Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | Dec. 28, 2012 1:09 p.m. ET What if investors could have Christmas all year long? Dividends are showering down on investors like sugarplums. In 2012, companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index will pay out regular cash dividends of $281 billion, predicts S&P Dow Jones...
Read MoreBy Jason Zweig | Dec. 21, 2012 4:27 p.m. ET Image credit: Hans Sebald Beham, “Patientia (Patience),” engraving, 1540; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam When you get the chance to learn from someone with 84 years of investment experience, you should take it. The day before he celebrated his 107th birthday, I spoke with Irving Kahn, chairman of Kahn...
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Photo credit: Georges de la Tour, “The Fortune Teller,” ca. 1630, Metropolitan Museum of Art By Jason Zweig 10:34 am ET Dec. 21, 2012 Giveaways, gifts, freebies, premiums, promos, tchotchkes, swag. Every year around this time, it pours in: the pens with corporate logos, the canisters of flavored popcorn, the iTunes gift...
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Image Credit: “Gambling,” photo, ca. 1900, Library of Congress By Jason Zweig | 1:17 pm ET Dec. 13, 2012 Last weekend’s Intelligent Investor column looked at the extreme difficulties of disentangling skill from luck when you are evaluating investment performance. It’s the topic of an excellent new book by Michael Mauboussin and a...
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Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | Dec. 7, 2012 7:48 p.m. ET Have investors finally learned that past performance doesn’t guarantee future results? You might think so. Investors are dumping mutual funds run by fallible stock pickers and replacing them with index and exchange-traded funds—”passive” portfolios that mimic the...
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