Editor's Note: The following article was written by Raymond James Chief Investment Strategist Jeff Saut. It has been reproduced with permission for the benefit of the Minyanville community. “Bureaucrats have little incentive to improve invest or innovate. When speculators are wrong however they are punished severely for their mistakes by losses of their own money... Speculators searching for profit send signals to producers and consumers as to the forces of destruction and good... Perhaps the most positive impact of my current-day speculators is to check at inception governmental activities that would have an inflationary impact. Governments are prone to spend ...

Energy stocks give back a chunk of their hefty gains in the previous session, with shares of natural gas producers leading the way into the red.

Editor's Note: The following article was written by Raymond James Chief Investment Strategist Jeff Saut. It has been reproduced with permission for the benefit of the Minyanville community.Back in January Stephen Moore wrote a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years.” For those of us familiar with Ayn Rand’s classic book recent events eerily mirror her writings about the economic carnage caused by big government running amok. As Mr. Moore wrote: “For the uninitiated the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises -- that in most cases ...

As my firm takes the controversial opinion that there are a few line items in your own budget that will still inflate -- a prominent possibility is taxes -- this unique group is worth a peek especially since so few do. That’s the other advantage careful homework offers in this space more than most. Master limited partnerships (MLPs) are under-followed by Wall Street and under-owned institutionally. Among the silliest but most significant reasons for the apathy is the “hassle” of K-1 forms to sort through in order to calculate lower personal taxes.I wrote about Inergy (NRGY) earlier this year ...

I believe “income” will be a profitable investment theme for the foreseeable future. Indeed the baby boomers are retiring; and the yields afforded them via Treasury securities money-market funds and certificates of deposit (CDs) won’t supplement their retirement account incomes enough to support them in the style to which they have become accustomed. Enter stocks which since 1926 have averaged a total annualized return of 10.4%. Interestingly roughly 5% of that return has come from earnings growth 0.9% has come from price-to-earnings (P/E) multiple expansions - but 4.5% of said return was derived from dividends. More than 40% of ...

Fiscal 2009 Earnings to be Released November 30, 2009