David R. Evanson

Jane Fraser was selected to be the next CEO of Citigroup, the first woman to run a “money center” bank.  One can only hope that she will best the performance of her predecessors.  Aside from a decade of irrational exuberance in the price of Citigroup shares (see graph below) any…

This article was written with Kurt Schacht and published by Barron's. At the time he was head of policy for CFA Institute. It was one of several articles we worked on together regarding market integrity. In addition, I negotiated a column for Mr. Schacht on nasdaq.com where we wrote a…

The unicorns are filing one after another for initial public offerings and the excitement in the IPO market is taking me back to 1982, when I was working at a publication called Going Public: The IPO Reporter, the pre eminent journal tracking initial public offerings. I joined the staff in late 1982,…

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens. Clemens was a very clever writer. So it should come as no surprise the very name he chose for himself -- Mark Twain -- would be steeped in mystery and uncertainty. Since time immemorial sailors have marked the depth of by…

Innumeracy -- the numerical version of illiteracy -- hurts.  It hurts more because unscrupulous parties use it to paint a convincing picture that is at odds with reality. Discourse, opposition, and needed change can all be suppressed by preying on innumeracy.  To see this in action, consider the case of Walmart…

When Amazon released its top 20 contenders for its vaunted second headquarters this morning, I quickly scanned the list — not for my city, Philadelphia — but for Detroit. I was sad Detroit didn’t make the cut.  It was a bad day for them and a bad day for the country,…