As you all may know, California is in a world of hurt.  The state is suffering from a huge budget deficit.  The recently elected governor, Jerry Brown, has proposed to close the shortfall with a combination of spending cuts and by letting California's voters -- the people who pay the… Read full post »

The Daily Beast has an annual list of smartest and dumbest cities in America.  Last year, we took that list and examined the per capita incomes of both the smart and dumb cities.

Not surprisingly, we found that the smart cities had a much higher per capita income than the dumb… Read full post »

Most of us have seen the pictures of the devastation in Joplin, Missouri.  At least 116 people died in the disaster.  Entire houses were ripped off their moorings and sent flying, with only the concrete slab left.  Hospital records from the local hospital were found 70 miles away.

Acco… Read full post »

I was at work the other day, and we have someone who's applying for citzenship.  She was born in Japan, grew up in Hawaii, and now is in the process of becoming an American citizen.  Good for her!

What is distressing, however, is the lack of knowledge of those who already… Read full post »

That's the big question that those who want to either invest or trade in this metal need to ask themselves.  Let's review the chart for SLV of the past few weeks.  You want volatility?  You got it.



Look at all those gaps up and down.  That's volatility.

First of all, the trend… Read full post »

Even the Lone Ranger's trusted steed couldn't deliver the kind of ride that the most reflective metal used in jewelry has over the past few weeks.  Take a look at the chart.




That's the ten day chart for the silver ETF.  As you can see there are three big gaps.  The…

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There are only two major investment banks left on Wall Street, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs.  And they're giving their clients completely different advice when it comes to commodities.  Only one of them can be right.

So the question is, which one?

Morga/…

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Since the party of spray tan liars is trying to spin the killing of bin Laden, it's time we do the same.

Bin Laden was empowered by Reagan, because he wanted the Soviets out of Afghanistan.  It's highly unusual to say that a Soviet occupation would have been better than the… Read full post »

This is one of the oldest sayings in investing.  But is it really something people can profit from?

In a word, yes.  According to an article in Smart Money, researchers have confirmed what many on trader have long suspected.  The trend is your friend.  If… Read full post »

Back in the dark days of the fall of 2008, when the world's financial system was about to implode, we had a lot of pundits and politicians talk about how wrong it was for the government to step in to prevent the financial system from collapsing.  For example, republican/…

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The advent of spring is marked by many things.  We move our clocks forward an hour.  The days get longer and the sun gets stronger.  In most places of the country, people can put those long overcoats away -- of course, some of us never need them.  In spor/…

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The last part of the economy to turn around in any recovery is employment.  Employers are quick to shed employees when times get bad, but they want to be sure that the recovery they're seeing is real and sustainable before they start to add to their/…

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Trading the news is a process when you use big events, such as earnings reports or economic data releases, to stake out a position and to benefit when it moves.  For example, if you've heard rumblings of problems at XYZ company, then you buy an in the money put/…

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As we know all too well, one of the problems that caused the financial crisis that caused Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns to implode and made the recession that started in 2007 worse was lax oversight of financial firms.  One logical provision to help counter this -- t/…

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Remember back in the 1990s, when Microsoft was the undisputed king of the tech world?  Back then, Apple, instead of being a media darling, was derided as a company with no traction with the real world.  And despite what the fan bois say, when it comes to systems t/…

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By now, everyone's seen the job report, which showed that payrolls only increased by 36,000 but that unemployment dropped down to nine percent.  But markets shrugged off the news, and the bond market actually sold off, which is the opposite of what you'd/…

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We all know that the what's being called the great recession started in December 2007 and ended in June 2009 according to the organization that calls business cycles, the National Bureau of Economic Research.

But some critics have said that the recovery that's underway was bu/…

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Today, Hugh Hefner announced plans to take his iconic company, Playboy, private. The price he will pay to do this is $6.15 per share.  As you know, this company and the magazine it publishes are American icons.  The Playboy clubs and the bunnies had their heyday se/…

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Right after Obama was elected and before his inauguration, we were hearing from many that he would destroy the market and that stock would plunge.  We offered those who were making those statements the chance to put their money where their mouth was.  We said, okay/…

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Back in the fall of 2008, when the world's financial system was on the brink, the Federal Reserve opened up its vaults to financial institutions for emergency loans.  While this move was criticized by many uninformed and ignorant people as a bailout, it w/…

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It will come as no surprise to regular readers that we're disgusted by the actions of Congress.  There's an old joke about how progress is moving forward, and since con is the opposite of pro, that tells you everything you need to know about Congress.

In situations like the current one, that's…

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On Thanksgiving, most Americans feast on turkey, watch a little football, and then relax.  That's a good strategy, but before or after the feast, a good thing to do is to look at your investments.

Everyone, no matter how good they are, has a few turkeys in their portfoli/…

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As regular readers know, one of our positions where we've seen a lot of profit is Ford.  We entered a position in this stock about a year ago, and we purchased the shares for around $7 a share.  Now the shares are trading at over $16 a share.

The options/…

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You may have noticed an extended absence here at Buy and Hold Plus.  Our blogging had to take a temporary hiatus due to a move on our part.  We left the Washington DC area and moved across the country to San Diego.

That doesn't mean that we haven't been trading, or looking…

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We recently wrote about how the historic record shows no correlation between the top marginal tax rate and economic growth, ideologue contentions to the contrary.

Now we're going to examine another piece of dogma that we've seen out there.  We've heard that raising taxes/…

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