Fools were out and about this week in an investing world jam-packed with actions and ideas. Here are three articles you might find useful as you decide how to invest your money.
Bond Bubbles?
Is some of your money among the billions of dollars people have spent buying U.S. Treasuries, which lends money to the government? "Investors are plowing into bonds with abandon," Fool contributor Morgan Housel reported this week, with a chart showing the numbers. Abandon has its place, but it doesn't mix well with investing.
Morgan suggests instead looking to individual company stocks. For instance, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT ) just issued three-year debt at a record-low 0.875%, IBM (NYSE: IBM ) issued three-year notes at 1%, and Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ ) issued 10-year notes at less than 3%. That's not great for those who bought the bonds, but it's good for the companies.
Check out the story to learn more, and don't forget to take the Motley Poll and see how your fellow Fools are voting.
4 More Dot-Com Buyouts
Don't let the word "dot-com" scare you, even though it's often followed by the word "bust" in reference to the situation we saw early in the century. Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz isn't afraid to look around the sector for good investments, and this week he highlighted four companies that could be attractive buys for other companies.
Here's some of what Rick had to say about AOL (NYSE: AOL ) : "The fallen giant may have sold some properties along the way, but it still has all of the right portal ingredients to make any buyer an instant online powerhouse."
Read the article to see Rick's thoughts on QuinStreet (Nasdaq: QNST ) , MercadoLibre (Nasdaq: MELI ) , and Ebix (Nasdaq: EBIX ) .
Why Are You Buying This Stock?
Sometimes you just have to do the math. For investors who want to know how much to pay for a particular stock and how to protect themselves from flat or falling portfolios, that math sometimes falls under the heading of "discounted cash flow."
Fool contributor Chuck Saletta uses a simple example to help investors understand the concept: If you give someone a dollar bill and that person immediately hands you 100 pennies, everything's good. But what if there's a lag?
"When you buy a stock, you hand over your dollars, with the expectation that the company will pay you those pennies over time -- either directly as dividends or indirectly as earnings," Chuck writes. "All that a discounted cash flow calculation does is estimate what would be a fair number of pennies to expect back in the future for your dollar, based on those time and risk factors."
See the article for help figuring out how to get a fair trade for your dollars.
RSS Headlines
Fool UK