Image Credit: Erika Wittlieb (Pixabay) By Jason Zweig | May 16, 2017 5:30 am ET Finding the next Amazon.com, which first sold shares to the public 20 years ago this week, is hard. In fact, finding the last Amazon was hard, too. From 1926 through 2015, only 30 stocks accounted for one-third of the cumulative wealth generated by the entire U.S. stock...
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By Jason Zweig | May 12, 2017 1:03 pm ET Image credit: William Hogarth, “A Rake’s Progress: The Orgy” (1733), Sir John Soane’s Museum, London My colleague James Mackintosh’s irresistibly titled column earlier this week, “An Algorithm, an ETF and an Academic Study Walk into a Bar,” highlighted a new study on the surprising...
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Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | May 12, 2017 8:46 am ET Propaganda dies hard. Even as evidence continues to mount that stock pickers have underperformed the market averages, active managers insist that they will make a comeback. Analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch found earlier this month that 63% of active fund managers investing...
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By Jason Zweig | May 11, 2017 10:24 pm ET Image credit: “One investment that is Never too high to buy,” advertisement by American Trustee Share Corporation from Forbes Magazine (1928), author’s collection Researching my upcoming weekly column for The Wall Street Journal reminded me of the mania for investment trusts in the late 1920s,...
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Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet By Jason Zweig | May 5, 2017 10:10 am ET Everywhere investors turn, mathematics and machines seem to be rendering human judgment obsolete. BlackRock, the giant asset manager, recently announced it will rely more heavily on computers to pick stocks. Rob Arnott, a leading advocate of mechanical investing approaches, said...
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