It’s hard to imagine mutual fund managers nostalgic for the big losses many booked in the financial crisis. But for actively managed funds, those realized losses did come to serve one useful purpose — as the bull market stretched on and managers took profits, they offset capital gains. Six years into a bull market, those losses are largely used up. That means more investors who own actively managed funds in taxable accounts will confront the biggest taxable distributions seen since before the crisis. Funds run by the Morgan Stanley Growth team, which Morningstar crowned 2013’s stock fund managers of the year, give a glimpse ...
(Reuters) – Britain’s BT has entered into exclusive talks with Orange and Deutsche Telekom to buy EE for 12.5 billion pounds ($19.6 billion), opting for the country’s biggest mobile operator over rival suitor, Telefonica’s O2. BT had been in talks with Telefonica and EE’s owners since late November about a deal to buy one of the providers, giving the fixed-line firm an unusually strong position to return to the consumer mobile market. BT said that if the deal completes Deutsche Telekom would hold a 12 percent stake in BT and would be entitled to appoint one board member, whereas Orange would hold a 4 percent stak...
“It’s America calling the shots in everything!” the former Soviet leader tells TIME In the offices of Mikhail Gorbachev, still sharp at 83 and plainspoken as ever, the walls are lined with photos from his travels as the leader of the Soviet Union and, in the years after its demise, as a living icon of the Cold War. One picture shows him with his late wife Raisa standing arm-in-arm with Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse. In another frame he wears a cowboy hat and jeans as he stands beside Ronald Reagan, the U.S. President who famously branded Gorbachev’s country an “evil empire” in 1983. These portraits, like many others in his Mos...
FOUR ATLANTIC CITY CASINOS have closed this year—another is expected to be shuttered soon—as revenues plunged because of new competition in neighboring states. The most spectacular fall in the Boardwalk empire? The $2.4 billion Revel. Eight years ago, Atlantic City’s gaming revenues reached $5.2 billion (an alltime high). In this environment, Morgan Stanley MS -0.76% purchased the Revel’s land for $74 million and picked Kevin DeSanctis, who had run Trump Plaza and worked with Steve Wynn, to plan a new, wildly ambitious casino project. The Revel was designed to attract overnight guests (in contrast to the city’s typical daytime visit...
When Debra Wetherby started her investment advisory firm in 1990, she was 32, just married and had less than $50,000 of capital. She plunged into an emerging industry of advisers who run their own businesses rather than operating inside big brokerages such as Morgan Stanley, which she’d left in 1988. With 10 clients betting on her, working without a salary and living on credit cards, she rented an office on San Francisco’s Sansome Street and gave herself a deadline: make money in three years, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its January issue. Today, Wetherby Asset Management leases the entire eighth floor of a financial-district...
As winter nears and extreme storm season ramps up, defense contractor Raytheon and Weather Decision Technologies (WDT) have announced a partnership that gives the international and commercial users of WDT’s services the same kind of big data-driven weather forecasting tools used by Raytheon customers like the National Weather Service. According to a statement from Raytheon and WDT, the licensing agreement means that both companies “will jointly develop customized versions of WDT’s applications.” This gives users of WDT’s weather prediction programs access to state-of-the-art technology enabling them to create data-driven forecasts a...
WASHINGTON – Holiday spending will see a “modest bump” this year, but it will be held back by budget concerns of those at the lower end of the income scale who have not seen salaries grow like those who are better off. That was the finding of the annual forecast of holiday spending released earlier this week by the Consumer Federation of America and the Credit Union National Association. “Many consumers continue to reflect significant concerns about their personal finances — most especially in the realm of weak income gains,” said Mike Schenck, senior economist for CUNA. “Because of this, we expect the incre...
A Phoenix real-estate guru and celebrity broker is facing more than 12 years in prison and $500,000 in fines after a federal jury convicted her on money-laundering charges. Jurors found Tanya Marchiol, 40, guilty this week on one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, two counts of money laundering and another count of structuring financial transactions. The verdict comes less than three weeks after Marchiol pre-empted the start of her trial by pleading guilty to three misdemeanor counts of tax evasion. She admitted willful failure to file tax returns on more than $1.4 million in revenue she earned from 2007 to 2009. Jurors agreed Ma...
Finding the best ETFs is an increasingly difficult task with so many to choose from. How can you choose with so many available ETF’s? Why ETF Labels are Confusing There are at least 44 different Financials ETFs and at least 188 ETFs across all sectors. Do you need that many choices? How different can the ETFs be? Those 44 Financials ETFs are very different. With anywhere from 22 to 541 holdings, many of these Financials ETFs have drastically different portfolios, creating drastically different investment implications. The same is true for the ETFs in any other sector, as each offers a very different mix of good and bad stocks. The Consumer...
Guest Post by Paul Kasriel, The Econtrarian As quantitative easing comes to an end (apparently) by the Fed and is taken up by the European Central Bank (ECB), let’s compare the behavior of nominal domestic demand in each central bank’s economy and venture a reason for any differences. Plotted in Chart 1 are index values of the nominal Gross Domestic Purchases in the U.S. and the eurozone, respectively. Each index is set at a value of 100 for Q4:2008. Since Q4:2008, Gross Domestic Purchases in the U.S. increased a net 18% through Q2:2014 (that is what the index value of 118 indicates). For the eurozone, Gross Domestic Purchases increased a...