Home Ownership: Do You Have The Courage To Buy Into This Housing Market?

Almost half of all American adults no longer believe that home ownership is a realistic way to build wealth.

That’s according to Gail Cunningham of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, quoted in Barron’s this week.

Given that home ownership is a cornerstone in almost every wealth-building plan, this is astonishing. Even if the days of selling a house for an enormous profit are over, building equity in a home beats the pants off paying rent.

Of course, home ownership is not always better than renting, but in most cases, it still is. And even if home prices are flat, building a little bit…

Health Care Reform: Five Ways to Profit With Biotech Stocks & Bond Funds

There are a number of health care reform plans on the drawing boards right now, and they all seem to come with mind-numbing sticker shock. The administration’s new plan and Senator Kennedy’s plan are both estimated to cost $1 trillion over 10 years.

I’ll believe that when I see it. When was the last time the government completed any project on budget?

And I’m not the only one with doubts.

Health Systems Innovations, a health care consultant that has worked with private health insurers, estimates that Senator Kennedy’s bill would cost $4 trillion over 10 years.

Ouch…

Should a health care plan be passed that…

The 800-Pound Gorilla On The Housing Market’s Back

I could almost hear the collective groans of disbelief as soon as readers read my forecast.

It was a column I wrote almost three years ago, warning about the impending U.S. real estate crisis and projecting that home prices were set to tumble by as much as 40%.

Turns out I actually under-estimated the scale of the bust. Prices have fallen much more than that in some areas - and may fall even further.

The are obvious reasons for this. The economic recession. The evaporation of available credit. A huge increase in unemployment. And, of course, the mere fact that the housing market had…

Monday Will Be A Big Day For These Two Emerging Market Nations

Keep an eye on the Chinese and Brazilian stock markets on Monday.

The two emerging market nations - both members of the BRIC group (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) - will each welcome a major new IPO to their respective stock markets.

The fact that they’re debuting on the same day is purely coincidental, but the story here is that both are very significant not only to their own countries, but could also underpin the emerging market area.

Let’s take a look at these IPOs in the context of the broader emerging market topic… the effect this often volatile but flourishing pack of…

Managed Futures Programs Are Going Mainstream

With trading strategies that are based on complex mathematical equations, or that are driven by sophisticated “black-box” computer programs, managed-futures programs are usually able to remove human emotion from the investment equation – a reality that certainly helped them post strong returns last year, even as the volatile U.S. stock market whipsawed investors out of about $7 trillion in shareholder wealth.

Managed futures programs - alternative-investment vehicles that enabled professional money managers to take positions in a wide variety of securities and derivatives - posted strong returns in a year that was marked mostly by investment losses. The average managed futures program…