Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | Sept. 16, 2016 7:05 am ET If someone offered you a guaranteed 3.5% return for 20 years, you’d probably be tempted either to sign up right away or call the cops to arrest the guy for securities fraud. But the guy offering this deal is Uncle Sam, and you should neither barge in nor run away screaming. You...
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Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | Sept. 23, 2016 1:39 pm ET Earlier this month, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that a trading newsletter company, Wealthpire, and its owner had agreed to pay nearly $1.5 million to settle allegations that they had defrauded subscribers through false statements and misleading advertisements....
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Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | Sept. 9, 2016 1:35 pm ET Your next financial adviser might be a centaur — not half-human, half-horse, but half-human, half-machine. You might have heard of centaurs in chess, where a person and a computer form a team that together can beat the best human or computer playing alone. The idea, popularized...
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Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | Sep. 2, 2016 12:07 pm ET Beware of boredom. Last month was dull in the financial markets, even by the normally sleepy standards of August. The S&P 500 stock index didn’t move up or down by more than 1% in a single day all month, according to Howard Silverblatt, a senior analyst at S&P Dow Jones...
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Image Credit: Sander van der Wel, “The Birthday Cake,” Wikimedia Commons By Jason Zweig | Aug. 31, 2016 10:12 am ET Forty years ago today, the index mutual fund was born when Vanguard Group’s First Index Investment Trust (now Vanguard 500 Index Fund) opened for business with $11.3 million in assets. That was far short of the $150 million...
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