I like to think that longtime readers have picked up on my love for all things markets. I also love the movies and in honor of the Oscars last night, I thought that it would be fun to list the best (and worst) Wall Street movies of all time. To make this list even more fun, I’ve included links to trailers and clips, but I have to warn you about… Read More
When I graduated from college in 1995 and started in this industry, I was told that the current saying for the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) was ‘10,000 by 2000,’ referring to the turn of the century. It seemed impossible to me because, at that point, the DJIA was trading below 4,500. Just a few months before, one of my finance professors said the market was overvalued. Less than six months… Read More
The employment situation in the US improved on Friday as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that the economy added 287,000 new jobs in June, well ahead of the consensus estimates of 180,000 and surpassing the high estimate of 235.000. Keep in mind that this was a first estimate and that these numbers are routinely revised. The revisions to recent estimates were mixed with the April numbers raised to… Read More
While markets were obviously down, one piece of good news is that they weren’t chaotic. You may think I’m grasping at straws here for a silver lining, but wild macro events can cause markets to get sloppy and that didn’t happen Friday. Last August, when markets were selling off, the heavy trading volume caused a number of stocks and ETFs to behave erratically in what some people described as a… Read More
Last December, I wrote that fading internet stock Yahoo was trading below the sum of its parts. You can read the whole article here, but the basic idea was that when you looked at the component value of Yahoo’s major parts, the market was saying that the core business was worthless. At that time, Yahoo owned stock in Alibaba worth $32 billion, stock in Yahoo Japan worth $8.5 billion and cash… Read More
I read a newsletter on and off that always features an obituary. I know a lot of people read them every day, but I find that a little depressing. I wrote about David Bowie’s passing back in January, and at the risk of writing too many obits, I thought I would note the death of John Gutfreund yesterday, who was dubbed the King of Wall Street by BusinessWeek magazine. Gutfreund… Read More
A while back, a colleague recommended that I listen to a podcast on Bloomberg called Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz. On the podcast, Ritholz interviews luminaries from the investment industry (and a few others) and talks about my favorite topic. Although I had listened to one featuring AQR co-founder Cliff Asness, I really didn’t take interest because I had seen Ritholtz on CNBC and didn’t think he was particularly… Read More
You know I love Wall Street soap operas and one just ended yesterday between the activist investor Nelson Peltz and the old-line chemical company, DuPont (ticker symbol: DD). An activist investor is someone who buys a large stake in a publicly traded company and uses that ownership stake to force management to make major changes. Being from St. Louis, Carl Icahn is the most famous activist investor in… Read More
