Steadfast Finances

 Banking, Business Trends, Peer to Peer Lending         13 comments

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I ran across this clever, or ghastly if you work in the banking industry, idea from Thomas Power from Ecademy.com.
What if Facebook became a bank?

If you’re a banker, I’d bet the Bank of Walmart idea is looking pretty good about now since the Internet is steadily putting the …

 Buy on the Dips, Index Funds, Investing 101         11 comments

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On March 9, 2009, the stock market closed at it’s lowest level in over a decade. The doom and gloom news factories were pumping out negativity as loudly as it could because that was what “people wanted to hear.”
You couldn’t pick up a newspaper, click to highly trafficked website, or …

 Investing 101, Investor Psychology         14 comments

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I ran across an interesting bit of research today suggesting that one of the leading ways investors get suckered into investment bubbles, and subsequently decimate our annual performance, is that we are far too concerned with being left out of the money making process, rather than losing our original investment.
As …

 Investing 101, Investor Psychology         6 comments

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If you’re curious why I take most investment advice and the majority of news/analysis from mainstream financial media with a grain of salt, this chart might answer your doubts.

(Note: Y axis is percent increase or decrease.)
At their peak, the mania driven belief in the bubble that these investments were ironclad, …

 Dividend Investing, Investing 101         4 comments

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Whether you believe that dividend investing is one of best forms of passive income or not, it’s certainly one of the most reliable ways to boost your ROI over the long haul and in a sideways market.
So not surprisingly, one of the questions I’ve been getting on a regular basis …

 Debt Reduction, Politics         3 comments

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One of the most jaw dropping, and completely depressing, animations of U.S. National Debt I’ve ever seen.

Perhaps I’m overly melancholy after seeing that it would take 12 plus football fields of 100 dollar bills stacked 8 feet high to pay our national debt, but isn’t it just a little ironic …

 Business Trends, Investing 101, Real Estate         4 comments

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Earlier today, I stumbled across one of Google’s many data mining gadgets called “Insights for Search” and before I knew it, two hours of my day were gone.
Basically, Insights For Search is just like Google Trends with few more bells and whistles, where it quantifies the number of times various …

 Humor, Politics         3 comments

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Here’s a perfect example of why Gen X and Gen Y are relying more and more on the 1-2 punch of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert when it comes to delivering the news… they ask the tough questions and state the obvious conclusions that mainstream media is too cowardly and …

 Buy on the Dips, Investing 101         3 comments

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Sometimes I love earnings season and then sometimes I hate it! If you’re wondering why… see Google’s 30 point nose dive in the after hours market today.
[click image to enlarge chart]

For disclosure purposes, I should say that I did not own Google prior to their earnings announcement but I think …

 Investing 101         3 comments

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One of things that still baffles me about the stock market is the vast sum of money that exchanges hands (electronically of course) at such a blistering pace.
In the blink of an eye, a few million dollar orders can be quietly executed in any given stock and no one …

 Index Funds, Investing 101, Peer to Peer Lending         13 comments

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Some interesting, perhaps troubling, results from the Merrill Lynch Quarterly Affluent Insights Survey this morning.
Younger investors are more risk averse than older investors. Those in their 20s and 30s are more risk averse than the 40s and 50s demographic because they been burned twice in the last decade.
Older investors are …

 Documentary Films, Investing 101, Investor Psychology         6 comments

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Perhaps nothing encompasses the roller coaster ride that was the 2000 to 2009 decade better than David Faber’s The Bubble Decade. If you haven’t seen it, set 45 minutes aside and take a look back at just how gullible we actually were to follow the herd and buy into some …