Markets

THE WAY INVESTORS think about the stock market may be entirely wrong.
Intuition tells us, and academic research confirms, that a company’s stock price should respond to important news and information. When a company announces a new product, for example, its stock should go up. And when results fall short of expectations, it should decline. 
But a new paper titled “The Inefficient Pricing of News” calls this idea into question. The authors found that investors respond much more slowly and inconsistently to market news than previously thought.

EARLIER THIS SPRING, Emil Verner, an economist at MIT, made an observation: The stock market, he said, seemed to be exhibiting “excess tranquility.” Despite an ongoing war, inflation and other negative headlines, investors seemed surprisingly unfazed. The market was on track for its fourth year in a row of positive returns. Through May, it had gained 11%.
But no sooner did Verner make this observation that the market did begin to wobble. Last Friday,

A few weeks ago my 27-year-old daughter mentioned she’d been hearing a lot about memecoins. That conversation sparked this text, which I wrote for her first and then revised for HD. I hesitated over the slight political connotation, but on reflection the underlying lesson feels too useful not to share.
Do you remember inauguration week? January 2025 didn’t just mark a political transition, it also launched a brand new cryptocurrency: the $MELANIA memecoin. It arrived with fanfare,

A WHILE BACK, I was speaking with a fellow who had recently retired. He shared this observation, only half-jokingly: “Working was easy,” he said. What he meant was that financial management during our working years is more straightforward than it is in retirement. We earn and save and hope that our savings grow. But when we get to retirement, it becomes more complicated to know exactly how to manage those savings.
In the 1950s,

The 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession were unsettling. People lost jobs, homes, and a good chunk of their nest eggs. The S&P 500 saw an almost 40% drop in 2008 alone.
The 24-hour news cycle and social media offered up plenty of data, advice, and stories of sheer panic. And the messengers we listened to likely affected our reaction to the market’s decline—as well as our longer-term financial prospects.
I started thinking about how the likes of John Bogle and Jonathan Clements helped me develop a thick skin for market gyrations and the things we can’t control.

ECONOMICS IS KNOWN as “the dismal science,” and perhaps for good reason. Oftentimes it can be abstract and overly academic. There are, however, certain economic concepts that can be helpful to individual investors. Below are two that I see as especially important.
When it comes to the government’s ability to control—or least influence—the economy, there are two main levers. The first is fiscal policy, which refers to Congress’s (as well as state and local governments’) ability to levy taxes and to spend money. 

BACK IN 2010, at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, a shareholder challenged Warren Buffett. Noting that shares of motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson had nearly tripled over the prior year, he asked Buffett why he had chosen to buy the company’s bonds rather than its stock. Buffett’s reply was a two-minute masterclass in how to think about investments. It’s worth walking through it point by point.
To start, Buffett acknowledged that hindsight can be cruel.

AN UNUSUAL STORY hit the news this week. GameStop, the struggling video game retailer, announced a bid to buy eBay. The offer was unexpected, but what surprised investors more was the economics of the proposed deal. eBay is many times larger than GameStop, making it difficult to understand how GameStop would be able to finance the acquisition.
GameStop has offered $56 billion for eBay, comprised of cash and stock. For the cash portion, according to its May 3 press release,

IN THE INVESTMENT world, May 1st is a notable day. It was on May 1, 1975 that the Securities and Exchange Commission deregulated the brokerage industry. For the 183 years prior to that, trading commissions on the New York Stock Exchange had been fixed at uniformly high rates. But when deregulation arrived, competition got going. That’s when discount brokers like Charles Schwab got rolling, and over time, May Day, as it’s now referred to,

IN 2020, ELECTRIC car maker Lucid Motors brought in revenue of $4 million. Five years later, sales had risen impressively, to more than $1 billion. In 2025 alone, sales grew 68%. That sounds like a success story, and through that lens, it is. And yet, over that same period, the company’s stock dropped more than 89%.
What happened?
A better question is: What didn’t happen? Despite growing sales, the company has struggled to turn a profit.

IT’S BEEN MORE than six years since Covid first entered our vocabulary. It goes without saying that investors have experienced a lot, and for better or worse, recent market events provide some useful lessons. The first has to do with the nature of the stock market.
What drives stock prices? Open a finance textbook, and the answer will be clear: The value of a stock should equal the sum of the company’s future profits.

I’m a diy 66year old new retiree. I’m also a proud follower of Jack B. I started out investing with the mentally of invest first the live off the rest. Borrowing from my 401k wasn’t an option and it bothered me to see others do it with no problem. My annual salary during my working year never exceeded $40k. But we never had to live off a budget. If the money wasn’t there, we didn’t buy it.

BEFORE WE GET into it, a brief word. We lost Jonathan last year, and those of us who followed his work felt it more than we perhaps expected.  He had a saying that I always liked – that there are really only twenty stories in personal finance, and the financial industry spends most of its time telling them on repeat in slightly different hats. He was right, of course. He usually was.
It struck me that a fitting tribute might be to take his core principles and do something with them,

RECENTLY, The Wall Street Journal ran a story about a new type of investment known as a digital stock token. For now, they aren’t available in the U.S., but they’re coming soon, so it’s worth taking a closer look.
What are stock tokens? At the most basic level, they’re a technology designed to make stock market investing quicker and easier than it is today. With tokens, trading won’t be limited to traditional business hours.

Felt a little uneasy with the market wobbles over the last while? Maybe some quiet anguish watching your numbers dip into the red? If so, welcome back to an old friend, recency bias, because that’s almost certainly what you’re experiencing.
Step back and look at your portfolio over the last 12, 24, 36 months and you’re on a solid upward trajectory. That’s genuinely good news. But you’re not thinking about that, are you? Your mind is stuck on whatever percent you lost last month.