Frankly Speaking

The Boston Globe ran a story last week which debunks a few myths about American manufacturing. It touches on the decline of American manufacturing (false!) and the loss of jobs to China due to lower wages (false!). Conclusion: American companies are manufacturing more than ever, but doing so with fewer workers. It isn’t the Chinese stealing our jobs – it’s the machines!

The “decline of US manufacturing’’ is giving Americans a “sense of economic precariousness’’ — only one in . . .

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: SILENT KILLER CLAIMS NEARLY 9,000 AMERICAN LIVES ANNUALLY

Earlier this year that Nina E. Olson, the ombudsman for the Internal Revenue Service, reported that Americans are spending 6.1 billion hours preparing their tax returns each year – the equivalent of 2,932,692 Americans working full time. 6.1 billion hours per year equates to the equivalent of 695,884.7 years (accounting for leap years of course). The World Bank reports that the average lifespan . . .

MagicDiligence has an interesting article about combining a technical indicator (price momentum) with fundamental value metrics (those exhibited by Greenblatt’s Magic Formula).

What was more surprising were his findings on price momentum, defined in the book as high trailing twelve month stock price appreciation. The stocks with the best price momentum greatly outperformed the market, although doing so with high volatility. On the other hand, buying the stocks with the worst price momentum was a sure path to . . .