Finance Geek

Every investor knows to buy low, but how do you make an educated guess about whether a stock is near the bottom or has further to fall? Plus: 5 stocks that look like bargains.

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The recession has put a crimp in some long-held plans to travel, launch a business or take up skydiving. But scaling back on dreams doesn’t mean abandoning them.

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With economic activity indicators softening and fiscal policy retrenching, some fear that we are heading for a period of sub-par growth in the developed world. A chief concern, voiced in a front page article in the Financial Times last Friday, is that with short term interest rates very close to zero, as is the case in all the large, developed economies, central banks are out of ammunition. But that is a misunderstanding.
The idea seems to be that since the major central banks’ policy rates are essentially zero, their economies are caught in what economists call a…

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Google launched a new version of YouTube last night that appears designed to work with the limited number of buttons on a standard cable or satellite remote control, hinting at a future that unites “couch potato” and “computer nerd” behaviors.

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Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management, says that the record-breaking federal deficit certainly isn’t wonderful, but it’s not catastrophic either.Deficits are the result of the cyclical nature of the economy and should be exp

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Sluggish retail sales in June are once again raising concerns about a stalling economy and the threat of a double-dip recession. Same-store sales data released Thursday morning showed that stingy consumers forced retailers to discount merchandise more tha

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Provided by Business Insider, July 8, 2010:Today’s blip down in the jobless claims notwithstanding, there’s no doubt that the prospects of a double-dip recession seem to be growing with each major economic announcement.Naturally this has to be causing con

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You may have seen the various reports today about the new YouTube HTML5 mobile site (perhaps the best write up is on Techcrunch) – they all say that the site runs as well or better than the native app on the iPhone, particularly with regard to video quality.

Similarly there is a Google Maps HTML 5 mobile site which is better than the native Google maps iPhone app.  I have just been playing with it and I think it is faster, makes more advanced downloads of map tiles to speed sideways scrolling and allows you to view layers on top of the map (e.g. traffic).  I will be using this from now on.

Beyond that there are a bunch of other HTML5 mobile sites for Google’s applications (see the screen grab from Google Mobile) some of which include offline functionality (in case you missed it, earlier this year Google abandoned its Gears project which was a proprietary effort to bring offline functionality to websites).

This is a big deal because users can put these web apps on their iPhones (or any other phone) without the approval of Apple.  Since the launch of the iPhone the app store paradigm has been in the ascendancy with all walled garden related issues that come with it.  Many of us have believed that an open architecture will eventually come to dominate, but it has been very unclear how long that would take.  Google is showing us that it might come sooner than we think.

HTML5 won’t be best for all apps, with games being perhaps the most obvious category where we can expect native apps to retain a significant market share, but it could make a big difference to the current app economy.

HTML5 apps are better for developers (and by extension consumers) for the following reasons:

• much closer to the write once run anywhere promise
• no app store approval process
• no restriction with regard to use of ad platform – I think this is right
• simpler for web developers to learn

Two things that native apps do have going for them are search and discovery via the app store and easy billing (at least on the iPhone).

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WASHINGTON — CNN has fired a senior editor for Middle East news after she published a Twitter message that said she respected a Lebanese Shi’ite cleric branded a terrorist by the United States, U.S. and British media report.

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Buyers have returned to the stock market; after falling more than seven percent in the last two weeks, a two-day winning streak has the Dow back above 10,000. …

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