Cartoon by Harley Schwadron

2015 will be The Year of the Stock Picker, the year that professional active management makes its long-awaited comeback. I feel pretty confident in making this forecast. Mostly because if it doesn’t happen, I can just roll it over into 2016, with a whole new set of reasons. In 2013, something like 98 cents of…

My pal Peter Boockvar with a plain-English summation of what Draghi did today during the ECB’s policy meeting – and why The Street is not terribly surprised… As should have been fully expected, Draghi is confirming that the ECB will start buying ABS in which details will be announced after the October meeting. They will…

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…