Outlook

Michael Pollock has a good article in today’s WSJ on the difficulty of relying on the standard metrics for mutual fund performance: If you’re trying to decide what mutual fund to buy, all sorts of rankings and performance figures are easily available. And you should look at most of them […]

Via Lapham’s Quarterly – note that three of them are recent. Click through to view larger original

Update: Kansas, class act veteran journalist, writes in to acknowledge the mistaken description of the ProShares ETF. Dave Kansas makes some good points in his WSJ article today on the latest batch of “specific, complex, risky” ETFs, but this is not among them: Conversely, the ProShares UltraShort S&P 500 (SDS), […]

Here’s a really interesting tidbit from a man who knows both Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) platforms intimately from a business perspective. Bob Bowman is the head of MLB.com, major league baseball’s very successful digital business. In a Q&A with Peter Kafka of AllThingsD, Bowman had this to […]

Another great sketch from Carl Richards: From Richards’ newsletter accompanying the sketch: We love control. You name it, we’d probably prefer to control it. But from the weather to our kids, there are limits to what we can control, and in no place is this more clear than our finances… […]

From CNBC this morning, here’s Berkshire Hathaway’s (NYSE: BRK.A) departing executive David Sokol. Money quote: “Knowing today what I know, what I would do differently is I just would never have mentioned it to Warren, and just made my own investment and left it alone.” Prediction: We haven’t heard the […]

Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas upgraded Tesla Motors (Nasdaq: TSLA) this morning in a big way – with a $70 price target, and a bull case scenario that the stock goes to $135/share, which is more than 400% up from here. It’s a 50 page research note, where Jonas says […]

Legendary investor Warren Buffett, head of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A), issued a press release today announcing that David Sokol (pictured) one of his top executives at the company and the frontrunner to replace Buffett, has resigned. Buffett writes: “Dave’s [resignation] letter was a total surprise to me.” The Wall St. […]

Some great responses to the question on Quora – first up, Benedict Evans goes back to the 15th century: Ferdinand & Isabella’s decision to back Columbus paid off pretty well. Spain ruled most of the south American continent for the next 300 years and used the flow of silver to […]

Turbotax produced this infographic that breaks down the U.S. government’s spending, how it’s changed in the last decade, and what it could look like in 2012, based on the proposed 2012 Presidential budget. Drag the scissors across the dates, then mouse over the sections of the dollar to see the […]

Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson went on Consuela Mack’s Wealthtrack this week to describe the fall of the West. He starts by naming the six killer apps (his term) that brought the West to prominence over the past 500 years, then explains China and India’s rise due to “downloading those […]