Good credit for rent
For about 50 million Americans, “it’s ‘no credit, no luck’ if they want to get a credit card, take out a car loan, or buy a house,” says Kiplinger.com in an editorial. But Fair Issac, which comes up with your FICO score, is working to “remedy the situation.” In a break for young people, widows, immigrants, and others with “little or no credit,” Fair Issac is starting to consider nontraditional data from Payment Reporting Builds Credit, a Web site that collects data on rent, bills, and other recurring payments. You can start a file on the Web site. These nontraditional credit records haven’t caught on with other credit bureaus—yet—but there’s hope they will soon.
Gold will rise as long as the bulls play it cool
Gold “continues on its seemingly inexorable march upward,” says Mark Hulbert in MarketWatch, hitting a new record high on Thursday. But people who time gold prices for a living “aren’t becoming commensurately more bullish,” and that actually “bodes well for gold,” if history is any guide. It’s not clear why the “average gold timer” isn’t “exuberant and enthusiastic” over gold’s good fortunes of late, but watch out when they hit “a record level of bullish exuberance”—that’s when the party’s over. But until that happens, for “contrarians” at least, the money says that “the path of least resistance for gold will continue to be up.”
