How To Play The Agriculture Game 

By Brad Zigler

During the heyday of paper assets, stockbrokers regularly lorded over their commodity-dealing brethren. It wasn't personal, mind you, just the nature...

The Auction-Rate Mess And You 

David A. Geracioti Editor-In-Chief

In September 2006, an SEC official gave a remarkably prescient speech to an obscure organization (well, obscure to me, anyway). Martha Mahan Haines, chief...

Survivorship Life Back In Favor 

By Alan Lavine

Despite current laws that reduce the estate-tax bite, survivorship life insurance is making a comeback as an estate-planning tool among some advisors....

A FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY 

BY JOHN CHURCHILL

Are closed-end fund preferred-auction securities safe? We consider CFPs to be the conservative's conservative security....

Beating The Bear 

By Stan Luxenberg

Academics have long scorned actively managed mutual funds. Instead of spending money on managers who attempt to beat the market (however that is defined),...

How Low Can You Go? 

By Stan Luxenberg

With credit markets jittery and the economy on the lip of recession (or in recession, depending upon whom you ask), real estate funds have plummeted....

Focused And Then Some 

By Stan Luxenberg

Competing fiercely for the attention of investors, fund companies have brought out a wave of specialized offerings. Many of the choices which include...

CAPITAL HILL CONTRIBUTIONS 

Christina Mucciolo

Wall Street is shifting loyalties. So far in the 2008 election cycle, the securities and investment industry has showered the Democratic Party with contributions....

Playing The Commodity Craze 

By Brad Zigler

When the search for alpha takes conservative portfolios such as the Harvard and Yale endowments into the land of bellies, beans and bullion, investors...

Abroad At Home 

By Stan Luxenberg

Using a wide-ranging investing style, Peter Lynch dominated the fund world during the 1980s. The manager of Fidelity Magellan was known to pick stocks...

Merrill Abandons CDO Biz, But Only for a Moment 

By Kristen French

Maybe Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain just wanted to test his audience. At an investment conference today, Thain said that Merrill would abandon CDO underwriting and other structured-credit businesses, the very ones that led to the subprime meltdown on Wall Street and beyond. And then he took it back. ...

To Catch A Muni Index 

By Stan Luxenberg

Since the first exchange-traded bond fund appeared in 2002, financial rocket scientists have struggled to launch a tax-free ETF. The development efforts...

Meet the Retirement Geek 

BY DAVID ADLER

Moshe Milevsky, professor of Finance at York University Canada, is a widely recognized innovator in the field of retirement-income planning, insurance...

A House of Pain 

By David A. Geracioti

The curious thing about a bubble is, when it bursts, you can't believe people actually behaved the way they did. (Remember, in the late 1990s, backing...

ETF Clones-At A Discount 

By Stan Luxenberg

Millions of investors have piled into exchange-traded funds (ETFs) over the past decade. Assets in the funds have grown from $65 billion in 2000 to $488...