Managing investment risk is learning to protect investment capital. Investors or traders can protect capital by diversifying an investment portfolio, placing limit orders on stocks, and to never trade or invest all capital at once in one stock market investment. No investor or trader ever is 100% successful with every investment and every trade. The ability to cut losses before they become huge is a learned skill. Sometimes stocks break out of support and resistance zones. Sometimes stocks are subject to substantial corrections. Knowing companies and market sectors helps determine if a drop in stock price is a correction or a new downward trend. Having a standing rule of when to cut loses and protect investment capital allows investors and traders to come back from losses. Not doing so is a too common story when investors and traders hold on to a losing stock all the way to bankruptcy, the company’s and theirs.
Day trading is done with a margin account. S Read more…
We’ve seen the political and financial elites paint lipstick on a pig before. But never anything like this!
Consider the pig in Washington: Uncle Sam continues to run the worst deficits — and borrow the most money — since America’s war for independence.
And yet Congress has virtually given up on any semblance of a long-term solution.
In any other world or time, Uncle Sam would be paying through the nose to borrow money, driving interest up all over the U.S., and causing havoc in the stock market.
The lipstick: The Federal Reserve continues to paper over the disaster with the wildest money printing of all time … PLUS … the most sustained zero-interest policy in U.S. history.
The result:
• Conservative savers are being squashed, earning a pittance for their hard-earned funds.
• Investors are again being herded into highly speculative deals.
• And ne
Read more…
A devastating Japanese tsunami, the Arab Spring uprising in the Middle East and dramatic developments in US crude production helped characterize oil markets in 2011.
The US Energy Information Administration released its 2011 in Review yesterday, a summary of the key developments that affected crude and heating oil supply and demand last year.
The earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in March knocked out nuclear power plants and initially cut oil demand, sending prices lower, as the Japanese economy faltered. However Japanese oil demand rebounded as Japan sought alternative energy supplies to rebuild.
Transportation bottlenecks in the US caused massive backlogs of crude oil at inland US markets, largely due to rising oil production in the US and Canada. This triggered a record price spread between the US benchmark West Texas Crude and European benchmark North Sea Brent.
Read more…
— Jonathan Langham @ 7:31 am — 
February 11, 2012