A Few Obvious Reactions

Institutional Buyers Of Bank And Thrift Stocks - The Gold Book















Get out of all of those bank stocks that were bought for dividend (as soon as you can break even on them). They slashed your payouts to nil. I think GE will be fine (very long term) with a dividend increase. Don't press your profit on DD (TAKE IT NOW!) Russia will be hot for awhile yet. I always like defensive tobacco (with an advancing high-yield dividend). People will have their cigs.

Visit my website here.

Balancing Your Financial Research

I like to use some of the most aggressive "wizards" in conjunction with some of the more conservative analysts to come up with a modicum of sanity. For instance, Pitbull Investor's "Stock Report Card" is extremely aggressive. So I use them with fool.com (Motley Fool) for consensus. Also, tradingmarkets.com (Power Ratings, short term & aggressive) gets used with finance.yahoo.com; powerratings.net (Power Ratings, long term & somewhat aggressive) with moneycentral.msn.com. You get the idea, get a consensus. Guess what, if everyone likes a stock (yeah, even Cramer, with old numbers), it's probably alright. But don't over-analyze, thereby missing a boat. Gut-instinct is often a good thing if you are investing experienced.
For mutual funds disregard the last statements. smartmoney.com and morningstar.com are the definitive experts. If they agree, it will be a winner.
For foreign investing, pay heed to Wikipedia's "List of Countries by Public Debt". Stay away from (by populace) highly indebted nations.

Visit my website here.