Financial markets

Research reveals how activist investors help and hurt.

It depends on the investor.

The story of a royal trading company comes to life on an 18th-century stock certificate.

Limited oversight, tons of money, and hype for days. What could go wrong?

An analysis of resolutions filed by activist investors.

Why Wall Street is wrong to worry about the impact on earnings per share.

When investor expectations are impossible to meet, bad behaviors ensue.

By instigating the dot-com crash, the capital markets have placed the entire new economy at risk.

Investors don’t weigh reputations equally.

Buybacks provide flexibility and push funding toward younger firms.

With the stock market down, many pension funds are in trouble, and employees and fund managers are scared. Companies should have realized—and had better learn—that they can never get ahead by putting retirement funds in stocks.

Most entrepreneurs understand that if the fundamentals of a business idea—the management team, the market opportunities, the operating systems and controls—are sound, chances are there’s money out there. The challenge of landing that capital to grow a company can be exhilarating. But as exciting as the money search may be, it is equally threatening. Built […]

Financial risk management is hard to get right even in the best of times. It can take one of six paths to failure, nearly all of them exemplified in the...

They expect a "short and shallow" downturn.

In financial markets, as in many human endeavors, there’s a battle between reason and madness. On one side are the disciples of the efficient-markets hypothesis: the notion that markets fully, accurately, and instantaneously incorporate all relevant information into prices. These adherents assume that market participants are rational, always acting in their own interest and making […]

An industry dedicated to financing inventors and monetizing their creations could transform the world.

Consumers in poor countries especially stand to benefit.

The tools we use to guide our investments are blind to the best opportunities for creating new jobs and new markets.

Marketers like to work on the demand side—take what’s in demand, make it cheaper, run a lot of ads, make a profit. If you can increase demand for what you already make, a lot of problems take care of themselves. It’s the promise of the typical marketing organization: Give us money, and we’ll increase demand. […]

Not long ago I asked the officer of a regional investment banking firm why the price-earnings ratio for a small publicly held company was so low. “After all,” I said, “this company has the potential to grow since it’s in the dental equipment industry. It seems to me it warrants a high ratio.” “Don’t you […]