BlackRock shook the world of active management when it announced that it had fired five of its 53 stock pickers. BlackRock will also move $6 billion of the $201 billion invested in traditional active management to quant strategies. The announcement may not sound earth-shattering, but it augurs a larger trend: Traditional active management is dying, but perhaps not for …

  Airlines operate in such a brutally competitive market that it’s sometimes tempting to view them as an undifferentiated group. The most richly valued of the big three US carriers, United Continental Holdings Inc., trades on a forward price-earnings ratio of 9.8; the cheapest, Delta Air Lines Inc., is on 8.7. The clustering is even tighter in China, where Beijing-based …

  Bloomberg Four years ago, Canada’s government tried to keep state-owned companies out of Alberta’s oil sands. Now, they may be around for a while. ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc decided this month to sell most of their oil sands to Cenovus Energy Inc. and Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. That leaves firms such as China’s Cnooc …