By Jason Zweig | Mar 28, 2012 2:50 pm ET Image credit: Bonnie, “Jesus Is Coming…Look Busy (George Carlin), 2008, Wikimedia Commons Some financial myths never seem to die. One is the delusion that the markets are full of “sophisticated investors.” This week, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, which helps regulate the sale of...
Read MoreWhat Brokers Call Clients Behind Their Backs
By Jason Zweig | March 16, 2012 2:00 pm ET Image credit: Frans Snyders, “Still Life with Dead Game, Fruits, and Vegetables in a Market” (1614), Art Institute of Chicago Greg Smith’s letter announcing his resignation from Goldman Sachs Group contained many juicy tidbits, perhaps most notably that he heard at least five senior Goldman...
Read MoreThe Financial Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton
Image Credit: G.K. Chesterton, 1915, Library of Congress By Jason Zweig | 11:30 am ET March 6, 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker has a characteristically thoughtful post about “Chesterton’s Fence” – the scintillating argument, by the great British man of letters G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), that we should never overturn the established way of doing...
Read MoreDow 1,339,410: The Latest Milestone
Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | March 2, 2012 8:41 p.m. ET This week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 13000 for the first time in almost four years. If you told yourself, “It’s just an arbitrary number,” you were right. Round numbers on stock indexes are meaningless in themselves. But they aren’t a...
Read MoreHas There Ever Been a Better Time to Be an Investor?
By Jason Zweig | March 1, 2012 7:30 am ET Image credit: Jasper Francis Cropsey, “Dawn of Morning, Lake George” (1868), Albany Institute of History and Art Tadas Viskanta at Abnormal Returns kicked a hornet’s nest with a recent post arguing, “There has never been a better time to be an individual investor.” When I tweeted it,...
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