It’s not often that I look to large blue-chip companies for investment opportunities. I prefer analyzing smaller easier to understand companies where I believe more market inefficiencies exist – it’s rare to find market inefficiencies among blue-chip stocks. However, every once in a while a large cap global company catches my eye, where the investment thesis alone is almost enough to justify buying. Enter Bombardier.

Bombardier is a very large Canadian company that operates globally. In a nutshell, they make planes and trains… but not automobiles. And that’s what makes them so attractive. Bombardier is a global leader in these two industries, and given the company’s strategic positioning and the long term growth potential (especially in its rail division), I think this is a company we should all have on our radar screens.

In my article titled Oil Prices Gone Wild posted June 9th, I spoke about how oil prices seemed to have gotten ahead of themselves. Prices defied gravity when they soared from $100 per barrel to just over $138 per barrel (when I wrote the article) over the course of only a few days. At this point I figured a massive correction was necessary to bring these prices back in line with the long term trend. Well, with oil prices down 18% from their peak, and natural gas prices down over 30% from their peak it looks like we’ve got that correction. But is it over? Is this just your typical bull market correction? Or is this really a bursting bubble caused by “demand destruction” (thanks CNBC for that overused buzzword).

A thought I made on commodities was just one example of logistics entering into the decision-matrix of each trade one might make. The fact is, being aware of the driving forces behind movements is a great advantage, and in this game, you want every advantage you can get.

...or foresee. The craziest events or news (even “spin”, thank you journalism) can have some very interesting effects on all manner of financial instruments. The most obvious are the scheduled ones, such as interest rates.

Herein lies a rare long term, speculative recommendation.

When looking for a quality dividend stock, one thing I like to look at is the Dividend Payout Ratio. What I like to see is a stock with a high dividend yield and a low payout ratio. Now you maybe wondering what constitutes a high yield and a low payout ratio, and this isn’t an easy thing to answer because it largely depends on the stock and its industry.

I think that Sin Stocks are an interesting topic, So I thought that today I'd do a brief post about them, and why I have one in my portfolio. First off, lets try to go over what exactly a Sin Stock is; A Sin Stock is generally any stock of a company that provides a product or service that people have moral judgments against. Now, there are so many people out there with different morals, so a sin stock for you, might not be a sin stock for me. For example, someone might not like ice cream, so any company that produces ice cream would be against their morals to own, but in general there are three types of stocks that are your main 'Sin Stocks', these are Alcohol, Tobacco and Casinos.