Opinion

Picking stocks is famously difficult. But just how difficult is one of the oldest arguments in finance. New York Times columnist Jeff Sommer reopened the debate last week with a piece describing a recent study by an Arizona State University business professor, Hendrik Bessembinder. Bessembinder looked at the performance of publicly traded stocks in the US from 1926 to 2016 ...

A few months ago, no one would have noticed British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn’s address at the annual conference of his Labour Party. But that was before he engineered its biggest increase in vote share since World War II after Theresa May gambled on a snap election and lost her majority. The election, Corbyn told the Labour faithful, “has put ...

Top US officials have said repeatedly that America is seeking a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis with North Korea. But President Trump’s insulting comments towards North Korean leader Kim Jong un appear to have made such a negotiated settlement more difficult. In the chaotic government-by-Twitter atmosphere of the Trump administration, no senior leader has publicly questioned whether the president’s ...

One of the unfortunate aspects of Trumpian populism is the effect it is having on our discussion of economic policy, and thereby on our understanding of the underlying goals that policies are meant to advance. This is perhaps most stark in discussions of international trade. The right used to discuss trade as a way to enrich the nation and raise ...

On Tuesday, Twitter announced that a select group of users would be able to send 280-character tweets—double the platform’s signature 140-character limit. It’s part of an experiment testing whether longer character limits would be better for everyone. The company explained that, in languages where a single character carries more meaning—Chinese, Japanese and Korean—they see “more people tweeting—which is awesome!” If ...

Until now, the defining feature of the Trump administration’s trade policy has been a worrisome yet vague recklessness. The US Commerce Department’s new ruling on Boeing’s dispute with Bombardier, a Canadian aircraft maker, shows the harm that comes when the administration gets specific. The rules that regulate trade can’t work without restraint and a commitment to a liberal economic order. ...

Political pressure is gradually forcing Facebook executives to take responsibility for the content that appears on the social network, at this point mainly for the advertising. So far, they are doing a good job of avoiding the real subject. On Wednesday, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg addressed the recent discovery that ads on Facebook could be targeted at “Jew haters”—or, ...

The Federal Reserve and other central banks have been on a quest since 2012 to get inflation back up to levels they deem appropriate for a stable, growing economy. There have been many setbacks along the way, leaving central bankers stumped, with Fed Chair Janet Yellen saying the slowdown in inflation has been a “mystery.” But their crusade may now ...

Eric Ries, an entrepreneur and the author of “The Lean Startup” and other business books, has started a company to create a new stock exchange. The Long-Term Stock Exchange will lock up investors’ money for a long time, forcing them to think beyond next quarter’s earnings. Obviously this lack of liquidity will cause stock sold on the new exchange to ...

Unsurprisingly, President Donald Trump hasn’t held back when speaking about the political crisis in Venezuela. Before the United Nations General Assembly, he demanded the full restoration of “democracy and political freedoms” in the Latin American country. A month earlier, he stunned many by stating that he would not rule out a military intervention. His UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, has echoed ...