Jerome Bitun

2011 Tax Deadline Just a reminder, you have to file your taxes by April 30, 2011. U.S. Outlook The rating agency S&P 500 issued a warning Monday, April 18, 2011 on US government debt. It said that there is a 33% chance it would lower the United States credit rating from AAA in the next two years if Washington failed to manage the country's debt. This sent the Dow Jones, S&P500 and the TSX lower. S&P said it has little confidence that the White House and Congress will agree on a deficit-reduction plan before the fall 2012 elections. By that time, the measures won't go into effect until the fiscal year 2014. This does not look good for the U.S. The ratings done by the three major ratings agency is very important and the AAA rating is one most sought after rating by both investors and debt issuers. The reason this is important is because most big pension funds, hedge funds and mutual funds have in their mandate to only buy "AAA" rated bonds. If the U.S. lose...

Whew! What a week we've been having! We got a really wild market yesterday. Oil was at $75 from $80 earlier in the week. The Canadian dollar dropped 4 cents to 0.95 and it was just over par a week ago. Gold is now almost $1,200 from trading sideways near $1,100 for last month or so and yesterday the Dow Jones went as down as much as 1,075 points and recovered by closing down 341.90 points. A lot of people as asking what happened? Why did the Dow drop so much yesterday? Was it the potential bankruptcy and street riots in Greece? No, it's been happening for almost a month now. The market has already factored that in. Was it bad earnings or jobs report? No, it wasn't any worse or better than the previous reports. In fact, some of the reports were better. So what happened? Well, a CNBC news report that came out late afternoon yesterday said that Dow Jones went down as much as 1,000 yesterday because it was, get this, due to a typo. A typo! Can you believe that? They said a ...