Observers of the daily movement of the stock market have long noted the interesting peculiarities about these markets. One of them is the market’s love/hate relationship with the economy. There’s a headline just about every day about how the market is reacting to some kind of economic datapoint. A good jobs report, a bad durable [...]

It’s May 1st, which in the world of Wall Street means everyone’s talking about one of the most inexplicable phenomenons in investing. It’s almost like Voldemort, you don’t even want to say it. Sell in May and stay away. This is the idea: markets don’t do well in the warmer months, so sell all your [...]

Something odd happened yesterday. You can see it in the chart of the S&P 500 below. The S&P was just chugging along doing it’s intraday thing and then blam! In a couple of minutes it tanked and then recovered. What could have happened to make markets react in such a way? Breaking news such as [...]

 The investment community has been split for decades on how regular investors should manage their money. The camps can basically be boiled down to active and passive investment. Passive investment is basically buying diversified mutual funds that index the markets. It’s too hard to beat the market, so you might as well just buy the [...]

Taken literally, such a headline probably wouldn’t surprise many people. But this is actually a good thing. New York City has a problem. They’ve got a lot of kids that end up in jail. And about half of them are very likely to end up in jail again. This is counterintuitive to the point of [...]

Instead of one story today, I want to point at three with a common theme. They all deal with stuff we know to be occurring, but we either don’t understand it or can’t see it happening. These hidden aspects of our world play a very big role in how the world we can see works. [...]

Dude, you’re going private. After starting a computer business out of his dorm room and turning it into a net worth measured in billions, Michael Dell wants to take his namesake company in a different direction. Dell has been a public company since the 1980s and that’s long enough according to its founder. Dell wants [...]

On this episode we catch up with the Department of Justice. The DoJ, after 7+ years has finally decided to go after the ratings agencies. At various points in the history of this recession the banks, insurers, mortgage brokers, Wall Street, Congress, the real estate industry, the Fed, economists, and very likely you have been [...]