If you were on vacation this week, and if you just now got around to checking out the final tally for the past five trading sessions, you might come away with the impression that it was business as usual on Wall Street. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Monday morning’s market plunge […]

To describe this wild week as anything but the epitome of craziness would be the height of understatement. So, I’ll dispense with a recap and just say that the nearly unprecedented volatility and market swings since Wednesday, Aug. 19, are an example of the kinds of bad things that tend to happen when stocks trade

The market was bathed in a virtual see of red this week, with the biggest selling wave coming Friday. The Dow plummeted 530 points to close at the lows of the session, and the lows of the week. The flood of selling Friday knocked the Dow, S&P 500 down and NASDAQ Composite down more than […]

Come on now if we all pull together We can lift up the weight of the world from your shoulders Lift up the weight of the world from your shoulders Just for a moment or two And be glorious you — Frank Turner, “Glorious You” The folk rocker’s lyrics tend to be both raw and

This article will focus on the top-performing U.S. domestic dividend equity fund for the first half of 2015, following our recent series on top international dividend exchange-traded funds (ETFs), DFE, DLS and IHDG. The best returns among U.S. small-cap dividend-paying funds during the first half of 2015 came from the WisdomTree U.S. SmallCap Dividend Growth

There’s no Goldilocks in the markets right now. There are only the three bears — and those bears are growling with ferocity. Although not technically in a bear market in terms of percentage off the recent high, my benchmark for what I consider a market trouncing into bear territory is the 200-day moving average. This

The Three Bears Have Arrived There’s no Goldilocks in the markets right now. There are only the three bears — and those bears are growling with ferocity. Although not technically in a bear market in terms of percentage off the recent high, my benchmark for what I consider a market trouncing into bear territory is

We are now firmly in the grasp of the summer season, and that means a whole lot of conditions present today that won’t be present any other time of the year. While news tends to be relatively light this month, and while trading volumes also are usually relatively light, so far this summer season volatility […]

The Truth about Currency Manipulators The big news rocking global markets early this week was China and its surprise move to devalue its currency not once, but twice in two days. Although markets have largely settled down during the past couple of trading days, the early-week selling in both domestic and international markets was a

“The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.” — Czeslaw Milosz The brilliant poet, writer and diplomat could frequently distill the essence of a thing with just a few well placed words. Here, he reminds us that rationality is not enough to alter your destiny. To do