James Mackintosh

Democracy has drawbacks, but in the long run it is still the best we've got, for companies as well as countries.

Winston Churchill once quipped that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” What is true for countries is usually true for companies, too.

Three popular stock market valuation tools are saying the rebound of the past couple of weeks is a fools' rally.

Taylor Swift ended the European leg of her Eras tour on Tuesday at London's Wembley Stadium, delighting nearly 100,000 cheering “Swifties"—but leaving many who couldn't snag a ticket disappointed.

Lots of people get the blame for the incredibly high prices at which tickets for Taylor Swift concerts change hands: **s**calpers who bought in bulk and jacked up the price; the vast numbers of people who missed out on the original sale; and Live Nation Entertainment, whose Ticketmaster issued the tickets. Rising prices ought to attract more sellers, but the mental biases of Swifties—and the rest of us—lead them to put more value on their tickets merely because they own them already. This is known in behavioral finance as the endowment effect, valuing something more highly merely because we have it.

Pity the investors in the three artificial-intelligence-themed exchange-traded funds that managed to lose money this year.

There are lots of embarrassing ways to lose money, but it is particularly galling to lose when you correctly identify the theme that will dominate the market and manage to buy into it at a good moment.

Stocks and bonds are far more sensitive to economic indicators than they have been in the past—because investors are aware of just how much rests on a soft landing.

Markets are skittish. Tiny shifts in the economy are magnified into fear of recession or big relief rallies as sentiment swings wildly . Add in the

Broadcom shares are down more than 9% today, and since the chipmaker is far more expensive than other big stocks, value investors should be taking this as a win and muttering about hubris before getting back to their balance sheet analysis. It turns out the biggest “value” ETF not only owns Broadcom, but has it as its largest holding. The point of value investing is to buy cheaper stocks, betting that eventually they will shine.