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By Jim Farrish, greenfaucet.com

The selling resulting from the comprehensive bailout plan from Geithner could be an opportunity. At least that is what I am reading from investment firms. Advisors are telling their clients the bottom is in and now is a good time to buy into equities for the long term. That may very well be the case over the next five years, but how much risk is there currently in the equity markets? From where I sit a 5% selloff in response to a plan from the Treasury says plenty.

I understand that fear breeds opportunity if you are rational in your approach to investing. The challenge is most investors don't approach these opportunities rationally. Looking through the various sectors of the market ...

By Jim Picerno, greenfaucet.com

It's big, it's bold, but it's also vague. And that's the problem.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner yesterday explained the new new plan to solve the financial crisis that ails America. Alas, as articulated yesterday, the plan is short on solution details and long on general notions of what needs to be done.

The challenge is figuring out how the latest effort will work and, more importantly, deciding if it'll fare any better than its misguided predecessors. At the moment, that's a challenge with no immediate answer. As the David Byrne and Brian Eno audio montage intones, "America is waiting for a message of some sort or another."

Certainly ...

By Michael Pento, greenfaucet.com

Much has been written lately about the beginnings of a recovery in the real estate market. Just last week housing bugs (investment "bugs" are not exclusive to those who only love gold) were cheering the latest data point which they claimed as evidence the market is making a comeback.

The Pending home sales index rose 6.3%, to 87.7 from 82.5 in November. That figure was also 2.1% higher than that of December 2007 when it registered 85.9. Helping to drive the increase in pending home sales are three major factors: lower home prices, lower new home construction rates and lower mortgage rates.

However, although those three factors have improved greatly since ...

By Roger Nusbaum, greenfaucet.com

In the last couple of days I have read more than one article extolling the virtues of Canada as an investment destination including this article from Barron’s profiling Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS) which I have owned for clients for several years.

Canada has a lot of similarities to the US in terms of how society functions and obviously its proximity to the US. There are also substantial differences; Canada is of course a commodity based economy, an economy with far fewer moving parts and it is not as bad off as the US. Regardless of what should be WRT to alternative energy the US is going be using a lot of oil for a long time to come and the US gets a lot of its oil from Canada. ...