Jim Pearce

Jim Pearce is the Chief Investment Strategist of Personal Finance, our flagship publication, and manages two trading services, PF Pro and Mayhem Trader. He began his career as a stockbroker in 1983 and over the years has managed client investment portfolios for major banks, brokerage firms, and investment advisors. Jim earned a BA from The College of William & Mary and the CFP designation from the College of Financial Planning.

Analyst Articles

  The solid rise in the S&P 500 over the first eight months of this year has given rise to the fallacy that the entire stock market is doing well in 2017. Um, not really. To be sure, on an equal-weight basis, the average stock in the index rose 8.6%… Read More

It was only six weeks ago that I reiterated my confidence that Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) would fully recover from an embarrassing scandal triggered by the admission a year ago that bank employees had opened approximately 2 million bogus deposit and credit card accounts over several years to achieve ambitious… Read More

The beauty of event-driven trading is that you don’t have to be in a stock very long, nor do you have to commit a lot of money to it, to generate huge profits. The stock market’s reaction to these sorts of events is usually swift and severe, and leveraged investments such as options can be used to magnify the change in value of the underlying stock. Read More

There will always be more news, both good and bad, as evidenced by this week's escalating tensions between the U.S. and North Korea. Hopefully, the two sides can resolve their differences without resorting to war. But if they cannot, then the financial markets will surely react to the possibility of a regional conflict including China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.  Read More