Risk Rewarded Blog

The future of cars is within sight. Autonomous or self-driving cars are coming to American streets.  And Silicon Valley will ensure they arrive sooner than major car companies want.In addition to a ten-minute dissertation on rocket science and arguing that all life on Earth is probably not real, Tesla’s charismatic chief executive Elon...

Bankers are under attack around the world. The assault is not being led by masked men with pistols but rather by anonymous cyber-thieves armed with malicious code. Their vulnerability stems from a historic shift. Before 1973, the world’s banks had a communication problem. Transferring money involved countless phone calls, telex machine...

If you're not getting our regular email updates, click here.Keep it simple stupid. That’s business adage that has stood the test of time. Facebook (FB) knows this well. Its business is so incredibly simple. It lures you inside with freebees, keeps you there with the comforts of home and other goodies, entices you to bring your friends along...

NOTE:  If you're not getting our timely market updates by email, click here to sign up now.Need to Know NowInvestors are in a gloomy mood today.  Blame the calendar.The two-month stretch of March and April have historically been one of the best in the calendar year for investors, and it certainly worked out this time, with a 6.9% gain...

Regular readers of my Forbes magazine column, Twitter feed and Yahoo! Finance blog know that I cover a lot more material than I can fit in my subscription newsletters.  That's why I decided to create a special VIP letter -- a quick, private, unvarnished analysis of what's going on in the markets, global economy, technology and culture, along with...

One of my favorite regular analytical pieces produced by the folks at Bespoke Investment Group is their monthly S&P 500 Decile Performance. The grid does a great job of explaining which factors are driving stock market performance in the month. During the middle of a year, these trends tend to be persistent from month to month.To run the analysis,...

Now let's turn to a more interesting subject -- tech product development.Fitness wearables maker Fitbit (FIT) filed for a $100 million initial public offering last week on the NYSE, bagging a cute ticker for a company that's poised to undercut Apple (AAPL). To cut to the quick: While Apple will try to dominate the market for high-end...

Everyone of a certain age remembers AOL (AOL) for the ubiquitous CDs the company sent out to encourage people to go online in the 1990s. And most of the news stories on Tuesday focused on the company's content, like Huffington Post or the fact that it's still selling dial-up internet access to more than 2 million people for 20 bucks a month. But...