The key to success in the auto industry is deceptively simple. Build great cars.

America is a good place to build cars. Even in this recession, Volkswagen is building a new plant in Tennessee, Kia of Korea just finished a new plant in Georgia, and Toyota has a plant going up in Mississippi— although construction has been stalled because of Toyota’s current state of confusion.

But Toyota already has plants in Kentucky, Indiana, and Texas. Mercedes builds in Alabama, BMW in South Carolina. Nissan has plants in Tennessee and Mississippi, Honda in Ohio and Alabama, Subaru in Indiana. Mitsubishi builds in Illinois, although the Mitsubishi plant is in trouble. Hyundai builds vehicles in Alabama, Kia in Georgia, and Fiat will build its first cars in Mexico this winter.

Most of the foreign plants are in states of the Old Confederacy and non-union, but the pay and benefits are quite good for their regions. There are few restrictions on importing cars into the U.S., and this is the proof that this is a good place to build cars.

To protect yourself against stock market gyrations, use a stop-loss order.

It was every stockholder’s nightmare: A 1,000-point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average May 6 erased about 10 percent of the index’s value in the blink of an eye.

Though it was a freak event quickly reversed, it underscored the high volatility of today’s market. If only there was a way to insure against a falling stock price.

There is one technique: a stop-loss order. The investor leaves a standing order with the broker to sell a block of shares if the price falls to a given level.

If you owned British Petroleum when it traded around $60 a share in mid-April, you could have issued a stop-loss order to sell at $55, averting a deeper loss as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico drove the price below $40.

Compared to traditional mutual funds, some ETFs now incur low fees and no trading commissions, with excellent tax efficiency.

Rock-bottom fees, tax efficiency, the opportunity to trade anytime.... It sounds like a perfect investment, making exchange-traded funds an inviting alternative to traditional mutual funds. Certainly, lots of investors think so: from 2000 through 2009, ETF assets soared from $66 billion to $777 billion, and the number of funds from 80 to 797.

ETFs are the latest thing; mutual funds are so, well, 20th Century.

ETFs are like mutual funds, except they are traded like stocks, through a broker, creating a variety of advantages over mutual funds. Investors put money in by purchasing shares, and the ETF manager invests it in a variety of stocks (or in a few cases bonds) according to a stated strategy. The share price rises or falls with the fortunes of this basket of holdings.

Although the leaders signal recovery, there are reasons to question its durability.

The economy continues to show signs of recovery. All 11 of the leading indicators with a discernible trend are expanding, and the cyclical score of the leaders, a purely mathematical measure, has increased to 88 from 77. The percentage of coincident indicators expanding has increased to 100 from 75 based on positive signs in employment, and the cyclical score of the coinciders has increased to 69 from 65.

Among the primary leading indicators of business conditions, there were continued improvements in those tied to consumption. We upgraded our appraisal of new orders for consumer goods to probably expanding from indeterminate after it rose 2 percent in March. (This series and all other dollar-denominated series are adjusted for price inflation.) Strong growth continued in new orders for core capital goods, driven by orders for construction and industrial machinery. And the Association of American Railroads reports a 15 percent increase in rail traffic, a traditional economic indicator, in the past 12 months.

The recent development of the Marcellus Shale reserves in America’s Appalachian Basin spotlights natural gas’s advantages relative to oil or coal.

With oil fouling the Gulf of Mexico and oil dollars spewing into the Middle East at the rate of $700 billion per year, America’s energy policy is in dire need of practical and cost-effective alternatives to oil. T. Boone Pickens thinks natural gas makes sense. In his “Pickens Plan” television commercials he states, “natural gas is cleaner, cheaper, abundant, and it’s ours.” If true, Pickens’ claims for natural gas would make it vital to the energy policy of this country.

Cleaner? The only byproducts of burning natural gas are carbon dioxide and water. It does not produce the complex unburned hydrocarbons common in burning oil and its derivatives (witness the catalytic converters on cars and trucks) and it produces no sulfur dioxides or nitrous oxides present in coal emissions. Natural gas produces only half the carbon dioxide per equivalent heat output of coal and 70 percent of the carbon dioxide for the equivalent heat produced from burning oil. In terms of greenhouse gases, then, natural gas is definitely cleaner.

At the same time, of course, no energy source is completely free of environmental side effects, as evidenced in this case by local concerns about water quality where natural gas drilling is occurring. Care must be taken, in short, to safeguard water resources in gas-producing areas.