Active versus passive? That's an old battle. But the stakes have recently been raised: Can the S&P 500 beat a portfolio of funds of hedge funds? Warren Buffet says yes, when performance is measured net of fees, costs and expenses, and he's putting...
It’s earnings season, and with Lehman, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley kicking it off this week, many investors will be asking themselves: Is the financial crisis over? (Or, at least, is it winding down?) The smart money at the sovereign...
When it Began, the credit crisis had little to do with retail brokerage. After all, the fixed income departments were the ones who made the bad mortgage bets that have since unraveled, resulting in a pileup of more than $200 billion dollars in...
Are closed-end fund preferred-auction securities safe? We consider CFPs to be the conservative's conservative security. Defaults are even rarer than failed auctions. We are comfortable with the safety of auction securities from closed-end funds...
Wall Street is shifting loyalties. So far in the 2008 election cycle, the securities and investment industry has showered the Democratic Party with contributions. The balance began to shift in 2006, when the industry gave 53 percent of donations...
When the search for alpha takes conservative portfolios such as the Harvard and Yale endowments into the land of bellies, beans and bullion, investors and their advisors take notice. Consider that David Swensen, in charge of Yale's portfolio (and...
Using a wide-ranging investing style, Peter Lynch dominated the fund world during the 1980s. The manager of Fidelity Magellan was known to pick stocks from all over the market: He would buy small bank stocks one year and large industrials the next...
Maybe Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain just wanted to test his audience. At an investment conference today, Thain said that Merrill would abandon CDO underwriting and other structured-credit businesses, the very ones that led to the subprime meltdown...
Since the first exchange-traded bond fund appeared in 2002, financial rocket scientists have struggled to launch a tax-free ETF. The development efforts finally bore fruit in September, when Barclays Global Investors launched its iShares S&P...