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 Business cycles were said to be repealed, information technology would expand productivity exponentially, and of course traditional valuations for common stocks (price/earnings and price/book ratios,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

On Thursday, September 25th, Kodak announced that it would reduce its dividend to a semi-annual payment of $0.25 per share ($0.50 annually) from a semi-annual payment of $0.90 per share ($1.80 annually). The board declared a cash dividend of $0.25 per share, payable December 12, 2003, to shareholders of record as of the close of

Investigations into mutual fund misdeeds have multiplied since we addressed the issue in September. The funds we recommend have not been implicated nor do we expect that they will be. However, more than a dozen fund families that market conventional open-end mutual funds have now joined the list of alleged participants in improper trading practices.

We have long implored investors to do their best to ignore the hodgepodge of investment advice that saturates the modern media, and instead consider the scientific approach to investing. Below we outline the history of this science, which is rapidly gaining favor with both institutional and individual investors. In particular we hope our readers will