The price of oil has dropped by almost $108 a barrel since last summer.

Both Tuesday’s $38.74 price and last summer’s $147 price were set by the same mechanism–supply and demand. Or more accurately, by what investors and traders believe about impending supply and demand. Read the full story

The evidence that the stock market pays off is circumstantial, but strong. If it were a crime to make money, a jury would convict on evidence like this.

Amid all the advice on investing that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, one tenet remains our bedrock. Put your money in stocks for the long run and you will do OK.

From Read the full story

The action in the market so far is inconclusive. The year started beautifully, then we plunged into another year showing losses. So soon.

For long-term investors who are buying companies with good prospects for several years to come, this is a buyers market. But there is one group to either avoid or treat with extreme care–small cap Read the full story

Ah yes, the bailout. Here comes that financial-section theme song. The chorus goes, "Woe to survival of the fittest. The end is nigh when freedom to fail is cut short." Today the sentiment was in an AP story, other days in the Wall Street Journal, Barrons, all over the Internet… 

Some writers may be correct in their compl Read the full story

2009 has started out well. If you keep your portfolio on line, you should be seeing green ink from one end to the other.

This is cause for celebration. But poking under rocks to find the losers is interesting. Every industrial group and sector has a smattering of stragglers. And one industry is doing much worse than any other. If you are Read the full story

"Alcoa to cut 13,500 jobs"…another recession headline confirms unemployment will continue to get worse for a while yet. Outright cuts make the big news. But some companies hitting rough times have taken a gentler approach. Their workers have kept their jobs…

But their paychecks are shrinking.

More and more America Read the full story

Retailers hoped that Christmas would ultimately save them from a bad season. It didn't happen. It seems that most of us took recession worries seriously and stuck to our vows not to overspend on holiday gifts.

Through Christmas Eve, sales this December fell 8% below last year's level. But stockings must have been filled with soc Read the full story

Big confab in the North Office. Bad news. The manuscript sucked.

"Look you’re working too hard to avoid saying what you really feel and it doesn’t have your usual good insights," I finally told Andy. "Why not put the truth down in its total brutal honesty?"

And thus he began again… "Man oh man… Read the full story

Ahhhh… It was too good to be true.

The SEC thought so and had been trying to investigate since 1999. At least one firm (Aksia LLC) that investigated the claims thought they were too good to be credible and the paperwork looked suspicious. It told its clients not to invest. In these bumpy markets, the money manager's returns were abn Read the full story

Last week, Andy and I went to the bank then stopped at Starbucks. There were no lines in the bank. We had to wait 10 minutes to get to the counter in Starbucks.

The legendary Howard Schultz is back, and so is Starbucks.

Schultz was the person who convinced the original coffee-roasting partners to expand in the 1980s when he visited Read the full story