There are several types of securities markets. You can buy and sell commodities, currencies, bonds, and stocks. Each of these four types of securities have their own exchanges around the world. A fifth category of securities, although mostly unregulated, includes all the cryptocurrencies. There are many exchanges for those types of investments. Each of these types of securities markets entails its own risks. To mitigate those risks investors usually turn to either mutual funds (which invest in multiple securities) or to contracts. The “contracts” category of risk mitigation is nearly as complex, perhaps more so, as the five groups of investment markets. You can buy and sell “futures contracts” which…

Investors sometimes lean toward small new companies, "startups", which may or may not start up in Silicon Valley or some other major West Coast city (Seattle is another springboard for technology startups). What attracts the casual investor to a small technology company is a clear, profound sense of growth, stability, and profitability. These investors may be angels but more often they are friends of friends, former business associates, and very often "silent partners".

Disruptive technologies come along every generation. They herald the end of one era and the beginning of another. Some common examples of disruptive technologies include railroads, telegraph, telephones, Colt revolvers, breech-loading rifles, magazine-loading guns, automobiles, machine-powered looms, television, computers, and the Internet.

How can you buy stock through an online brokerage like E*Trade if you only have a limited income? Each online brokerage publishes a schedule of fees. For example, you can find E*Trade's fee schedule here. Assuming you don't have much money to invest in a given month, how can you do this without wasting a lot of money on trade fees (which may cost as much as $10 per purchase)?

There are probably thousands of articles that explain how trading stock options works. I have read a lot of them. But I was pretty impressed with this article from OptionsHouse. It covers the basics with a very well-written, no-nonsense style. I think one reason they do such a fine job is that, as a brokerage, they have to be very careful about what they say. That article was probably reviewed by several people or written by someone very senior in the organization.

Investment advisers have earned a reputation for living the high lifestyle, taking big risks, and achieving big gains. Part of this reputation was built in news headlines that included covered fantastic merger and acquisition deals, stock market dips and peaks, and a few people going to jail. Part of this reputation was built through clever advertising ("when E.F. Hutton speaks, people listen", "Smith Barney makes money the old-fashioned way; they EARN it") and through popular books and movies.

There is no question about the ability of some investment strategists to outperform the market over time. Standard probability models tell us there will always be outliers in either direction (an approximately equal number of strategists will underperform the market over time). How largethese outlier groups tend to be depend on where you slice the bell curve. You can arbitrarily say 1%, 5%, 10%, etc.

Few Fortune 100 executives can be pinned down to a "common demographic". In August 2013 Forbes published a breakdown of the then current leadership of the Fortune 100 CEOs and you can see a lot of diversity in the demographics with three notable exceptions: over 90% of the list members are white, and over 90% of them (not necessarily the same group) are male, and their ages tend to fall around 57.

A friend recently asked me if I had ever heard of Dr. Markas Gilmartin. According to this article Markas Gilmartin is a co-founder of Epoch Wealth Management. To be honest, I have never heard of the man but that doesn't mean anything. I have not heard of most biologists or professional financial consultants.

Two recent investment column articles are pointing the spotlight at a new trend in options trading. Traditionally investors look at buying and selling options on future stock trades when the stock market is relatively quite -- volatility is low. But given the political and economic crises rolling out across the world, stock markets are having to adjust their trading.

Stock options bring to mind scenes from various movies where some big investor is making millions of dollars by betting on futures. Is investing in stock options really that easy? Or is it much harder than enthusiasts would have us believe?

This is a question that has been nagging at the back of my mind for a while. Here is why: I am seeing a lot of television advertising for Websites that boast they publish "real consumer reviews" for businesses. The business of writing reviews for businesses must have become big business, because last year the New York state Attorney General cracked down on the practice.