Investment

Under departing Chairman William Donaldson, the SEC generated plenty of noisy headlines. But one of the Commission's most decisive actions received little attention; it recently eliminated a class of investments: stable value mutual funds. Stable...

Private non-operating foundations in recent years have faced increasing governmental scrutiny of their compliance with the Internal Revenue Code1 and evolving prudent investor standards as well as inconsistent equity market returns and low returns...

The impact of decisions that planners make about GRATs in transferring wealth can now be more precisely quantified. Advances in quantitative modeling and capital-markets forecasting allow us to evaluate the interactions among the moving parts that...

Ever since stock options were listed on the Chicago Board Options Exchange in 1973, the most popular and widely practiced option strategy has been selling covered calls against stock holdings. On the surface, it can be a very compelling strategy...

Price wars have hit a variety of industries recently, including airlines and wireless phone providers. Will mutual funds be next? A few signs of funds discounting have appeared. In April, American Funds slashed expense ratios 10 percent. Earlier...

You gotta have a gimmick, Stephen Sondheim advised in the 1959 musical In the song, it's about how to roll them in the aisles at Minsky's. But, mutual fund marketers have made the same calculation, constantly introducing offerings that are...

The Dogs of the Dow strategy fell from grace in the late 1990s (along with many other strategies overshadowed by Internet stocks), and it has since spent most of its time in the investing doghouse, so to speak. However, having fared surprisingly...

Virtually every major business publication has predicted the collapse of the great real estate bubble of the 2000s. So far, the warnings of a collapse have not panned out. But, it is increasingly clear that it is a question of when not whether...

After announcing General Electric's company-wide push into so-called green technologies in May, Jeffrey Immelt, the company's CEO, stressed that the move is not part of some save-the-planet idealism. Rather, he said, GE's initiative is driven by...

When Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter got married back in 1997, the idea was to create a Wall Street powerhouse: a white shoe investment bank (Morgan Stanley) with a nationwide, albeit work-a-day, distribution network (Dean Witter). That, at least...