Finance

There are lots of investing and other financial tools available to the individual investor in today’s world and apps shouldn’t be ignored. They conveniently sit at your fingertips ready to provide analysis, ideas, money management, and other data. In this article I present 10 of my most used apps for investing and other financial aspects of my life.

Love it or hate it, cash is playing an increasingly less important role in society. In some ways this is great news for consumers. The rise of mobile and electronic payments means faster, convenient, and more efficient purchases in most instances...However, there is also a darker side in the shift to a cashless society. Governments and central banks have a different rationale behind the elimination of cash transactions, and as a result, the so-called “war on cash” is on.

There is a misconception about the uncanny ability of very profitable U.S. companies, like Microsoft and Apple, to park their profits overseas in order to dodge U.S. taxes: the money from these profits that are parked “overseas” isn’t actually overseas. Words: 338

8 years after the credit crisis, most big American banks and almost all big European banks are relapsing in spite of extraordinary central bank efforts to liquefy and engineer profits for them. However, as long as they pose colossal risks to the global economy and draw tens of trillions of dollars of central bank spending (which they mostly hoard on their balance sheets to survive and thrive) away from productive economic use, global growth will continue to stagnate, until it contracts dramatically and implodes the big banks all over again.

Compare your salary. Negotiate smarter. Know where you stand. Compare salaries by industries, employers, and even university alumni. 143,332 professionals have already shared their data.

Preparing for, and living in, retirement halfway is a dead end. The richest and most successful retirement experiences and outcomes occur when taking on life and activities full-circle. Thinking in completion mode inspires endless loops of satisfaction. Closure is an accomplishment. It allows you to move your life and those of others, forward. It allows others to do the same. Here are five circles to an enriching retirement.

So you want to be rich? In order to join the millionaires’ club – and not get booted out because you went broke spending all your money – you’ve got to develop money smarts. The rich don’t stay rich by spending frivolously and being obsessed with beating the Joneses’. Here are some money management essentials you may want to keep in mind to master like the millionaires do.

Deutsche Bank’s catastrophic derivative exposure has hammered down its stock price from $135 in 2007 to only $17/share today - ergo a heart-stopping price loss of -87%. Furthermore, DB’s stock price appears to be hell bent for leather to follow Lehman Brothers’ lethal path to Wall Street’s graveyard due primarily to its oppressive derivative’s exposure. As Warren Buffett has said: “Derivatives are weapons of mass destruction.”

As the dollar strengthens gold weakens & as the dollar falls, gold rises - .and it is my firm belief that the dollar is toast. If the dollar falls to the same magnitude which it has in previous interest rate cycles, we could see gold rally by 50%.

American balance of trade deficits will start to hurt and haunt the U.S. as the world migrates to a series of arrangements for trade beyond the USD (although the USD will continue to function as the lead foreign exchange/reserve and trade currency for sometime yet) and the introduction of an IMF-SDR basket of currencies.