View Money As Capital
If everyone were a knowledgeable business person with sound business experience, everyone would manage their money a whole heck of a lot better.  A business person recognizes their money or funds as capital.  This capital is deployed or invested and the effectiveness of how well it has been deployed is measured by its return.
Your money that you have in your pocket or in your bank account is capital.  You decide how to allocate it, and depending on how you allocate it, it will likely determine how successful …

There is a great article by ETFGuide regarding the herding mentality of investors, and how investors are usually wrong.  They details some examples of recent market tops and bottoms, and they beg the question regarding whether or not we are topping out right now.
A few key examples:

October 2002 – Dow: 7,500; S&P: 800 -  24.5% of investors were bullish; 54.8% were bearish – Stocks put in a bottom at this level
October 16, 2007 – 54.6% of investors were bullish; 16.5% of investors were bearish – The market peaked here.
March, 2009 …

This stubborn market continues to stay high despite what I believe is a broken economy.  Sure we have some better numbers due to government programs and inventory cycles, but I believe the economy is broken.  We are too dependent on consumption and consumption isn’t coming back.
Despite this fact, some awful sectors such as commercial real estate and retail continue to go up, and at the same time, they continue to kill my portfolio.  I’ve been short for some time, and anyone without a serious level of conviction would have gotten …

Gold continues to stay above $1000.  I was a believer in this run over $1000 as noted here, but part of me could see gold dropping below $1000 if there is another major leg down in the stock market.  I’m not sure what the catalyst for such a leg down will be at this point, however.  Banks writing down more assets?  Fed raising rates? 10% unemployment?

Today’s market is nuts and is incredibly interesting.  I’m on the edge of my seat, and incredibly interested to see how this market plays out …

This post is a type of mission statement for this blog, so that my current readers and future readers know exactly what they’re getting into when they visit 20smoney.com.
With regards to the following topics, please note the following:
Personal Finance
It’s amazing how many personal finance blogs and websites are on the internet that all re-hash the same Suzie Orman / Dave Ramsey advice.  I’ll save you some time by summarizing their views right now.  Spend less than you make, pay off your debt, have an emergency fund, save money for the …

There are fresh signs of the severe lack of consumption that will continue to cripple the U.S. economy for years.  While the fresh retail numbers might make you think that consumption is getting better, remove programs like Cash for Clunkers and the picture is murky at best.
In the news today are two interesting consumer related stories:
Best Buy’s Terrible Earnings
Best Buy (BBY) reported a miss in earnings this morning despite a beat on the revenue side of things.  If a company beats on revenue and misses bad on earnings, the clear …

Article marketing has been big for years for the “make money online” crowd.  For those of you who do not know what it is, article marketing basically means writing and submitting articles or content to free article directories (ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, etc.) in order to create backlinks and point users to a specific URL or website that can potentially earn money for the owner of that site.
People may use articles to create “backlinks” which will help them rank better in search engines or they may use them to get people to …

Mint.com is a fantastic tool that I’ve used for quite a while.  Even more importantly, I believe it’s a great example of how to start a successful business on the web.  It follows a simple formula of finding a day to day problem that people encounter, then offer a slick, easy service  online to help people with such a problem.  With Mint.com, that problem is budgeting and spending patterns.
It was just announced that Mint.com was sold to Intuit (it’s main competitor) for $170 million.  An inevitable acquisition in my opinion.
From …