James Glassman

A stock-picking system that can consistently beat the market has always been the Holy Grail of investors - desirable, tempting, but unobtainable. Investing just couldn't be that easy. But a few years ago, James P. O'Shaughnessy, a financial adviser and quantitative...

In the good old days, foreign stocks provided balance. Typically, if U.S. stocks were having a bad year, non-U.S. stocks would be having a good year. One study found that for the 25 years between 1970 and 1995, foreign stocks beat U.S. by a wide margin in 12 years,...

Harvey Pitt had to go. He had lost the credibility to run the Securities and Exchange Commission. Now, President Bush should move swiftly to replace him. The SEC has too much on its plate for dawdling. What the country needs is someone who has the guts and stature to...

Celebrating its 30th anniversary, Money magazine recently crunched the numbers and found the 30 stocks that had returned the most, in price and dividends, since the magazine's founding in August 1972. The No.1 stock was, of all things, an airline - Southwest (LUV) -...

You probably know the old joke: "How do you make a small fortune in the stock market?" "Start with a large fortune." After three years in which the market has lost between a third and a half of its value (depending on your favorite index), this bit of humor hits too...

"My message is as follows: stocks stink and will continue to do so until they're priced appropriately, probably somewhere around Dow 5000, S&P 650, or Nasdaq God knows where." That's what Bill Gross, the usually mild-mannered managing director of Pacific...

At a time when more than 8 million Americans are unemployed, business investment has stalled and the recovery is still tentative, Congress is considering a tax hike. Even more surprising, the misguided proposal is sponsored by Republican Rep. Bill Thomas of...

Now in his 12th year, Will Danoff is running Fidelity Contrafund, and, as usual, he is running it brilliantly. In 1996, I conducted one of those exercises to which idle minds are often prone, attempting to find the best core mutual fund - that is, a fund that could be...

If you're thinking of bailing out of the stock market, you're not alone. Frantic investors are moving their money out of stocks and into bonds and money-market funds - that is, out of equity and into debt. Investing demands choosing, and, instead of owning pieces of...

If the current bear market hurts, it should. It's the fourth-worst in modern market history. But here's balm for aching portfolios: The smart folks at Sanford Bernstein & Co., a value-oriented investment-management firm, tell us that "the key thing to remember is...

The test of a good system is not whether failures occur but whether they are remedied with speed and certainty. Despite the hysteria generated by media and politicians, the U.S. securities-trading system has clearly met that test. Since a series of corporate...

In what may be the best signal yet that the stock market has hit bottom and is on its way back up, this week I am going to write about bonds. Regular readers know that I am not fond of bonds as long-term investments. History has convinced me that they return far less...

If you are having a tough time deciding whether to dump a stock you own, don't despair. You aren't alone. In investing, nothing is harder. Nothing. Some people offer a simple formula -- such as, always sell a stock if it has dropped 20 percent or if it has risen 100...

For years, Grant's Interest Rate Observer was noteworthy for being both exceptionally witty and consistently wrong. Times have changed. The newsletter, edited by James Grant, who has written wonderful books on such topics as the life of Bernard Baruch and the history...

As the stock market falls for the third straight year -- something that hasn't happened since 1941 -- I get asked three questions: 1. When will it end? 2. Why is it happening? 3. What should I do? The third question is by far the most important, and the answer is...

Al Frank, who died of cancer April 25 at age 72 in Carmel, Calif., was one of the very best stock pickers in America. He never sought the spotlight and few investors recognize his name, but he deserves a place in the investing pantheon with gods like Warren Buffett,...

When you own a stock, you become a partner in a business. And the most important characteristic of a business -- a good one, anyway -- is that it grows. Over time its revenue and profits rise, and your stock becomes worth a lot more. The prospect of strong growth...

After any breakdown of a public institution, politicians feel the urge to "fix" things so it doesn't happen again. Often, however, the cure is worse than the disease. That's the case with the proposed remedies following the collapse of Enron. Why does Congress need to...

For the past 10 months, the attorney general of New York, Eliot Spitzer, has been investigating Merrill Lynch & Co. Although he hasn't charged anyone with a crime, he has accused the firm of misleading customers by hyping stocks to win investment-banking business;...

A visitor to Tokyo just can't believe that this is what a decade of stagnation looks like. Restaurants are full, shops are bustling, construction cranes are all over the place. Yet on Thursday, a government report showed that Japan's economy had "contracted by a real...