Word: perlis
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...past year oil has traded above $120 per barrel and below $50 per barrel, generating plenty of buzz (even within government agencies like the Commodity Futures Trading Commission) about oil speculators and their mysterious ways of making mounds of money. (Read "Why There Should Be More Oil Speculation, Not Less...
...brokerage account, but it lets you leverage your bets to the hilt) as collateral to comfortably trade one contract. That might sound like a lot for just one contract, but a single contract on NYMEX represents 1,000 barrels of crude oil: if the price moves $10 per barrel, you just had a swing of $10,000 in your account, which means you've either doubled your money or lost your shirt, your dreams wiped out in mere minutes. And you thought casinos had all the action...
...make money? If you sell oil at, say, $66 per barrel, and buy it back at, say, $65 per barrel, you keep the $1 per barrel difference. On one contract, or 1,000 barrels, that comes to $1,000. Not bad for a hard day's work. But take the other side of that trade - buy for $66 and sell for $65 - and you've lost a grand per contract. Remember that on both trades, you're going to pay high transaction fees and commissions, and you'll likely be forced to take a worse price in order to guarantee...
...China can help. But it remains a relatively poor country, with an annual per capita income of $6,000, compared with $39,000 in the U.S. and $33,400 in the E.U. To be solidly middle class in China's big cities is to have an income of about $12,000. Brisk though auto sales may be, most Chinese still can't afford a Volkswagen or a Buick, let alone a BMW. Even as China's consumers feel richer, their share of its economy may not change much until Beijing enacts reforms to the health-care and social-security systems...
...automaker General Motors, was in meltdown mode, begging the government for funding and trying to raise cash. One salable piece of its portfolio: 84 homesites in Hidden Springs. Jim Hunter, of Boise Hunter Homes, was there to buy. Hunter figures GMAC had already plowed about $88,000 per lot into the neighborhood by laying down streets and sewer lines. In the fire sale, he spent $52,000 a pop. And so the land was recycled - from an overextended national company to a more nimble local player able to put it to good economic use. It was, in its own small...