Today’s market opened up a tad on positive action from Asian and European markets; however, the pangs of last week’s painful performance took hold and the S&P 500 fell as much as 0.7%.  Earnings and revenues for Caterpillar (CAT) were below estimates causing investors to recall flat to poor results from General Electric (GE), International Business Machines (IBM) and McDonalds (MCD) on Friday.  Then, shortly into today’s session, Existing Home Sales o Read more about What the Market Wants: Half-full or Half-empty?

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” -- Winston Churchill

For the moment, investors continue to see any signs of a sharp market drop as a clear buying opportunity, rather than as a time to panic and exit the market.

In other words, greed currently trumps fear on Wall Street.

Is this a perfect time for a contrarian play or what? Read more about ETF Periscope: Gold Gets Smacked Down as Wall Street Continues to Soar

That’s been hard to figure lately.  Uncertainty has not eased.  Not in Europe.  Not in the Middle East. Not in China or Japan. Not in the U.S., with a dead-heat election battle and unknown future Congressional dynamics.  Companies overall continue to beat earnings, mostly, and miss on revenues.  Now there is a certainty: earnings cannot keep going up if revenues keep going down. Read more about What the Market Wants: Looking for Certainty Amidst Uncertainty

By: Meena Krishnamsetty, Insider Monkey

Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) is the most popular stock among hedge funds and billionaires, and it is performing spectacularly. Despite Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s successful performance hedge funds are underperforming the market third year in a row. The reason is simple. Equity hedge funds usually hedge around 50% of their long exposure. It just doesn’t make sense to compare them to the S&P 500 index which is 100% long. So we came up with a better way of illustrating hedge funds’ true stock picking ability and constructed an index that is 100% long. Read more about 5 Stocks Billionaires Are Crazy About

By Meena Krishnamsetty (Insider Monkey Editor) Read more about 5 Stocks Hedge Funds Are Buying Like Crazy

By Meena Krishnamsetty (Insider Monkey Editor)

Hedge funds will disclose their end of first quarter holdings next week. However, we can still track hedge funds’ transactions through Form 4, 13D, and 13G filings. We don’t get to see their entire portfolio in these filings but we get to see their recent transactions in their large positions. Here are the stocks hedge funds bought recently: Read more about Hedge Funds Bought These Stocks Recently

For U.S. equities, ETFs offer a higher percentage (10%) of attractive investment options than mutual funds (1%) at a lower cost. The radically higher number of US equity mutual funds (4,700+) versus ETFs (380+) is not indicative of better stock selection from active management. On the contrary, the vast majority of actively-managed funds do not justify the higher fees they charge. Read more about ETF vs Mutual Funds: The Winner Is…

Having too many choices can be intimidating. And there are definitely lots of choices when it comes to ETFs. For example, in the equity market alone, there 30+ technology sector ETFs, 35 "large cap value," and 20 financial ETFs. A very healthy selection abounds for every category of ETF. Read more about Picking The Diamonds Out of The ETF Rough

%&$#?@! the Government

By David Brown, Chief Market Strategist, Sabrient Systems Read more about %&$#?@! the Government