By Jason Zweig | 6:19 pm ET Sept. 26, 2014 Bill Gross’s stunning departure from Pimco, the bond-fund giant he cofounded, on Friday reminded investors of something many of them might rather not know: Returns and performance sound like the same thing but can be drastically different. Returns in the fund business are often called “performance” for a reason....
Read MoreThe Rise of Ultracheap Financial Advisers
By Jason Zweig | 4:26 pm ET Sept. 19, 2014Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet In a world in which the expected long-term return of a stock portfolio after taxes and inflation is 3% to 4% a year at best, financial advisers still typically charge 1% a year for their services. Why, when you take all the risk, should your adviser take up to one-third of all the...
Read MoreA Poetic Tribute from Case to Shiller, on the Real-Estate Bubble, of Course
Image credit: Wikipedia Creative Commons By Jason Zweig 6:00 am ET Sept. 17, 2014 At a conference Friday at Yale University in honor of newly minted Nobel laureate Robert Shiller, economist Karl Case of Wellesley College paid tribute to his long-time research partner with an original poem on the lessons of the real-estate bubble and its...
Read MoreA Golden Oldie: The Bogleheads
Image credit: Wikipedia Creative Commons By Jason Zweig 8 pm ET Sept. 18, 2014 (updated, but text not altered, 5 pm ET Nov. 29, 2015) By popular demand, I’m posting here the PDFs and full text of an article I wrote years ago: “Here Come the Bogleheads,” about the group of diehard Vanguard investors who revere John C. Bogle,...
Read MoreIf You Buy Alibaba, Be Ready for a Rough Ride
By Jason Zweig | 6:38 pm ET Sept. 15, 2014 It won’t be easy for individual investors to get a piece of Alibaba Group Holding as the Chinese Internet retailer sells up to $24 billion in shares this week in the most anticipated initial public offering of 2014. Anyone jumping in expecting a quick killing is apt to be disappointed. If you have money you can...
Read More