This morning's gap up triggered my stop loss in Symantec (SYMC).  This name actually remained quite weak considering the huge move Wednesday and follow through day yesterday but finally it triggered a 3% threshold and I was out at $14.12.

With that I am mostly out of the short book other than some piddling index exposure.

No position

Labor Day weekend begins tomorrow afternoon in the U.S. It’s the traditional end-of-summer holiday, and most folks will get Monday off as a paid holiday. My own vacation is going to be a bit different: I’m going to take tomorrow off instead. This will be the last post until Sunday evening.

It’s time to stop learning and start earning.

I’m not kidding. You really should stop studying and just get out there. Once I did, I became a lot more successful.

I can best explain the true cost of learning when I tell you about launching my blog.

Two years ago, I didn’t know what a blog was.

A friend convinced me to launch one in order to market a book I was writing, so I decided to “look into it.”

The more I looked into blogging, the less I understood it. As a result, I went deeper.

The personal finance book Grow Your Money!: 101 Easy Tips to Plan, Save, and Invest ends with a list of what financial steps we should take each month. They list the August steps as follows:

• Review your insurance coverage to make sure no changes need to be made.
• Do an employee benefits checkup.

Here's what I do on these:

By many measures Microsoft (MSFT) stock is cheap.  The question for today’s screencast is whether it is cheap for a reason?  The stock has become a favorite of some smart hedge fund managers, including noted value investor Whitney Tilson.  However Todd Sullivan notes that the company has not increased its book value per share in over a decade.  Can the stock truly outperform if it can’t increase its own n