If you always suspected that financial markets were one giant insider network, a new National Bureau of Economic Research paper will help confirm that notion. Three researchers, from Harvard and the University of Chicago, find that analysts’ “buy” recommendations perform better when the analyst…

The concept of “blue” investing — buying shares of companies that support the Democratic party — isn’t working out so well for mutual-fund investors. The Wall Street Journal reports today that Blue Investment Management has folded its small-cap fund and…

American Water Works, parent of St. Louis County Water Co., made a less-than-stunning debut yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange. Its shares fell 4 percent, closing at $20.60. And that’s after parent company RWE, a German utility, cut the offering…

David A. Noyes & Co., a Chicago investment firm, is conducting a fascinating online poll to select the greatest financial innovation of the past century.

Trouble is, most of the choices are pretty pedestrian. I ruled out 401ks and IRAs as…

TransferOrbit, one of St. Louis’ newer public companies, is engaging in the all-too-common penny-stock-market practice of paying websites to hype its shares.

StockMarketNewsAlert.com, for instance, profiled the company last week and issued a “trade alert” saying that “recent news flow…

Simon Constable of TheStreet.com makes a strong argument that Alcoa should be kicked out of the 30-stock Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company’s been essentially treading water during one of history’s great commodity booms. Constable writes:

These days, Alcoa doesn’t appear reflective…

When I turned on our Bloomberg this morning and looked at the monitor we have set up for local stocks, I saw something I’d never witnessed before: The sea of red numbers, meaning falling stock prices, was interrupted by only a…

Four St. Louis companies saw their stocks double in value during 2007, and three of them have to give some  credit to the alternative-energy craze. MEMC Electronic Materials, up 126 percent, is considered a solar-energy play because its silicon wafers…

One possible justification for using a stockbroker — as opposed to being a do-it-yourself investor, or working with a fee-based planner  – is that the broker may give you good advice about when to buy stocks. Alternatively, he/she may perform…

A lot of investing books, good and bad,  come across my desk, but few look as dangerous to investors as the one that arrived yesterday. “The Blue Way: How to Profit by Investing in a Better World”  has a simple and…