You normally don't get a margin call unless your securities, minus the debt, are worth 30% or less of their nominal market value.

Stock prices aren't real things. They're just froth on a wave. The wave is the only real thing, which investors forget when they're watching the ticket slither by.

Life insurance can be numbingly complicated. Clients often turn off their brains and surrender their judgment to the very agent or planner who brought on their coma in the first place.

It seems like only yesterday that savers were dorks. They kept piggy banks. They drove last year's cars. They fished in their change purses for nickels while the superstars flashed credit cards. Today, values have changed. The new object of veneration is not money on the hoof but money in the bank - and the dorks all have it.

The rule on staying alive as a forecaster is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.

No one knows what stocks will do tomorrow, but the evidence is clear as to how they'll perform over 10 or 20 years. They will almost certainly go up.

You don't date an annuity, you marry it. An annuity isn't a mutual fund that you buy today and sell tomorrow. Nor is it a certificate of deposit, ready for any new use at maturity. When you buy an annuity, you are making (or ought to be making) a 15- or 20-year commitment, at least.