If you're itching to buy stocks into the recent decline, you may get your chance very soon. Through the Tuesday close, the market is as oversold as it ever gets.

When the United States needs money for the bailout, it will almost appear from thin air.

As options volatility makes more and more headlines, could this index-tracking fund make sense?

One unintended consequence of the banking bailout plan may be the catalyst for a "crude" reality none of us want to see.

Irrational behavior by politicians and investors open the door for an options strategy with great profit potential.

The bottom line is that the WaMu deal highlights how fortunate we were to have steered investors like you clear of all financial stocks for most of this year, even when they seemed really cheap. But it also shows that there's a lot of opportunity ahead for the banks I'm now calling "national champions," such as...

Stocks have fallen broadly this month on intensifying credit fears, and now it's getting serious. The broad market is now down 24% for the year and 30% from the last top in October 2007.

Last week you already know that stocks were in bad shape, but you may not have realized that the credit markets were even worse. This is important because this bear began with a worsening of credit in mid 2007, and it will end with an improvement in credit at some point.

Chris Rowe discusses the changes coming with the federal bailout plan and what this means for traders.

Unlike Warren Buffett, most investors don't have $5 billion to bailout the U.S. banking system. But they still have a lot at stake that's riding on the economy, the Federal Reserve and this so-called bailout package. Here are 6 tried and true tips that will help you profit AND protect your wealth in these choppy waters of economic uncertainty.

Clearly the market has decided that, at minimum, throwing another trillion dollars at the banking crisis will be inflationary. You can't float that many bonds and flood the world with new paper and not cause inflation. You can argue whether deflationary forces, such as lower asset prices, will thwart the inflation in the long term, by which I mean a few years. But you can't argue that flooding the market with brand-new money won't cause the value of current money to be debased a lot sooner.

Stocks pulled out of a stunning tailspin last week by mounting a ferocious rally in the last two days that actually occurred faster than it might have seemed.

Clusters of extreme declines have historically often brought bring bear markets to a close. Except when they didn't.

Once in a lifetime events are piling up so fast that we are going to need several lifetimes to absorb them. Someday we'll look back at this period with awe, but for now we just need to figure out how to keep our heads low, our emotions in check, our wits sharp and our portfolios guarded.

Overall the tone of next quarter is setting up to be one where companies announce better-than-expected third-quarter numbers but then provide a sour forecast for the fourth quarter as well as for the first half of 2009. That is a recipe for a lot more volatility and not a lot of progress.

We can see misdirection everywhere we look today, as brokerage analysts talk up the strength of big financial firms even while we can clearly see that fund managers at those brokerages are feeding stock into the market on every rally. So it is times like this when we really need to understand how to keep our eye on the ball, and not look where the dealers want us to look.

It became apparent over the past two weeks that the only way to hit the reset button on the global economy is for Western capitalist governments to act like their socialist counterparts and recapitalize their financial systems. Here's how it would work.

Stocks have jostled around lately like rocks at the bottom of a paper bag, always threatening to break down but never quite developing the energy. This week's trading was brought to you by the letter E, for "entropy," which is a measure of disorder with a system.

It's no secret that this is an election year and that markets tend to favor elections. However, these are special times and you have to look at history to get a sense for what may be headed our way this year. I did some digging and have some very interesting results to share with you today.