standard and poors

Forget black cats, broken mirrors and unstoppable psychopaths in hockey masks -- on Friday the 13th, the biggest terrors sometimes hit our wallets. No, the Great Crash of 1929 didn't start on a Friday, but a fair number of financial disasters did.

Was Standard & Poor's right to downgrade America's credit rating on Friday? We asked our readers this morning. They answered, by a convincing margin, yes. It's hard to disagree. S&P's rationale for the downgrade is difficult to refute: The political brinksmanship of recent months...

Standard & Poor's downgraded the U.S. debt rating for the first time on Friday. Coming on top of concerns of a second recession, the move has investors worried that we're headed into a bear market for stocks. Here's what that would look like.

The odds that the U.S. will default on its debt increase each day, and even if a short-term deal is reached, the ratings agencies may downgrade U.S. debt anyway. If that happens, turmoil could roil the markets. So where can the smart money flee for safety? 24/7 Wall St. offers 10 safe options.

Is the American recovery fast or slow? Depends on who you ask. The Wall Street Journal sees corporate America merrily rolling along while Main Street suffers. The New York Times warns that Wall Street is about to feel the pinch too. But nobody is all that optimistic about Greece today.

After the losses of the past week, it seems hard to imagine that the S&P 500 has much further to decline. But the index took a fall to near 1,000 as recently as last July, and the issues that punished the markets then are looming over the economy again -- or perhaps, still.

Fear is in the air on Wall Street. Unemployment is high, housing sales are sluggish and the dollar is weak. Now, to add insult to injury, Standard & Poor's has lowered its U.S. debt outlook to negative, putting the nation's AAA credit rating at risk. Fortunately, smart traders can benefit from these worries.

Apple is gearing up to report its quarterly results after the markets close Wednesday, and both investors and consumers are wondering if it'll take a hit from Japan's massive earthquake and tsunami, which have already rocked the earnings results of some other tech titans.

Popular investing site The Motley Fool has patented a system it believes can predict stock performance. Called Motley Fool CAPS, it taps the collective brainpower of more than 170,000 investors. Based on its performance over the past five years, it appears to work. But can it really?

U.S. equities have piled on way-above-average returns in the last five months. But what can investors expect over the next few years? The charts show some patterns, and they hint that returns could revert to a longer-term, lower average -- but what might that be?