This morning, bank of America Merrill Lynch put out a small tidbit on the “downward wage rigidity” suggesting that this cycle has been very abnormal in terms of wage gains. Historically, a drop in unemployment meant a quicker uptick in how much employers were willing to pay in raises to retain workers. My partner Barry…

For the last four years I’ve predicted that the biggest trend in finance would be the death of the retail brokerage model and the rise of the investment advisory segment. In my 2012 book, Backstage Wall Street, I suggested that this shift would be inexorable. Last year, this trend seemingly went into hyperdrive. RIAs saw their AUM…

Sorry, I couldn’t think of a more apt title for this post. CNBC: The CBOE Volatility Index, a popular gauge of whether people are expecting gyrations in the market, just saw its biggest monthly plunge in nearly three years. So are we headed for a mellow September? Not necessarily, if you ask some of the…

Today you’re hearing a lot about how stocks act historically during the month of September. It’s considered to be the worst month of the year in terms of average annual returns and it usually leads to a pickup in seasonal volatility. My pal Jon Krinsky CMT, technical analyst at MKM Partners in New York, put the…

Happy Labor Day! This weekend’s must-read is quite apropos of today’s holiday. ‘Profits Without Prosperity’, an incredible article at the Harvard Business Review, shows exactly how corporate share buybacks have gotten out of control in the last decade. It then goes on to point out the various ways in which buybacks-gone-wild are killing the capital formation process…

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