I’ve always thought index funds were pretty cool. On average, stock mutual funds do worse than unmanaged indexes like the S&P 500 and Russell 1000. So if you buy a fund that only trails the index by a teeny bit, as most index funds are able to do because of their super-low fees, you’re already doing better than most investors.
But when …
Every time bad news breaks for U.S. automakers, journalists and other observers offer one of two main explanations. One is that Detroit doesn’t make very good cars, or at least doesn’t make them efficiently enough. The other is that American automakers are so burdened by the retiree health care and pension commitments that they made when …
My post the other day about the Webcomic Achewood (it was actually about newspaper economics, but since most of its traffic seems to have come from a link that Chris Onstad put up on his site, I guess that makes it about Achewood), has been generating a steady stream of mostly fascinating comments. Here are a couple about how media …
As promised, I asked Larry Summers what he does for D.E. Shaw. Being the hedge fund guy that he is now, he wouldn’t tell me anything on the record. But I can quote from the D.E. Shaw press release announcing his arrival:
Dr. Summers will be involved on a part-time basis in various strategic initiatives and high-level portfolio management
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There’s a great story in today’s Wall Street Journal (you have to pay to read it) about the brouhaha surrounding ousted Citi wealth-management boss Todd Thomson‘s expense accounts. He was taking Maria Bartiromo to dinner at Daniel (danger, cubicle-dwellers! site plays music!), flying her around Asia, and–most impressively, by my …
A commenter to my post on hedge funds argues that since Larry Summers is an economist, he’s not necessarily just hedge fund window dressing. Larry’s not just an economist, he’s one of the great economists of his generation. But I still don’t believe David Shaw hired him for advice on arbitrage strategies. That said, I’ll send Larry an …
So I didn’t actually watch the State of the Union address, other than the Dikembe Mutombo moment. Veronica Mars had a monkey to find, Alabama was playing Auburn in basketball … Plus, I got out of political reporting a long time ago in part because I really can’t take speeches.
Still, I am capable of doing a text search, and so I did …
Daniel Gross has a new piece up on Slate about all the former big-name government officials joining or starting hedge funds. He lists a few (Madeleine Albright! Larry Summers! John Snow! Former SEC chairman Richard Breeden!), then writes:
Let’s set aside the question of whether the arrival of politicians is a neon sign to hedge-fund
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As of today, I write for Time, and the Curious Capitalist is back. I’m finding it a very strange experience to start work at an actual news organization after being immersed for weeks in the (re)writing of a book. I haven’t been reading newspapers, I’ve barely touched the telephone, and the only places on the Web I’ve been going to …
So there it is in Keith Kelly’s column in today’s New York Post, the news that this blog (which has probably had about 10 readers in the past month, since I ‘ve had my head in a book and haven’t been posting) is leaving Fortune.com (and CNNMoney.com) for Time.com. Kelly fails to mention that I’m also leaving Fortune magazine to write a …
Okay, so I said I wasn’t going to be posting much. But this is too good not to share:
I got a DHL Express Letter the other day sent straight from “Samsung Main Building” in Seoul. What could be so important that the Korean electronics giant would spend $30 or $40 to get to me? (According to the DHL website, it would cost me $44.10 to send …
I haven’t been posting much lately, and won’t post much (if at all) over the next few weeks because I’m taking some time off to finally really and truly finish the book I’ve been working on for the past few years.
The book is tentatively titled The Myth of the Rational Investor, and it grew out of an article I wrote for Fortune‘s annual …
