Investing and Global Finance News

Monthly Archives: November 2010

Cyber Monday Retail Success

Online retailers saw significant sales success on the Monday after this year’s Thanksgiving. “Cyber Monday,” so named to both reflect and encourage the post-Thanksgiving boom in online shopping, may generate up to $1 billion in sales this year, according to a Jeffries analyst. This will reflect an increase from last year’s Cyber Monday sales of $887 million, the analystics firm comScore reported. The firm plans to publicize its Cyber Monday date on Wednesday.

As the public increased its purchases, retailers’ stocks rose in tandem. Amazon shares reached an all-time peak of 2.6%, while the stock of its smaller rival Overstock.com rose 8.1%. Ebay Inc’s PayPal unit saw a 21% rise in its total payment volume as compared to last year’s Cyber Monday.

Total U.S. online sales in 2009 were $130 billion.

Black Friday Online Sales on the Rise

The day after Thanksgiving this year saw online sales increase by 15.9% over Black Friday 2009, according to Coremetrics, a web analytics technology provider that is part of IBM. E-retailer Buy.com reported a sales jump of 45%. In addition, ChannelAdvisor reported that its retailer client’s same-store sales increased by almost 35%, seeing particularly good results… Continue Reading

Black Friday Countdown Continues

Higher income consumers have expressed greater optimism about their financial future but their lower income counterparts are still struggling. It is the goal of America’s retailers to attract both sectors to their holiday sale season, which begins on “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving, this week. “It’s critical to get off to a good start… Continue Reading

Holiday Hopes Give Rise to Higher Stocks

As Thanksgiving approaches towards week’s end, stocks have risen in anticipation of Black Friday. The gains in sales during the first half of November have given hope that the day after Thanksgiving, which is the traditional start to the retail industry’s biggest sales period, will launch a flourishing holiday selling season. MasterCard Advisors’ Spending Pulse,… Continue Reading

Speculative Stocks

You get an email to your inbox. The letter says: ”Just invest two thousand dollars today and watch your investment grow 100-fold!”. Obviously, that line is meant to tempt you to read further. The letter will continue with terms such as “the next Apple” and “ripe for a buyout”. Sounds enticing, right? What should you… Continue Reading

The Promise of Black Friday

As Thanksgiving 2010 approaches, investors have their eye on Black Friday. This is the traditional start of the holiday shopping season which aims to identify a level of retail volume that will indicate a market upswing. This year’s Black Friday, so-called because stores usually make sufficient sales on that day to get their accounts “into… Continue Reading

Cash Flow and Increasing Dividends

There are a lot of different ways to pick which stocks you want to invest in. Extensive research is necessary if you want to pick small stocks with explosive potential. However, if you’re not interested in spending a lot of time doing research and/or don’t want to take high-risks, here’s a list of stocks for… Continue Reading

Can You Say “Dominate” in Chinese?

The Chinese economy is becoming a bigger and bigger player in the global market. As of today, four out of the ten biggest companies in the world are Chinese! China now has the largest car market in the world, which makes the largest Chinese car-maker, Bitauto (NASDAQ: BITA) a very compelling buy. This would also… Continue Reading

Karstadt Finds Unexpected Growth

Berlin / Dusseldorf – Thomas Fox the CEO of Karstadt predicts a great future for his  department store chain in Germany. “The best times of these department stores in Germany still lie ahead,” lectured Fox on Wednesday even before the industry gathered at the German trade conference in Berlin, “Germany is a country store.” To… Continue Reading

Diversify, Diversify, Diversify!

One of the cardinal rules of investing is diversification.  You never want to put all of your eggs in one basket. Ensuring your portfolio is diversified will make sure you will not lose half of your money in one day. If you invest no more than 4% of your money in a single investment, and… Continue Reading