Why some analysts are worried about the Fed’s latest monetary easing effort. Is the glass half full? The Federal Reserve has committed to buying $600 billion worth of Treasury bonds between now and June, and it wants to purchase up to $900 billion in debt by the end of September 2011.1 This second round of [...]

A blip in the bull market? Or is more selling ahead? A look at some opinions. Sooner or later, a bull market experiences a correction: a decline of at least 10% from a peak. We’ve now seen the first correction in the present bull market: the Dow went below 10,000 on May 25 (and rebounded).1 [...]

Stocks that tend to pay sizable dividends. Institutional and individual investors buy preferred stocks because they offer fixed dividends – in fact, dividend yields are typically greater than those of common shares.1 Preferred stocks are occasionally called hybrid securities, because they have characteristics of debt instruments as well as equities. Let’s review some of their [...]