Feb. 3. “The fears are justified, but from a valuation standpoint the market has overshot, as it typically does. We’ve been pounding the table to put money into equities.”

The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose 2.2 percent last week to 1,344.90 after U.S. unemployment fell to the lowest level since February 2009 and manufacturing grew at the fastest rate in seven months. The S&P 500 retreated 0.2 percent to 1,342.13 at 11:46 a.m. in New York today.

Companies whose shares dropped at least 20 percent last year helped [continue]…

Add Your Comment | 0 Comments

Three coming technology breakthroughs

Posted January 31, 2012 at 3:47 am

by Mark P. Mills and Julio M. Ottino

In January 1912, the United States emerged from a two-year recession. Nineteen more followed—along with a century of phenomenal economic growth. Americans in real terms are 700% wealthier today.

In hindsight it seems obvious that emerging technologies circa 1912—electrification, telephony, the dawn of the automobile age, the invention of stainless steel and the radio amplifier—would foster such growth. Yet even knowledgeable contemporary observers failed to grasp their transformational power.

In January 2012, we sit again on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century. All find their epicenters in America: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.

Information technology has entered a big-data era. Processing power and data storage are virtually free. A hand-held device, the iPhone, has computing power that shames the 1970s-era IBM mainframe.

The Internet is evolving into the “cloud”—a network of thousands of data centers any one of which makes a 1990 supercomputer look antediluvian.

From social media to medical revolutions anchored in metadata analyses, wherein astronomical feats of data crunching enable heretofore unimaginable services and businesses, we are on the cusp of unimaginable new markets.

The second transformation? [continue]…

Add Your Comment | 0 Comments

Is the “home prices” knife still falling?

Posted January 24, 2012 at 2:15 am

by Chris Martenson

With the beating home prices have taken since 2007, existing and soon-to-be homeowners are keen to know:

Are prices stabilizing? Will they begin to recover from here? Or is the “knife” still falling?

To understand where housing prices are headed, we need to understand what drives them in the first place: policy, perception, and price discovery.

In my December 2011 look at housing, I examined systemic factors such as employment and demographics that represent ongoing structural impediments to the much-awaited recovery in housing valuations and sales.

This time around, we’re going to consider policy factors that influence the housing market.

Yesterday while standing in line at our credit union I overheard another customer at a teller’s window request that her $100,000 Certificate of Deposit (CD) be withdrawn and placed in her checking account because, she said, “I’m not earning anything.”

The woman was middle-aged and dressed for work in a professional white- collar environment — a typical member, perhaps, of the vanishing middle class.

Sadly, she is doing exactly what Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve policies are intended to push people into doing [continue]…

Add Your Comment | 0 Comments

How Microsoft can reclaim its throne in 2012

Posted January 12, 2012 at 1:45 am

by Farhad Manjoo

The old conventional wisdom about Microsoft was that you could never count it out. Sure, the company would always break into new markets with products that looked dead on arrival—see Windows 1.0 or Internet Explorer 1—but Microsoft’s genius lay in its persistence.

When Bill Gates got hold of an idea—conquering desktop computing, controlling the front door to the Web—he turned into a nerdy Wile E. Coyote, constantly inventing new ways to go after his rivals. In Version 2, he’d fix 80 percent of what was wrong with his first effort, and in Version 3 he’d fix 80 percent of Version 2, and so on.

He’d never reach perfection this way, but Gates was never interested in perfect: By the time Microsoft reached Version 4 or 5, it was usually halfway decent. And when Gates found something halfway decent, that was usually the end of the game for everyone else. (He had a better track record than the coyote in that respect.)

Then Gates left, Steve Ballmer took over, the Internet became the dominant force in the tech business, Apple hit a string of home runs, and the old conventional wisdom began to fail.

Over the last decade, Microsoft tried a half-dozen initiatives to enter the music business, but nothing worked. It suffered the same fate with search engines: Bing is better than all its previous search efforts and it keeps improving, but nobody cares.

Windows and Office, its two biggest products, are tied to a model of computing that looks to be on the wane. And with the exception of the Xbox, Microsoft’s recent products seemed to demand a new conventional wisdom: Whatever it does, count Microsoft out before it even gets started.

But not anymore. Maybe [continue]…

Add Your Comment | 0 Comments

The opportunity machine is just getting started

Posted December 16, 2011 at 2:42 am

by Howard Lindzon

Because I do not know or care where the Dow or Hang Seng ends in 2012, I find it easy to be optimistic, even ‘bullish’.

The ‘flow’ across my Twitter and Stocktwits feed as well as my Gmail inbox is dizzying. I have learned over time to dip in, consume, prioritize, delegate, laugh, and prosper. I have wasted time for sure, but I have gotten smarter. The few of us that have braved this new world (and it is just a few of us in the global sense), are ahead of the curve.

The streams and network effects available to us in 2011 can enhance and broaden what I call the ‘opportunity machine’ of the stock market to all markets.

Like the stock market was before this entrepreneurial and start-up funding boom, you can’t see everything, trade everything, own everything. The truly successful investors and entrepreneurs will compartmentalize the flow. I am grateful the market has kicked my ass time and again for 20 years to prepare me for this point in time.

I am sure there were startup bubble articles in 2009 when I invested a little time and money in TechStars. Tomorrow they will be RAMPANT. But , a TechStars or Y Combinator degree and even a failure out of the gate is worth more to me and maybe the world than an $apol or Devry $DV degree – which I have yet to see in the wild.

It has to be a bubble if the angel investments I have made in the last three years have raised close to a billion dollars. I mean not a road was paved or a bridge built.

If college costs fall 50 percent over the next 10 years (they will likely rise 150 percent), we will still see a huge number of parents back their kids in a business over college.

Even the French stop smoking here and there to talk startups at [continue]…

Add Your Comment | 0 Comments