Charting Stocks

Hartford (HIG) CEO Ramani Ayer will be stepping down from his position as the company’s Chief Executive. Ayer spent 10 years at the top of the struggling insurer and will be retiring at the end of the year amid record company losses and shareholder pressure.
In our 2009 forecast, we suggested that Hartford’s future looked the [...]

We’ve been warning about the insurance stocks and Hartford in particular for months.  See these posts:
The Coming Annuity Crisis
Forecast 2009 (We predict another major insurance company failure in 2009, with Hartford as the leading candidate)
Today the Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services announced that it cut the ratings of Hartford Financial Services Group’s counterparty credit rating [...]

2009 will be a year of complete destruction for the US economy. 5 Million will lose their jobs. The Dow Jones Industrial average will break below 6,000. Municipalities will fail. Insurers will fail. The unemployed and foreclosed American population will take to the streets and begin rioting. The Greatest Depression is upon us.
Sound far fetched? [...]

The annuity shoe is about to drop!
(MarketWatch.com) Shares of AXA dropped as much as 17% in Paris as the French insurance giant shaved about a quarter of this year’s underlying earnings assumptions as the world’s market gyrations produced fewer asset fees and made it more difficult to pay out on annuities.
The insurer added that the [...]

Are you one of the millions of Americans that has a portion of their retirement assets in annuities? If so, you MUST read this.
Thanks to their hefty brokerage commissions, annuities have become one of the most widely sold and marketed financial products in the US today. Variable annuities have upfront sales costs which range from [...]