Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | Feb. 26, 2016 10:25 am ET One of Wall Street’s most opaque practices may be on the verge of fading away. In what’s called revenue sharing, asset managers pay brokerages to subsidize the costs of distributing their mutual funds. The industry describes these payments as a potential conflict of interest, since...
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Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | Feb. 19, 2016 1:10 pm ET Picking stocks has become so hard that some stock pickers have given up pretending to try. Pry open the hood of a mutual fund, and you might be startled by what you find. In the past, you would have seen roughly 100 stocks, each painstakingly selected by a portfolio manager...
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Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | Feb. 12, 2016 1:58 pm ET Many investors are searching for a refuge in the latest stock-market storm. Ever since the financial crisis of 2008-2009, fund companies have been pushing “smart-beta” funds. These are bundles of companies that have tended to be less risky and more lucrative than the market as a...
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Image credit: Allgauer Festival Week, Lienert-Kempten, Wikimedia Commons By Jason Zweig | Feb. 8, 2016 9:23 p.m. ET I had fun talking with Shai Dardashti of The Manual of Ideas about The Devil’s Financial Dictionary. With luck, you’ll enjoy it, too. The video is in several segments, each about three minutes long. Click on each link to view. Part...
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Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | Feb. 5, 2016 1:24 pm ET There will be blood — in surprising places. The epic collapse in the price of oil, from more than $100 per barrel less than two years ago to below $30 earlier this past week, has crushed investors in the futures market, energy partnerships, high-yield corporate bonds and the shares...
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