Maybe I'll toast in the new year with beer, not champagne. Why so? Read on.

First, seeing is believing, not hearing is believing. It's worth keeping that in mind since with less than seven weeks to go before we're in 2010, you'll soon be bombarded in print and on TV...

Wild, off-the-wall gold forecasts -- some of which have proved to be anything but wild or off the wall -- are a dime a dozen. Here's one that floored me; maybe it'll floor you, too.

First, the last thing I want to do is sound like a broken record after...

How Sweet it is! Or maybe not.

That's a reference to an every day occurrence. In brief, some guy comes up with what he thinks is an ingenious product that's a far superior mousetrap to what's currently on the market. But skeptics ridicule the idea and the creator goes through...

If only Goldfinger had just waited

One of Edgar Allen Poe's most famous stories was The Gold-Bug. Written in 1843, it dealt with a man, William Legrand, who was deemed to be mentally ill because he was obsessed with finding gold after being bitten by the gold bug. He...

Hallelujah! The latest jobs numbers, though pretty darn ugly, are beginning to throw off some hopeful signs.

If you're skeptical, that's legitimate, since companies continue to chop their work force big time. The latest is Johnson & Johnson, which plans to slash 8,000 jobs. Further, Friday's release of October job...

Brett Favre, the aging 40-year-old quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings football team, proved to the rest of us Sunday that getting older doesn't mean you're losing it. To the contrary, demonstrating that novelist Thomas Wolfe was wrong in his belief that you can't go home again, the supposedly washed-up quarterback...

Go figure this crazy market following another bout of schizophrenia. Take last week, a week that may have flashed bum tidings ahead for investors, even the possibility of a selling panic. First came terrific Thursday, then wicked Friday, as big money was made and even bigger money was lost.

Most...

With Thanksgiving Day (November 26) less than a month away, let's talk turkey. No, not the turkey we can't wait to eat, but what some Wall Street professionals regard as the "economic turkeys."

They're the ones operating on the delusional premise that the recession is history and that by mid-2010...

Wall Street's bad guys could be at it again.

In this case, it's another potential significant insider trading scandal--one of several I've discovered that are under investigation.. The most recent one centers on one of the year's biggest and most publicized corporate acquisitions--personal computer giant Dell's $3.9 billion takeover...

Even the media gets it wrong at times. Take a recent Wall Street Journal story headlined "gold is still a lousy investment."

Actually, the numbers show the Journal was way off base, at least in its past assessment of gold, what with the precious metal being a spectacular performer in...

Hey, with the economy perking up, the Dow recently sprinting above 10,000, a sizzling jump of more than 50% from its March low, and growing talk out of Washington that we'll have a national health bill before year end, things are slowly starting to look honky dory again to a...

With Halloween just around the corner, face masks of ghosts, ghouls, goblins and Godzilla are already starting to rack up some brisk sales. Maybe you've already bought one of them. One fella, though, who won't be sporting any horror mask at his Halloween outing is veteran San Francisco money manager...

Call it the fine art of giving to get. Last December, shortly after Bernard Madoff, the master of all Ponzi schemes, was arrested, Nino Selimaj, 51, one of New York City's colorful and successful restaurateurs, came up with a novel promotional idea involving the king of the con men. In...

No ifs, ands or buts -- stock prices are barreling ahead again. For how long is anybody's guess. Let's say for argument's sake that you buy Wall Street's rapidly swelling party line that the economy is on the road to recovery, and therefore it makes sense to begin nibbling away...

The bull-bear debate rages on, but no two ways about it: the bull, judging from the market's ongoing Samson-like strength following roughly a 50% sprint from its March lows, has firmly grabbed the Wall Street reins. The bears are still out there hollering fire, but the fact of life is...

On the surface, the U.S.'s failure to win the 2016 Olympic games is no big deal. So it went to Rio De Janeiro instead of Chicago. Too bad, but life goes on. And as far as the stock market goes, judging from its ongoing strength, the loss is pretty much...

Hey, if you're looking to make a few extra bucks, have I got a gig for you. It's an unusual job you would probably never think of: playing Santa Claus, or perhaps Mrs. Claus.

I thought about it after hearing Friday's grim September jobs report, which came on the...

Here's one of those pre-Halloween horror stories that deals with your net worth. I don't know whether veteran online stock tracker Michael Markowsi will go to any Halloween parties this year. But if he does and you happen to run into him, a word of caution: don't ask him about...

If you hate your boss, keep it to yourself. The reason: Not only will the jobless rolls continue to swell, as many economists expect, but one of them, Standard & Poor's chief economic poncho, David Wyss, usually conservative and non-flamboyant in his forecasts, figures another 900,000 people will be...

There's an age-old Wall Street saying: Don't fight the trend. For now, at least, the apparent trend is that equity prices are headed even higher after whopping stock gains of 53% in the S&P 500 and 46% in the Dow from their March lows.

In this context, meet four bulls...