Is Apple connected to the real economy? Apple is driven by consumer spending, but is their gain just someone else’s loss?

Apple Inc (AAPL) is the most popular company on the planet, and the most popular stock in the investing world. Apple has flat out been killing it.

Our forecast for 2012. Stocks End Up 10-15%. Housing Stays Crappy. Middle Class Struggles. Politics will continue to be politics. Don’t worry, there’s still good news in this article.

Stock picking was all the rage because everyone was convinced that stocks were where you should be because the performance was so great. Stock picking gave individual investors the idea that they could generate even larger returns therefore they ate it up. Hot stock tips spread via newsletters and word of mouth like wild fire. The reality is that these tips could work if someone read the fundamentals right. Unfortunately all of this ended in 2008.

For approximately 5 months I have been managing my “mutual fund” via Youtualfunds.com – which is a very cool platform. My performance over the last 5 months has been very good. While the performance is encouraging, I’ll be the first to admit that a 5 month time frame is very short. You can follow my performance by…

Essentially countries want lower currencies priced against other currencies in order to stimulate exports. Of course if your exports are cheaper for other countries, then stuff is also more expensive for your own people, but that’s irrelevant, right? Well, what happens when EVERYONE is devaluing against eachother trying to all stimulate exports? Well, you have all currencies losing value.

A rundown of commentaries on current events such as Occupy Wall Street, the idea of income disparity, what is happening in Europe and Netflix!

Stock markets continue to be volatile with weak jobs/economic data and especially fears over the Europe situation. The European debt crisis will have to come to a head at some point, so it probably makes sense to hold out until it does. What will that look like? A Greek restructuring of debt at a minimum.