Image credit: Wikipedia Creative Commons By Jason Zweig and Joe Light Feb. 21, 2014 6:28 p.m. ET Are bonds a portfolio’s bulwark or its Achilles’ heel? Investors can’t seem to decide. Over the last seven months of 2013, amid rising interest rates and falling bond prices, skittish investors yanked $18 billion more out of...
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By Jason Zweig | 6:48 pm ET Feb. 21, 2014Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet Some people become value investors. Some might be born that way. Consider Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett’s mentor and the author of Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor. Graham’s widowed mother was a small-time speculator; she was wiped out during the Panic of 1907, when...
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Image credit: The Goodman Family By Jason Zweig 3:10 pm ET Feb. 17, 2014 George J.W. Goodman, known as Adam Smith to his readers and Jerry to his friends, died last month, age 83. But his work will outlive him for years, and quite likely decades, to come. Warren Buffett considers Jerry Goodman the second-best writer ever to explain...
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By Jason Zweig | 6:05 pm ET Feb. 14, 2014Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet Think it’s hard to get objective advice about saving money for retirement? Try getting objective advice about taking out money during retirement. Everyone has a vested interest. Brokerages, mutual-fund managers and insurance companies all earn fees on the investments they promote to...
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By Jason Zweig 11:00 am ET Feb. 12, 2014 Image credit: Robert Couse-Baker, 2009, via Flickr Kids who grow up in farm country learn how to drive early. When I was a teenager in the mid-1970s in the foothills of New York’s Adirondack Mountains, I and all my friends drove tractors and bashed-up jalopies through the hayfields and on the dirt roads long before...
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