Featured Voices

For many, the collapse of the housing bubble was the trigger that began the era of economic slowdown Americans find themselves mired in.

But recently there have been growing reports in the media of a housing "recovery." So we've invited Patrick Killelea, founder of the popular housing site Patrick.net and author of The Housing Trap: How Buyers Are Captured and Abused and How to Defend Yourself, to clarify the situation.

The short answer is this: While there are some markets where home prices are back in line with both fundamental and historic norms, buyers still need to exert caution when making a purchase. » Read more

In the blink of an eye, the market moves what used to take humans thirty minutes

High Frequency Trading (HFT) deeply concerns Erik Hunsader, founder of Nanex. He worries that today's investors, our regulators -- heck, even the HFT algorithms themselves -- don't fully understand the risks market prices face in our brave new era of bot-dominated trading.

For instance, Hunsader estimates that HFT algorithms are responsible for 70%(!) of all completed transactions on our exchanges, and for 99.9%(!!!) of all exchange quotes.

The pictures of trading floors you see on TV, where the people in bright jackets appear frantically busy in making their trades, have no bearing -- claims Hunsader -- on the actual trading action. The real action happens across fiberoptic cables, on racks of servers in cooled rooms; where an arms race defined in cable length and switching speeds.

The reality is that the machines have taken over. » Read more

Barry Ritholz has had a long career, both participating in the Wall Street machine operates and opining on how it operates. By any account, few understand the ‘street rules’ of modern investing better than he.

And he thinks many investors today, both individual and professional, are letting themselves get dangerously distracted. » Read more

During the height of the 'Goldilocks economy' of the mid-1990s, Mat Stein wrote When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency, a master compendium of do-it-yourself preparation skills.

Fast-forward to today's Great Recession, drought-stricken, $100+ oil, post-Katrina, post-Fukushima world -- many are realizing the prudence of taking basic precautionary steps to reduce their vulnerability to whatever the future may bring. Whether you're concerned about the fallout from a breakdown of today's weakened global economy, or simply want to be better able to deal with the aftermath of a natural disaster if you live in an earthquake/hurricane/flood/wildfire/tornado-prone part of the world -- the personal resiliency measures Mat recommends make sense for almost everyone to consider. » Read more