Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | 3:18 pm ET Oct. 2, 2015 Just about everybody but the Pope has been worrying lately about whether mutual funds and exchange-traded funds are equipped to withstand the next stock-market crash or bond collapse: activist investor Carl Icahn, the Federal Reserve, the U.S. government’s Financial Stability...
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Image Credit: “Navy Department, U.S. Binoculars,” photograph, Harris & Ewing, 1918, Library of Congress By Jason Zweig | Oct. 5, 2015 9:23 p.m. ET Someone asked me about this article the other day, so I’m reposting it here. I originally wrote it in 2001; I’d change it a little if I were writing it from scratch today, but I...
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Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | 1:57 pm ET Sept. 25, 2015 Can’t anybody here play this game? Three-quarters of all U.S. stock mutual funds have failed to beat the market over the past decade. Last year, 98% of economists expected interest rates to rise; they fell instead. Most energy analysts didn’t foresee oil’s collapse from $145 a...
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Image Credit: “Fortune Teller, State Fair, Donaldson, Louisiana,” 1938, Russell Lee, Library of Congress By Jason Zweig | Sept. 25, 2015 6:23 p.m. ET After the humiliating failure of the U.S. intelligence community to predict correctly whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had developed weapons of mass destruction, the federal government sponsored a...
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Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | 2:40 pm ET Sept. 18, 2015 The Federal Reserve didn’t raise interest rates this week. But when rates finally do go up, how worried should you be that a panic by other investors might tank your bond fund? A new Wall Street research report argues that long-term investors in high-yield or “junk” bond mutual...
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