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“Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (PANW) is a provider of network security services to large-scale enterprise users. The company is relatively new, founded in 2005 and shipping their first product in 2007, and went public in July 2012. The company has grown very quickly and today they count over...

“The ProShares Ultra FTSE China 25 Fund (XPP) delivers twice the return of the FTSE China 25 Index. The FTSE China 25 is an index that follows the performance of the largest 25 Chinese stocks. [It’s] the Chinese equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a measure designed...

In my mind, Warren Buffett is the best investor ever. Here are eight guidelines that will help you become a better investor.

The market’s main trend is still up, but day-to-day action is getting choppier and the prospect of volatility looms. In today’s Stock Market Crash Course, the experts weigh the market’s oversold condition, which suggests a correction, against the indicators for further upside, including sentiment, acquisition activity and technical factors.

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“Two Harbors Investment Corp. (TWO) is a mortgage REIT (or mREIT, as it is sometimes known). It buys, owns and manages both agency-backed (guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie) and non-agency-backed residential mortgages. It then generates revenues for shareholders primarily by the interest it earns on the mortgage loans. “Two...

Cabot Top Ten Trader Editor Mike Cintolo wrote this about a month ago: “As the general market has heated up, we’ve noticed more and more ‘Bull Market stocks’—brokerage, investment bank and asset management firms, each of which directly benefit from higher stock prices and increased trading activity—pushing to new highs.” The market...

To most investors, stock market seasonality is just one more theory, often ignored unless it’s part of your market timing system. But seasonality always gets a second look as the calendar rolls over at the beginning of a new year. The spike in interest is partly psychological; beginning a new year...

The chances that the stock market will rise another 18% during the next 12 months or so are pretty good.

“The Internet sector has a favorable period that runs from the middle of April and lasts through the beginning of July, with historical returns of 11.5%, 6.0% and 4.5% over the last 15, 10 and five years respectively. Buy First Trust DJ Internet Index Fund (FDN) with a...

“UnitedHealth Group, Inc. (UNH)—A U.S. leader in health care management, UnitedHealth provides a broad range of health care benefits and services, including health maintenance organizations (HMOs), point of service (POS) plans, preferred provider organizations (PPOs) and managed fee-for-service programs. Gains from the rising Medicare population will be offset...

I think the odds are good that the incredible Japanese secular bear market in stocks has come to an end.

Options prices often rise as traders buy volatility insurance to hedge against big moves in the stock.

Warren Buffett has said, “Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.” What about us ordinary investors who can’t wait 10 years? I have an easy solution-- I buy when a stock is undervalued and sell when it becomes overvalued. The time frame is usually about two years. The basic principal is simple: the stock market and the individual stocks that make up the stock market have always bounced back and forth from overvalued to undervalued to overvalued, over and over again.

We appear to be at a major turning point, a changing of the guard, if you will, and if you don’t heed the market’s message, you risk discovering that it has taken some of your hard-earned money. The fact is, most leaders of the last bull market are toast. Google is 37% off its high. Apple is down 37%, too. So what’s working? Two sectors.

Rather than give the same old big advice (buy quality stocks on reasonable pullbacks, let your winners run, cut your losers short, and don’t try to go against the trend of the market) I’m going to recommend three small changes that you might actually be able to implement. And a successful small change is much better for you (both financially and emotionally) than a big change that you can’t make happen.

I know that these trading fiascos are bad things ... and yet part of me is strangely pleased about them. I like having big object lessons that show what happens when people break the rules and refuse to cut their losses short. Rogue traders aren’t greedy criminals - none of the big ones have made any money for themselves on their dealings. But their mistakes remind us that anyone who reacts to losses by making increasingly riskier trades can parlay bad luck into a financial catastrophe of amazing proportions.

My investing idea in this issue is FLIR Systems, a global leader in thermal imaging. The company’s name is an acronym for Forward Looking Infrared, a kind of imaging technology that allows military aircraft and vehicles to see through darkness (and also daytime fog and smoke). Government Systems applications may be FLIR’s calling card, but they’re a small part of the whole story. The company also has a Thermography division that designs and manufactures temperature sensing technologies that can spot overheating machinery, leaks, flaws in buildings and gradients in scientific experiments.

In 1931, Humphrey Neill, who later became famous as the Vermont Ruminator, wrote a book called “Tape Reading and Market Tactics - The Three Steps to Successful Stock Trading.” What are the Mr. Neill’s three steps to successful stock trading? The first step is familiarizing yourself with the methods of the institutions that move the market. The second step is learning how to interpret the actions of both these groups and the investing public. The third step (and hardest of all) is achieving mastery of yourself; of the “temperament, emotions, and the other variables that go to make up human nature.”

At Cabot we’ve learned that it takes excellent, innovative management to steer a fast-growing company down the highway of success. Contrarily, bad management can wreck even the most promising company. As might be the case with one carbon fiber company Cabot’s been watching for more than a decade.

William Arthur Ward (1921-1994) said it like this: “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” My thesis is simple: that the market is always changing, and that to succeed as an investor, you’ve got to change with it. Well, I think it’s time to adjust the sails, because as the market works to build a base here, the strongest stocks in the market are coal stocks...and never before in my career have coal stocks been attractive investments.