Fascinating, aren't they, these security markets of ours, with their unpredictability, promise, and unscripted daily drama. But individual investors themselves are even more interesting. We've become the product of a media driven culture that must have reasons, predictability, blame, scapegoats, and even that "four-letter" word, certainty.

We are becoming a culture of speculators, where hindsight is replacing the reality-based foresight that once was flowing in our now real-time veins. Still, the markets have always been dynamic places where investors can consistently make reasonable returns on their capital. If one complies with the basic principles of the endeavor and doesn't measure progress too frequently with

Moving the needle on gender pay disparity.

What industry has the greatest pay disparity between genders? If you guess the financial advice industry, you’re a winner. The gender pay disparity (GDP) between male and female financial advisors is a whopping 60 percent. These are men and women working at the same job, with the same level of education and years of experience.

Natasha Lamb, a managing partner and co-founder of the Boston-based firm Arjuna Capital, says she was shocked to find out her own occupation has such disparity.

If it works for one or ten, it ought to work for 1,000, right?

That’s the philosophy used by Troy Tisue and his team at TAG Resources, LLC, to identify the best employer-sponsored employee retirement benefit plans for the firm’s clients.

He knows that for many employers, going it on their own is too costly. By joining a pool of employers all purchasing the same type of benefit plan, Tisue’s clients have access to much more affordable retirement plans to offer to their employees.

Several high-profile figures bashed Bitcoin recently, but what’s really going on?

As Bitcoin plummeted from its $20,000 all-time high to a more modest price at about $8,000, the critics, almost immediately, started piling on.

“At this point in time, the money has been made in bitcoin already,” said Jordan Belfort, the so-called “Wolf of Wall Street” who is now a motivational speaker. Belfort, in an interview with “The Street,” took aim at Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, describing proponents of the fiat fund as “scamsters.”

The reason people assume the risks of investing in the first place is the prospect of achieving a higher "realized" rate of return than is attainable in a risk free environment…i.e., an FDIC insured bank account featuring compound interest.

Over the past ten years, such risk free saving has been unable to compete with riskier mediums because of artificially low interest rates, forcing traditional "savers" into the mutual fund and ETF

Women-owned businesses are growing rapidly in numbers but lag in size and revenues compared to all U.S. firms. Finding the key to women-owned business revenue growth is a good starting point for closing the gap.

According to the 2017 State of Women-Owned Businesses report, commissioned by American Express, the number of women-owned businesses has grown 114% in the 20 years since 1997, much faster than the 44% growth rate for all U.S. businesses.

A correction is a beautiful thing, simply the flip side of a rally, big or small. Theoretically, even technically I'm told, corrections adjust equity prices to their actual value or "support levels". In reality, it's much easier than that.

Prices go down because of speculator reactions to expectations of news, speculator reactions to actual news, and investor profit taking. The two former "becauses" are more potent than ever before because there is more self-directed money (and sector/index derivatives) out there than ever before. And therein lies the core of correctional beauty!