Day: April 23, 2018

Once investors move on from basic equity trading, for purposes of seeking alpha, or leverage (investments that move up and down at a faster rate parallel to the market), it’s hard to get very far without making use of options. But where most companies only have one stock, and one price for that stock, dozens of options exist for each share with options available.

Options, in general, give you (hence the name) the option to buy or sell one share of a stock at a named price, whether or not that price is the market value of the security. Like futures, options also have an expiration, or execution, date. However, unlike the commodities futures, where a forgetful investor can suddenly find themselves drowning in a tanker-truck worth of orange juice, all an expiring option does is whatever it says it will do — for example, if you have an option agreement to buy 400 shares of Wal-Mart stock for $73 each at the end of August 2017, and you do not actively exercise it, it goes into expiration. Read more…

According to an article in Friday’s New York Times, Vitaly Borker is back in prison.

Read more…

In the first 100 days of the Trump administration, one of the main directives given to the transition team was to eliminate two regulations for every new government regulation passed. In addition, the administration used a rarely-utilized loophole known as the Congressional Review Act to target every amendment and regulation passed in the closing months of the Obama presidency.  One of the prime targets, the Fiduciary Rule, is a financial regulation intended to provide customers an extra measure of protection when they find a financial advisor, originally scheduled to go into effect in April.

Why was this law so controversial? For one, the financial industry has always preferred self-regulation to government involvement. But the Fiduciary Rule goes far beyond that in terms of customer assurance and transparency. Read more…

In one of the strongest signs yet of the long-term effects of the economic recovery, for the first time since 1974, the world’s five largest corporations by market capitalization are both US-based and all in the same sector.

While the last two years have been particularly bullish for tech stocks, the broader-market slowdown combined with continued growth in the internet sector have shifted the focus away from the traditional market titans, energy and heavy industry. This change reflects the shift in the employment market as well, with the smallest share of American labor involved in manufacturing since pre-industrial times. Read more…