Global Market Comments December 31, 2012 (SPECIAL CHINA ISSUE) Featured Trades: (FXI), (BIDU), (BYDDF), (CHA), (CHL) (iShares FTSE Xinhua China 25 Index ETF Wisdom Tree Dreyfus China Yuan Fund ETF iShares FTSE China 25 Index Fund Baidu, Inc. BYD Co. Ltd. China Telecom Corp. China Mobile Ltd.

Global Market Comments December 28, 2012 Fiat Lux SPECIAL BATTERY ISSUE Featured Trades: (BYDDF), (SQM), (SNE), (GM), (XOM), (TSLA) BYD Co. Ltd. Sociedad Quimica Y Minera Sony Corp. General Motors Co. Exxon Mobil Corp. Tesla Motors Inc.

These are indeed grim times. If you can’t make money selling Twinkies to Americans, then you better shut down, and fast. That was my conclusion on leaning that the venerable bakery company, Hostess, was liquidating in in the wake of failed union negotiations. I probably could not have made it through my Quantum Mechanics class [...]

Former stock trader, Yang Yanming, was recently executed by lethal injection for embezzling $9.52 million from Galaxy Securities during 1997 to 2003. The move was part of a broader effort by the Mandarins in Beijing to crack down on rampant corruption in the securities industry. Yanming never revealed where the money went, according to the [...]

The Western U.S. has found a new wrinkle in the housing collapse, where homeowners are desperately struggling to cut living costs to meet the next payments on their underwater houses. Raising horses can cost more than children, so Nevadans are turning them loose to join herds of wild mustangs, to dodge the $30,000 a year [...]

When I was growing up in Los Angles during the fifties, the most exciting day of the year was when my dad took me to buy a Christmas tree. With its semi-desert climate, Southern California offered pine trees that were scraggly at best. So the Southern Pacific Railroad made a big deal out of bringing [...]

Global Market Comments December 24, 2012 Featured Trades: (THE ENERGY CRUNCH), (NEW NUCLEAR POWER), (THE CHIHUAHUA GLUT)

I recently spent an evening with Ambassador Richard Jones, the Deputy Executive Director of the International Energy Agency in Paris, who had some eye-opening things to say about the energy space. The IEA was first set up as a counterweight to OPEC during the oil crisis in 1974, and has since evolved into a top [...]