President Bush has proposed legislation that would eliminate the taxation of dividend income for individual owners of common stocks. We do not recommend that investors take any action at this point in anticipation what Congress might approve. Many aspects of the proposal have already been altered. Whatever new law survives the legislative process will very

The following item was sent to us by a friend. We could not determine its author, but we found it to be a wonderful depiction of the politics surrounding any proposed cuts in Federal income tax rates. Let’s put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand. Suppose that every day, ten men go out for

Much ado has been made of the return of the Federal deficit, mostly by those who deride tax cuts. Frequently heard is the argument that deficits represent an increase in demand for credit that in turn will increase interest rates, to the detriment of economic growth. While this argument is unsubstantiated, the outlook for long-term

Several subscribers recently asked why we exclude Altria (formerly Philip Morris) from our 4-for-18 High-Yield Dow Strategy. Its current yield of almost eight percent makes Altria the highest yielding of the 30 Dow stocks and it has consistently ranked among the “top four” highest yielding issues since March 1993, soon after the company lost its

In late April regulators announced the final terms of a deal reached with ten Wall Street securities firms following a two-year investigation of analysts’ practices. If the intention was to restore faith in Wall Street, count us among those who consider the deal a failure. The market showed no immediate reaction; the major indexes hardly

The recently signed Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (JGTRRA) marks the third major tax-cut package passed by Congress in as many years. This most recent package will prove particularly beneficial to individual investors. However, the plan comes at the cost of additional complexity because some changes are retroactive and all are

In the aftermath of the great reversal in the equity market that began in the spring of 2000, advocates of “stock picking” put forth a peculiar argument. In a bear market, it was claimed, the ability to pick winners from among the rubble would be all the more important. Passive strategies, especially indexing strategies that

Remember the late 1990s, when we were entering a “new economy” guided by a “new paradigm”? Business cycles were said to be repealed, information technology would expand productivity exponentially, and of course traditional valuations for common stocks (price/earnings and price/book ratios, dividend yield) were obsolete. The party has ended, of course, and though the investing

Much publicized government investigations into mutual-fund practices have been initiated and a wave of shareholder-initiated lawsuits is sure to follow. The allegations are troubling, as the chicanery in question would benefit institutional short-term traders at the expense of long-term individual investors. We are confident that the funds we recommend are not especially vulnerable to these