moustachio

I don't think Snowden should have leaked the information on foreign espionage... With that said, you don't need to be perfect or face an almost certain lifetime in prison to be a hero in my opinion. Snowden exposed some of the the unconstitutional machinations of our police state. Having him here in the USA rotting away in court or jail wouldn't be doing him or those of us that still value privacy in the USA any good at all. Good for him on fleeing the country. I prefer heroes over martyrs any day.

I wonder if American opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline is also a little bit of protectionism? Bakken oil has usually sold at a discount. If all of that Canadian oil was piped in to the same destination as much of the Bakken oil, then it might put more downward pressure on domestic realized oil prices. Environmental politics might not be the only thing driving the opposition to that pipeline.

+1 to Ericopoly. The length of a bull market is probably influenced by a lot of things(perceived macro environment risk, value relative to other assets, etc), but there is more pent up demand from the deep and long recession than there would be from a "normal" recession/expansion cycle. Because of that I wouldn't necessarily compare the length of this bull market or economic expansion to other more "normal" historical markets. I think with cars though there isn't as much pent up demand as it would seem historically, because newer cars just last better and longer. I drive a Honda that will be 10 years old soon and there isn't any rust and no mechanical problems. The last car I had that was 10 years old was getting rusty and little mechanical problems were getting annoying. Average age of the fleet might be going up, but perceived age probably is maybe not as far out of line with historical standards. One of the biggest things I think of these days with regards to macro, other than the elephant in the room of monetary policy, is oil production and a potential boom and bust cycle. Right now increased oil production has to be a nice boost to economic output and should help along a long bull market. However, if the oil industry becomes a victim of it's own success and prices plummet due to excess supply, then a bust in the oil industry might be enough to tip us into recession and end a bull market. I don't know how likely this is, but its definitely near the top of my list on things to watch. If an oil industry bust looks likely I'll be out of stocks. If prices stay stable it should be a nice contributor to a stable growing economy and a potential secular bull market though.

I have to say, I had think or swim and they were acquired by TD ameritrade. I largely like TD Ameritrade for the normal stuff, but they don't give access to international stocks and they make you call in and pay $50 for a "broker assisted trade" for thinly traded OTC stocks. I've ran into this with several stocks lately. Other than those two issues I don't really have any complaints though. I'm still looking at getting a second account, possibly with fidelity, in order to buy OTC stocks cheaply and conveniently. I would switch to Interactive Brokers in a heartbeat but it doesn't sound like they have anything included to make your taxes easy.

Bad government policy is increasing income inequality. In America single mother homes are basically subsidized by the government. If you subsidize something, you will get more of it. So we get more single mother homes, and guess what? Married couples tend to end up quite a bit wealthier for a number of reasons. Incentivize good choices and subsidize less bad choices and you will "magically" get less income inequality. This takes time of course, as this is generational stuff. A large part of structural unemployment is due to many costs of employment being tacked onto employers...once again, due to government policy. Health care provided by employers? This was originally just a form of tax evasion, a way to give pre-tax benefits to employees to maximize their compensation. Now it is almost viewed as an entitlement for workers, and we have Obama care to make everything even worse. All benefits from employers giving medical care should be eliminated. Now, whether we would end up transitioning to a single payer system(which would be corrupted in America by special interests, and be one of the worst in the world) or a free market system, it doesn't matter much from an employer's perspective. Either way it lowers the direct cost of employing someone. There are a lot of other costs that are embedded in employing each worker that government policy could lower or eliminate(unemployment compensation, for one). Lowering the price of employing people should increase the percentage of people employed. Another component of so called structural unemployment is lack of skills/training. I hear manufacturing mentioned often. Really though, who wants to spend thousands on schooling and lose two years of pay to get a job that pays only slightly more than many jobs that require no extra schooling? Employers can only pay so much and maintain profitability, and would-be students realize that a lot of these training programs and schools simply don't have a high pay-off and you still have to work hard in sometimes bad conditions. Everyone would have been better off if a would be high school graduate who otherwise might not go onto secondary schooling had the option of spending the last two years of high school in a trade school or other two year program. Heck it might even cost taxpayers less, and the student would have more marketable job skills and employers more potential employees. A potential win for everyone. Just a few of my thoughts on this. I think the inept morons in congress won't make any improvements and income equality will get worse. That will lead to populists and leftists with much worse and destructive ideas than the above. The wealthy should take preemptive steps to try to prevent bad income equality even if they don't care about the lot of the poor/middle class. If they don't, people will scapegoat them and take their money. Self preservation in this case means helping out the people below you.

The US has had increasing production of oil for some time now and will into the foreseeable future. New housing was being built at such a low rate for some time that it would take a while at higher production rates for it to get back to historical norms. I see both of these things potentially contributing to having a longer than usual economic expansion, which could help create a longer bull market in US stocks. On the other hand, there are always plenty of things to derail an economic expansion or bull market, and the US legislative government is extremely incompetent. I think the market has a lot of potential room to run still, but the risk/reward isn't nearly as favorable as it has been for the past several years and more caution should be exercised in what types of companies are suitable to invest in. I'd be cautious of using leverage in most stocks and avoid cyclical stocks where the potential downside could be higher.

Go with your gut, especially the gut feeling you get from personally dealing with these people. Obviously they might just have rose colored lenses and think it might take a year+ for you to sell, but they might have some silly scheme in their heads that reasonable people wouldn't even be able to guess at... one that probably involves screwing you over. If you get weird vibes off of these people at all then play everything by your own rules.

I was burned on Chinese reverse mergers during that infamous period right before and during some of the highest profile blow ups. Until evidence proved otherwise, I found the idea that there were many billions of dollars worth of fraudulent companies spread among many companies listed on major US exchanges to be pretty ridiculous. These days I think it is good business practice to assume that any Chinese company has some degree of corruption and fraudulence and is fleecing the shareholder until proven otherwise. I would largely ignore any Chinese equity unless it has paid out to shareholders the majority of the cash it has raised by equity offerings in the past. If they have met that requirement the potential for them being a fraud is pretty low.

WRES is another small cap oil company that trades real cheap on a cash flow and assets basis. It isn't a Canadian company, though. It has a relatively new CEO and is worth checking out. I'm long.

I can't remember if I found it due to him, Hester(another former board member), or due to a stock screen, but he wrote a seeking alpha article on CRWS, which was easy money on the table for me. Here is a book review and interview on seeking alpha: http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/279331-owen-bernard/2095302-book-review-youre-welcome-planet-earth-the-most-powerful-trading-system-ever-publicly-revealed It actually sounds quite interesting. If it was $20 and a printed copy I would enthusiastically buy it. As it is, I'll just publicly congratulate him on one of the better book titles out there :)

Many brokerage software have price alerts built in. You can also build a watchlist with yahoo finance and set alerts and get an email when it hits a price target.

"Goldman Sachs' Robert D. Boroujerdi and his team recently published the firm's Income Book, which includes dividend and buyback investment strategies." http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-the-best-stocks-with-dividends-and-buyback-plans-2012-10?op=1

First post! Thank you to Parsad and to all posters for this fine board. I've learned a lot from the discussions, and it is good enough that at times I was excited to post(couldn't get registered at those times though!). With that said, I am going to have to admit some responsibility for this $10 fee. I got frustrated with being tagged as a spammer and eventually donated hoping that would help along the registration. It worked, but also prodded Parsad towards this idea :) . Considering most brokerages have minimums to open an account, and charge 5-10$ per transaction, $10 for a lifetime membership shouldn't be cost prohibitive for most investors, and should be viewed as a prudent investment with a very high potential return. Maybe there are some kids or young people that have yet to invest that might find it excessive, but they can still lurk and read all the posts they want for free. I don't know of any free and open boards that rival this one. I tend to doubt there are any, since I've looked, but this one is definitely worth $10 to participate in. I would suggest dropping a penny though for more mainstream pricing, 9.99 just seems like so much less, right? :) -Nathan