Critics complain that hedge funds are too expensive for the returns they have lately been producing. Setting performance aside (which is as varied as the strategies pursued), on first blush, the ante does seem somewhat dear: Most hedge funds...

Many businesses spend small fortunes to establish and promote their brands. Last year, Merrill Lynch, for example, spent about a half-a-billion dollars on marketing and business development. Imagine Merrill's new challenge: Come April, Merrill...

Private foundations are usually organized as trusts or not-for-profit corporations. When choosing between the two, advisors tend to focus on ease of formation and maintenance, flexibility and standards for trustees or directors. They generally don...

It remains to be seen whether anybody was playing a cosmic joke when Hurricane Wilma was tearing South Florida apart at the same time that President Bush was appointing Ben S. Bernanke to succeed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve...

Money manager Jim Rogers was ahead of the pack through most of his career. In his younger days, he helped make George Soros into the billionaire hedge fund titan. In recent years, Rogers operated two successful commodity funds. And, in the early...

Critics lambaste mutual funds, calling them old-fashioned contraptions that generate big tax bills. It's true, on average, that exchange-traded funds and separate accounts have tax advantages over mutual funds, data from Morningstar and other...

Dry bulk shipping isn't exactly the most exciting industry sector to research. Even among sea-borne freight, oil-tanker companies overshadow dry bulk shipping companies. (The price of oil will do that.) But the dry bulkers who carry cargo like...

Back during the buying panic of the 1990s, it was fashionable to believe: Sell your losers, and run with your winners. Of course, one of the lessons of the subsequent crack up: Don't let your winners run so much that they dominate your portfolio...

Dedicated followers of the Clipper Fund may have been dismayed when longtime managers James Gipson and Michael Sandler left the fund recently. For many investors, the Clipper crew represented the best in value investing. During the past decade...

Wall Street is a place where trends can cycle nearly as fast as they do in the fashion world, but in the post-bubble years, investors are treating dividend stocks like the always-flattering basic black. To meet the demand from dividend-hungry...