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Jack Bogle is ready to declare victory. Four decades ago, a mutual-fund industry graybeard warned him that he would “destroy the industry.” Mr. Bogle’s plan was to create a new mutual-fund company owned not by the founding entrepreneur and his partners but by the shareholders of the funds themselves. This would keep overhead low for investors, as would a second part of his plan: an index fund that would mimic the performance of the overall stock market rather than pay genius managers to guess which stocks might go up or down.

Not even Warren Buffett has minted more millionaires than Jack Bogle has—and he did so not by helping them get lucky, but by teaching them how to earn the market’s long-run, average return without paying big fees to Wall Street.

“When the climate really gets bad, I’m not some statue out there. But when I get knots in my stomach, I say to myself, ‘Reread your books,’ ” he says. Mr. Bogle has written numerous advice books on investing, including 2007’s “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing,” which remains a perennial Amazon best seller—and all of them emphasize not trying to outguess the markets.

It is one of the great investment conundrums of our time: Why do so many stockholders cheer when a company announces that it’s buying back shares?

Stated simply, repurchase programs can be hazardous to a company’s long-term financial health and often signal a management that has run out of better ways to invest in the business.

given the enormous popularity of buybacks nowadays, those that are harmful probably outnumber the beneficial.

nvestors were expecting volatility in 2014, but this is ridiculous.While the overall stock market remains somewhat tranquil, beneath the quiet surface, some individual stocks are already giving their owners a sickening ride. Thursday was the latest day in a week full of some head-turning big drops in stocks, including consumer electronics seller Best Buy and skin treatment maker Nu Skin.

Thursday closed down a bruising $10.74, or 29%, to $26.83, while Nu Skin, a seller of skin care products, was down $30.43, or 26%, to $84.80.

Evidence of investors' low tolerance for disappointment. Best Buy's stock woes were triggered by reports of holiday sales that fell short of what analysts had predicted. The consumer electronics seller reported that sales at stores open at least a year fell 0.8% during the nine-week period ending Jan. 4. Investors were already turning negative on retailers following disappointing news from other retailers and consumer products sellers. Shares of at-home soda maker equipment maker, SodaStream and video game seller GameStop have seen their shares fall 22% and 19% this week on disappointing results.

President Trump, in his State of the Union address last week, boasted to the nation about stock market gains: “The stock market has smashed one record after another, gaining $8 trillion and more in value in just this short period of time.”

He has boasted about the booming market in tweets no fewer than 54 times since taking office.

The Dow Jones industrial average plunged 1,175 points Monday, its biggest one-day point drop in history, following Friday’s beastly 666-point slide. The S&P 500 has lost more than $1 trillion in market value in just three trading days, and the Dow’s 8 percent drop in six trading days wiped out the year’s gains.

In one corner is Robert Shiller, the Yale economist who argues that markets (and by implication, share prices) are often irrational and therefore beatable. He famously predicted the bubble in technology stocks in the late 1990s.

In the other corner is Eugene Fama, the father of the view that markets are efficient and that they are always processing all available information. Mr. Fama’s followers believe that investors who try to beat the averages will inevitably fail.

As someone whose professional life centers on evaluating investment managers, I come down emphatically with Mr. Shiller.

General Electric Co. GE -1.39% helped invent the world as we know it: wired up, plugged in and switched on. Born of Thomas Alva Edison’s ingenuity and John Pierpont Morgan’s audacity, GE built the dynamos that generated the electricity, the wires that carried it and the lightbulbs that burned it.

To keep the power and profits flowing day and night, GE connected neighborhoods with streetcars and cities with locomotives. It soon filled kitchens with ovens and toasters, living rooms with radios and TVs, bathrooms with curling irons and toothbrushes, and laundry rooms with washers and dryers.

He eliminated some 100,000 jobs in his early years as CEO and insisted that managers fire the bottom 10% of performers each year who failed to improve, in a process that became known as “rank and yank.” GE’s financial results were so eye-popping that the strategy was imitated throughout American business.

That’s not to say that Silicon Valley’s wealthy aren’t donating their money to charity. Many, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Larry Page, have signed the Giving Pledge, committing to dedicating the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. But much of that money is not making its way out into the community.

The San Francisco Bay Area has rapidly become the richest region in the country—the Census Bureau said last year that median household income was $96,777. It’s a place where $100,000 Teslas are commonplace, “raw water” goes for $37 a jug, and injecting clients with the plasma of youth —a gag on the television show Silicon Valley—is being tried by real companies for just $8,000 a pop.

There are many reasons for this, but one of them is likely the increasing popularity of a certain type of charitable account called a donor-advised fund. These funds allow donors to receive big tax breaks for giving money or stock, but have little transparency and no requirement that money put into them is actually spent.

In any reading, the most unusual thing about Wall Street’s being challenged by a rowdy band of Redditors is that it took so long to happen. This kind of populist revolt — internet-based insurgents gleefully pulling down the pants of the unsuspecting establishment — has been happening for years, to many powerful institutions.

Book publishers, movie studios, restaurant chains — all of them have, in some way, been forced to cede power to their online critics. Our politics, too, have been transformed by internet activists, with TikTok teens disrupting presidential rallies and Twitch-streaming memelords storming the Capitol.

these internet-based insurgencies tend to follow a similar pattern. One day, a group decides to take action against a system it feels is immoral or corrupt. Members identify structural weak points (a vulnerable political party, a risk-averse studio head, an overexposed short position) and figure out creative ways to exploit them, using social media for leverage and visibility. With enough highly motivated people pushing in the same direction, they eventually prevail, or get enough attention that it feels like they did.

How to Make Sense of Plummeting Global Markets

What makes these falling prices unnerving is that it’s hard to tell a simple story about what is driving them. It could be that the markets are moving according to their own internal logic, driven by money managers’ psychology, with their habitual toggle between fear and greed turning back toward the former.

Oil prices are down so much that profits of oil companies will suffer mightily, and some will surely go bankrupt.

GameStop's stock has continued to make big moves, briefly crossing $450 a share on Thursday, fueled by Reddit users collectively taking on the Wall Street establishment. But individual investors looking to make trades have faced multiple issues on trading sites and apps over recent days, with many experiencing service disruptions, according to Bloomberg.

Robinhood explained the move in a blog post Thursday morning, just before the stock exchanges opened: "In light of recent volatility, we are restricting transactions for certain securities to position closing only, including $AMC, $BB, $BBBY, $EXPR, $GME, $KOSS, $NAKD and $NOK."

GameStop's stock price had hovered between $4 and $20 for the past year -- until Jan. 13 when it began skyrocketing. It closed Wednesday at $346.37. 

Her show might be gone but the “Oprah Effect” clearly endures.

After Oprah Winfrey said on Monday she would buy a 10 percent stake in Weight Watchers and take a seat on the board, the company’s slumping stock doubled to $13.92 per share, adding about $400 million to its market value

Ms. Winfrey also plans to give Weight Watchers unfettered access to her name and face for marketing purposes.

It's difficult to tie those gains directly to President Trump's economic vision, however. On average, employers have added 170,000 jobs in each of the 10 months since Trump took office. That's slightly below the 196,000 per month pace during the comparable period in 2016, under President Obama. If you throw out September of this year, when job gains were depressed by hurricanes, Trump's monthly average is closer to Obama's, at 185,000, but the change in administrations doesn't appear to have had much effect on the overall job market.

Factories nationwide have added 171,000 jobs so far in 2017 — a rebound from the previous year when factories shed 16,000 jobs. Trump has promised to lead a renaissance in American manufacturing. The sector has generally been adding jobs since 2010, although the strength of export-oriented factories is strongly tied to what's happening in the global economy.

According to the Labor Department, there are 95 million Americans 16 and older who are not working. But that figure includes retirees, students and voluntary stay-at-home parents. It's an open question how many might be lured into the workforce. Lower taxes might offer a carrot to would-be workers. The administration is also considering sticks — in the form of a less generous safety net.

Apple is on the verge of yet another major milestone. The iPhone maker is close to topping a market value of more than $3 trillion — the first publicly traded company ever to be worth that much.

Shares of Apple (AAPL) were up about 1% in premarket trading Monday to around $181.75. The stock needs to hit $182.85 for Apple to surpass the $3 trillion mark.

Apple's market value first crossed the $1 trillion threshold in August 2018 and passed $2 trillion in August 2020.

Unfavorable economic conditions, chiefly rising interest rates and the struggling stock market, are taking a toll on Manhattan’s high-end housing sector, according to a report Monday from Olshan Realty.  There were 21 contracts signed in the week ending Sunday that were priced at $4 million or more—the report’s benchmark for luxury—marking the third week in a row of slumping deals, Donna Olshan wrote in her eponymous weekly market review. 

The priciest contract signed last week was on a full-floor penthouse at 53 West 53rd St. in Midtown, which had been most recently asking for a hair above $33 million. Spanning 4,599 square feet, the property has views of Central Park and the Hudson and East Rivers.  Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel, and adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art, the building offers its residents amenities including a golf simulator, a wine room, a library and a theater. 

“We’ve seen a lag in the impact that rising interest rates have had on the market, likely because many buyers may not be aware of what this has done to their budget,” said Danielle Hale, chief economist for Realtor.com. The site released a report Thursday finding that for the 19th consecutive week, U.S. home prices saw double-digit year-over-year increases, with the median listing price rising by 14.4% from the same week last year. Homes also spent six fewer days on the market during the week ending April 23 than during the same period last year, according to Realtor’s findings.

When the stock market crashes, “higher for longer” will become a thing of the past as the Fed makes an abrupt pivot. Then the 10-year yields and U.S. dollar will come tumbling down.

The Federal Reserve’s policies are threatening U.S. financial markets and the economy. They are in danger of a steep recession and the risk of a repeat of 1987’s Black Monday.

Early in the pandemic, the volume of U.S. dollars in circulation soared. For two years starting in March 2020, the M2 money supply—a measure of the cash and checkable deposits in circulation plus savings deposits and other easily convertible assets—grew at an unprecedented annualized rate of 16.5%. That is more than three times the appropriate rate for hitting the Fed’s 2% inflation target.

Israel’s war with Hamas and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have made the world a more “scary and unpredictable” place than at any other time since the Second World War, Dimon contended. “Here in the US, we continue to have a strong economy,” he said. “We still have a lot of fiscal and monetary stimulus in the system. But these geopolitical matters are very serious — arguably the most serious since 1938.

What’s happening ... right now is the most important thing for the future of the world — freedom, democracy, food, energy, immigration. We diminish that importance when you say, ‘What’s it going to do to the market?’ Markets will be fine. Markets can deal with stuff. Markets go up and down. Markets fluctuate.”

That said, the conflict in the Middle East — in which at least 1,400 Israelis have been murdered and 9,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7 — has rattled a financial system already gulping at the prospect of inflation proving sticky and interest rates staying higher for longer. The region accounts for 48 per cent of global energy reserves and produced 33 per cent of the world’s oil last year. Previous crises, such as Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, resulted in big price shocks — although so far, at about $86 a barrel, oil has roughly returned to its pre-October 7 level, while gas prices have risen only slightly.

As Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin scrambled to save faltering markets at the start of the pandemic last year, America’s top economic officials were in near-constant contact with a Wall Street executive whose firm stood to benefit financially from the rescue.

Laurence D. Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, was in frequent touch with Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Powell in the days before and after many of the Fed’s emergency rescue programs were announced in late March.

Mr. Fink planned alongside the government for parts of a financial rescue that his firm referred to in one message as “the project” that he and the Fed were “working on together.”

Over the week of March 16, markets experienced an enormous shock to what investors refer to as liquidity, a catchall term for the cost of quickly converting an asset into cash.

Mr. Powell bluntly directed his colleagues to move as fast as possible.

They devised unparalleled emergency-lending backstops to stem an incipient financial panic that threatened to exacerbate the unfolding economic and public-health emergencies.