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Markets have been sideways in the past month, affected by wars, upcoming elections, and analysts see-sawing on the possibility of a Fed rate reduction. The Federal Reserve is meeting this week, and predictions for a rate cut this year are all over the board: none, one, or two.

I expect we’ll have more volatility as we near the fall election cycle.

In the meantime, economic stats look good! Manufacturing continues to climb, jobs are still being added at a rapid pace (272,000 vs. the estimate of 190,000), and the unemployment rate—at 3.9%—remains steady.

It’s earnings season. And it’s a weird one.

What a rally off the bottom! After flirting with a severe correction and possibly a bear market, stocks have soared over the past two weeks. The S&P 500 is now down less than 3% YTD. What happened?

Panic waned and investors realized that the economy is still strong, interest rates are still low, and money has no place else to go but stocks to fetch a decent return. The initial panic from the Russia/Ukraine war subsided. Then the Fed hiked rates by a measly 0.25% and pleased short-sighted investors.

Today’s story is about Joe, a successful investor who has his own investing system. His system is unusual in a couple of ways.

What makes Cabot unique in the investment publishing industry is that all of us editors answer subscriber questions.

The most popular column I’ve written (judging by the volume of your responses) was published nearly three months ago (March 13). The topic was health care, a subject of increasing attention by President Barack Obama these days. So today I’m going to tackle it again--focusing on the cost of healthcare and what can be done about it in the future. I’m also including a couple more letters from readers that came in too late to be included in the original reader-response issue.

Today’s main topic is a hot one and a big one ... the question of whether it might be a good idea to reduce the legal drinking age in the U.S. from 21 to 18. The background: a group of 129 presidents and chancellors from colleges and universities have signed the Amethyst Initiative, which states simply that the current legal limit of 21 is not working and asks for an open unbiased discussion of the issue.

Inflation is going on. And it’s starting to sink in. Oil prices are soaring. Interest rates are rising. And the Fed is going to have to be more aggressive than previously anticipated about raising rates and reducing stimulus.

The last five months have been great ones for the market, with all the major indexes powering relentlessly upward, and many individual stocks doing even better. For most of that time, everyone was happy just to hang on and make money—after all, that’s the goal of investing. But sometime in...

You know Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN) and Netflix (NFLX) are good stocks. But the best stocks are often companies you’ve never heard of. Here are 10 of them.

Tech stocks are having a tough week as interest rates and inflation fears creep up. This is uncomfortable for many because five companies, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook, make up almost 25% of the market value of the S&P 500. My view is that this pullback is providing new entry points for some tech stocks that have been on a good run. For perspective, most non-tech stocks are weathering the increase in bond yields quite well.

Today, we’re selling two profitable ideas that have lost some momentum, and our new Explorer recommendation centers on turbulence on the high seas.

Years from now, I wonder how historians will label this new decade. Will it be the “Terrific Twenties” or the “Turbulent Twenties”? It’s obviously too soon to tell, but we remain optimistic about the future today with a new idea at the fringe of the powerful clean energy trend that has moved past an inflection point. Meanwhile, the Explorer’s group of stocks had another good week as Virgin Galactic (SPCE) launched into space. I wonder if its take-off might be wrapped up in the Reddit revolution?

Markets are facing end-of-the-summer doldrums as concerns about job and Covid growth dampen enthusiasm. We move two stocks from buy to hold, while on the positive side, Cloudflare (NET) shares are up 73% this year and Novonix (NVNXF) shares are up 58% in the last 10 days of trading. Today we have a new semiconductor-related idea for you in an area usually overlooked by investors.

Stocks slipped a bit yesterday after minutes from the Federal Reserve’s last meeting showed officials increasingly in agreement about pulling back on the central bank stimulus. This was prompted by increasing evidence of mounting inflation. Markets are a bit choppy against this backdrop but earnings continue to be relatively strong, such as Sea Limited (SE) posting another superlative quarter yesterday. This week you will see I have divided Explorer stock updates into two categories: “trading” and “buy and hold,” as we turn to clean tech infrastructure for a new recommendation.

Today’s new addition is a semiconductor company. It designs products that are the heartbeat of digital technologies. Its content is found in electric vehicles, datacenters, IoT devices, airplanes, mobile devices and more. It is benefitting from surging demand from Apple (AAPL) products, from which it generated 40% of revenue in 2020. While the market cap is a little larger than we typically look for, the opportunity warrants the exception at this time.

By their nature, turnaround stocks involve a fair amount of risk. One way to help reduce that risk is to find out-of-favor stocks that offer high dividend yields. This puts hard cash in your pocket while you wait for the turnaround to take effect.

In this issue, we list six additional out-of-favor stocks that have high dividend yields which we believe are sustainable and also have turnaround potential: