The Heritage Auction Galleries’ Central States Numismatic Society Convention Platinum Night Auction has turned out to be quite a show. Besides the “King of Coins” 1804 Silver Dollar going for a cool two point three million dollars, several other incredible rare coins have gone up and been sold for some nice fetches, as well.

The legendary 1807-S Seated Dollar, the rarest regular silver dollar in existence, wound up selling for about a half a million dollars, The sixth finest known example of a 1794 dollar went for a half million as well, a twenty cent piece from 1876 went for four hundred sixty thousand, a 1794 silver dollar went for three hundred forty five thousand, and a 1795 Flowing Hair dollar sold for about a quarter million. (more…)

“Are you, nuts?! You want me to risk part of my savings trading options? This whole covered calls idea sounds like just another one of those crazy options strategies that sound great, but don’t deliver in the end.”

My pal was a normally a mild-mannered sort – very contemplative, always weighing the consequences rationally before acting. In short, a logical thinker.

Imagine my dismay when that one phrase, “trading options”, triggered this unprecedented tirade. You’d think I’d insulted his family or something even worse. (more…)

If you are new to the stock markets than automated stock software is the way to go. These are programs which automatically conduct all of the market analysis work for you on your behalf. Ultimately all you have to do is enact the trades as they come to you. The program supplies the enter and exit times so that all you to do is trade accordingly.

But with so many different options on the market today claiming to be the best, it is difficult to know which is actually best. This is a review of the best automated stock software on the market today. (more…)

You must have thought a number of times about how your dream retirement is going to be like, but have you really thought about how are you going to make your retirement investment? If not, then it’s time for you get started and do all the calculations. This is because, if you want your retirement dream to come true, this wakeup call should get you on your feet to get real and act wise. After all, even when you employ an expert to handle your finances, you cannot simply follow someone else blindly for your future livelihood. It is equally important to acquire the knowledge and understand what differentiates a quality advice from a quality sales pitch.

Here are a few good steps to help you get started:

1. Educate yourself

You can start your retirement investment education by reading various book reviews and taking online or live investment classes. This way you learn about what options are on the platter and how many possible ways you can go about them. But beware of the free lunch or free dinner seminars which usually try to sell you their investment plans or products in the name of education. (more…)

Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, are investments that hold a basket of securities like mutual and index funds, but they trade like stocks. This means that you can trade the ETF at any time of the day. This has the downside of incurring transaction costs each time you add to your ETF portfolio, whereas mutual funds are often set up to allow you to add funds for free. Other than this downside ETFs can be a good way to be bet on different classes of asset, like gold, or a sector such as oil, or even a country such as Japan. There a wide range of ETFs for you to choose from, but this article draws your attention to one of the most dangerous types – the leveraged ETF.

Leveraged ETFs return double or triple the returns of an underlying index, and there are also Inverse ETFs, which return two or three times the inverse of an index. However, since these ETFs have their exposure to an index reset on a daily basis their returns do not correlate to the index when they are held for longer than their typical compounding period which is a day. Any ETF analyst could tell you this, but most of the suckers on main street have no idea and end up holding the investments for an extended period. (more…)