Category: Stock Market

Investors flee to gold

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Stock-shocked investors are fleeing to gold, pushing the precious metal to new heights.

Gold reached a new intraday high of $1,782.50 per ounce in electronic trading before backing down to $1,746.20. That’s an increase of $33, or about 2%, compared to its Monday close. On Monday, gold broke $1,700 for the first time.

The current flight to gold has been by a nasty stock market plunge. On Monday, the Dow Jones industrial average plummeted 624 points, or about 5.5%, and the Nasdaq and S&P 500 dropped nearly 7%. It was the worst day on Wall Street since the 2008 fiscal crisis.

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Why Are Gold Stocks Falling?

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Gold stocks normally amplify the gains from gold. If gold goes up 10%, then a good gold stock should go up 20%. So traders look for this ‘leverage’ to the gold price in gold stocks.

That was until ETFs became such a big force on the market.

Now traders can invest directly in gold ETFs with borrowed money to get the same effect. It saves having to do all that annoying research into a gold company.

So with all that money heading for the ETFs – instead of the stocks – the gold price and gold stocks are diverging.

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Start investing with just $100

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Start investing with just $100!! I’ll let you in on a little secret about investing: Start investing: How new investors can begin with $100 © MedioImages/Corbis
Extra3/5/2010 4:00 PM ET
Start investing with just $100

Faced with a dizzying array of investment options, deciding where to put your money can be daunting. But starting small doesn’t mean it won’t pay off big.
It’s not nearly as hard as you think.
However, the fact that most people do it badly might lead a reasonable person to believe the opposite.

How badly? A study by Dalbar, a Boston investment research firm, found that from 1988 to 2008, when the S&P 500 Index ($INX) grew at an average annual rate of 11.8%, individual investors in equity mutual funds saw average returns of 4.5% a year, before taxes.

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10 Stocks off to a Good Year

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Neither the multifaceted disaster in Japan nor the domino-like progression of political unrest in the Middle East and North Africa has prevented the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index ($INX) from climbing 13.4% in the first quarter of 2011. And some stocks performed as if we were living in the best of times.
Among the index’s top 10 performers was CB Richard Ellis Group (CBG), a commercial real estate company that offers services to tenants, owners, lenders and investors.

The Los Angeles company’s stock climbed 30.4% in the first quarter, helped by better-than-expected fourth-quarter financial results and an improving outlook for commercial properties.
CB Richard Ellis recently raised $800 million through term loans to purchase the real estate investment unit of ING (ING).
Some analysts think the share price has limited upside potential after soaring 68.5% in the past 12 months. Yet the commercial real estate market, considered by some “the next shoe to drop,” is turning around faster than many observers expected.

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Investing in India

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As investments go, India has really great long-term prospects. No doubt about it. Indeed, India has enjoyed very decent growth rates for the last decade, pulling many of its people out of poverty in the process. But investing in India…

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