Investing in steel over the past decade has been a minefield. Faced with stagnant pricing and exorbitant labor costs, the U.S. players suffered a near-death experience in 2001, when Bethlehem Steel, the No. 2 steel maker, went bankrupt. But that...

It's common knowledge that mutual fund shareholders lost money in the late-trading and market-timing shenanigans that have recently consumed the fund industry. But shareholders have been losing many times more money over a longer period of time...

Bond investors have reason to fret these days. With the Federal Reserve holding its benchmark rate at just 1 percent, short-term funds pay puny yields. The economy appears to be recovering, implying that rates are bound to rise in the next year...

To measure Janus Mercury's fortunes in newspaper column inches is to believe the fund is a disaster. An aggressive growth specialist, Mercury suffered big losses in 2000 and 2001. That was followed by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer...

To some, choosing the most talented money managers is easy. All an advisor has to do is examine their track records over, say, three to five years, and pick those that have performed the best. After all, that's more or less how we go about...

To the people who love them, style boxes are great diversification tools. Bob Olstein is not one of those people. Those boxes are artificial barriers, and somebody should rip them up, says Olstein, manager of top-performing Olstein Financial Alert...

Separate accounts or mutual funds? The choice can be difficult, and often advisors feel compelled to pick one and ignore the other. Indeed, until recently, the case against mixing two investment types in the same portfolio has been a potent one...

The shine is starting to dim on investments in gold. True, bullion rose about 20 percent in 2003, and gold stocks improved more than twice as much (42 percent), thanks to a sliding dollar's burnishing of the precious metal's safe-haven status. And...

Three years ago Barton Biggs, the curmudgeonly chief global strategist of Morgan Stanley, said a hedge funds had gripped the United States and Europe and that a was inflating. Biggs allowed that he didn't know when the hedge fund bubble would...

Three years ago, at the height of the equities run-up, investors had little reason to be interested in hedge funds. The intervening years have brought with them some important lessons about diversification, and this has made alternative...