Hot Stock Profiles

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission says that investments and financial products should come with warnings in the same way products such as cigarettes come with warnings that they pose health risk.

The corporate regulator has outlined a set of new guidelines designed to regulate the way companies advertise financial products. The guidelines are part of the regulators attempt to crack down on advertising which is designed to market riskier retail derivative products.

Greg Medcraft who is the current chairman of ASIC says that investors should be made aware of the consequences of investments made in riskier financial products.

“I think it’s important that advertising be balanced, particularly in financial products,” he said.

“It’s almost important to have a health warning, but there’s consequences as well with some particular financial products.”

ASIC says it would like to see financial services companies engaging in a more balanced form of advertising.

According to Mr. Medcraft some

Read more…

When a new customer chooses from the endless array of credit cards with airline miles rewards, there are many important factors that come into play. Annual fees, introductory rates, and the rate of mileage accrual must all be taken into careful consideration before choosing a card. But one aspect that often gets overlooked is perhaps also the most important: just how ‘rewarding’ are these airline rewards programs really?

What good is a rewards program if you can’t book a ticket on the most desirable travel dates? Or what if the amount of mileage it takes to book a ticket is astronomically high? These details will spell the difference between satisfaction and disgust with an airline miles reward card.

To help avoid some of the pitfalls of booking a free ticket, let’s take a look at the two most common ways airlines allow their customers to redeem mileage.

Almost all major carriers utilize a similar redemption structure for free tickets. Miles a

Read more…

Many consumers are under the impression that credit card companies only use an applicant’s credit report to determine their financial reliability to then place them within a suitable credit bracket. Credit card companies, however, often use a variety of factors other than the credit score when determining what types of cards and interest rates to offer a prospective cardholder.

Most card companies have a wide-ranging selection of credit cards, with some specifically designed for applicants that have excellent credit, and others that are suitable for sub-prime cardholders. Ultimately, there are three factors considered by credit card companies when issuing interest rates and credit limits, which are income, financial history and credit score/credit report. I

Read more…

Economics:

• 8:30 a.m.: Go ahead and brace yourself, we get the government’s first guesstimate ofsecond-quarter GDP, and it probably won’t be pretty. Macroeconomic Advisers’ latest read on this is 1.3%, which is a good bit lower than the 1.8% Wall Street expects. Who will be right? None of us, that’s who.
• 8:30 a.m.: We also get the second-quarter employment cost index, which nobody will notice. Remember when everybody was worried about inflation?
• 9:45 a.m.: We get the Chicago ISM report; people who pay a fee get it a few minutes early. This report was surprisingly strong in June, getting everybody briefly jazzed about the economy. Will it hold up?
• 9:55 a.m.: The University of Michigan releases its final consumer sentiment reading for July. A sligh

Read more…