Every once in a while, when a baseball player hits one out of the park at an away game, the fan who catches the ball throws it back on the field. Why celebrate the opponent’s achievement? As rebukes go, it’s not subtle. Sometimes I wonder if the rank and file employees who got $1,000 “tax cut” […]
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 time frame in which one
This post was based on an article I wrote for Kiplinger with my client Ken Berman of Gorilla Trades. I negotiated with Kiplinger to designate Mr. Berman as a contributor and deliver original articles to them on a regular basis.
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, and the total tally of
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 throwing a weight in the
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 back in the spring of
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, I thought. It made me
With earnings season here once again, and the term fake news ricocheting across social and traditional media, it’s not too great a leap to get to the concept of fake earnings. Lots of companies present earnings that aren’t really earnings. For example, in January Intel reported earnings of $10.3 billion, and then adjusted earnings of $13.2 billion, about
For companies trying to develop relationships with the media, here’s another arrow for your quiver: Share the stories they write with your social media networks. This according to journalists and reporters themselves. When asked in the 2017 State of the Media Report by public relations software firm Cision, ‘How can communications professionals improve their media relationships and
It seems almost every reporter, anchor, radio host or ‘influencer’ out there likes to point out they are giving you information that ‘the mainstream media won’t report on.” Sometimes it’s information the mainstream media “wouldn’t dare report on.” I would offer that if you are trying to interpret the media landscape today, remove the notion