Investment

Trustees of individual retirement accounts (IRAs) have increasingly seen participants turning to nontraditional or alternative investments in their accounts. These investments include not only real estate but also mortgages and closely held...

Dear Editor: The March issue's, Charitable Giving, column in the Briefing section described private letter rulings issued to Harvard University in 2003 and to other universities starting in 2006. The technique outlined in the rulings and described...

David T. Leibell and Daniel L. Daniels of Cummings & Lockwood LLC in Stamford, Conn. report: On June 14, 2007, the Internal Revenue Service released for public comment a discussion draft of a redesigned Form 990, Return of Organizations Exempt...

Remember when Chevy Chase used to wrap up the Weekend Update faux-news segment of Saturday Night Live with the line, I'm Chevy Chase and you're not? David Swensen, the manager of the Yale University endowment, has posted such consistently strong...

What does integrity have to do with superior portfolio performance? A lot, say researchers in a study released in May, which found that advisors who demonstrate high levels of moral and emotional competency outperformed the S&P 500 by 73 percent...

Even smart investors make foolish choices. In their search for hot returns, mutual fund shareholders often buy near the market peak. Then after experiencing big losses, the same shareholders sell near the trough. One of the most notable examples...

Economist Paul Zane Pilzer considers himself to be an environmentalist. But he is not your average greenie. Indeed, Pilzer is something of an icononclast: There is no such thing as scarcity of natural resources, he argues. When humans were running...

Yes, it's easy to get sick of all this hype about the environmental movement. An Inconvenient Truth (whether you agree with its conclusions or not) won an Oscar; hottie celebs are driving hybrid automobiles; the press gushes about eco-related...

The sub-prime lending meltdown could be spreading. It’s one thing for Bear Stearns to have to arrange a $3.2 billion bailout of one of its hedge funds, but, for the brokerage industry, the problem just hit closer to home...

Individual investors are paying less to own mutual fund shares, as fees and expenses have hit their lowest level in more than 25 years, according to research published Tuesday by the Investment Company Institute. In 2006, fund shareholders, on...