Tag: Wall Street

When a Vig Equals Ownership: The Forever-Cost of a 401k Plan

Wall Street — by which I mean the overall business behemoth that makes its money by holding investments of other people’s money and by trafficking in investments and money generally — is vigging all of us to death. I mean this pretty much literally, i.e., I mean that, from the […]

The Twitter IPO: Are We Partying Like It’s 1999?

Today, at roughly 9:45 a.m., I’m walking in Ess Eff Sea Eh on 2nd Street at Mission, heading towards Market, and my cool-car detector fires off, as I see a red Ferrari convertible going through the intersection, headed towards 1st Street. This is the car:   That’s it, right down […]

Investing Is Simpler than You Think, Part 1: The Rise of Self-Directed Investing

I came of financial-career age at E*TRADE in the late 90s. The commercialization of the Internet was in its infancy back then, and so too was the world of online stockbrokers like E*TRADE and Schwab and Ameritrade and Datek (long ago hobbled and then subsumed into Ameritrade). At the juncture […]

Financial Writing Does Not Have to Be Boring

A young person the other day mentioned to me in passing, as she almost-imperceptibly stuck a needle deep into the middle of my vein and began pulling a few vials of blood out of moi, all while simultaneously seeing a book peeping out from my brief case, that she liked […]

Google Oops

Now there’s something you don’t see everyday: a big public company accidentally releasing its quarterly earnings announcement before it was finalized and before the market closed, precipitating a 10% drop in the stock price and a halt of trading in its shares. Google fall down and go boom-boom-big today on […]