48 Quotes by Gary Weiss

Mutual funds dare to be average. In fact, they dare to be lousy. They have long since ceased striving for anything resembling perfection when it comes to managing your money.

Numerous academic studies have shown that amateur investors make poor traders - buying stocks for the wrong reasons, holding losers for too long, and acting on whims and emotions.

I found that options traders - the Amex was mainly an options exchange - routinely conspired to keep as wide as possible the spreads between the prices investors paid and the prices floor traders paid for the same securities.

Humiliating events have a way of capturing the public's imagination. So it has been since antiquity, when gladiators were pitted against each other and the legions of Spartacus were crucified in endless rows on the way to Rome.

Kochi, formerly called Cochin, is a former European settlement with a large Christian population and a seafaring heritage. It is a town of enormous charm that reminds some visitors of the Caribbean more than India.

Ordinarily, the feds piggyback on the S.E.C. in complicated financial cases, but history proves that breath-holding on that score is a dangerous endeavor.

MF Global used to be known as Man Financial, and it had a reasonably good reputation. It did a humdrum business placing commodities trades for fund managers as well as farmers, grain dealers and others whose livelihoods depend on the vagaries of commodity prices.

When it comes to making laws that protect the public from the financial services industry, Congress has done a progressively worse job since the Pecora Commission hearings of the early 1930s, which led to Congress taking bold steps to regulate banking and securities firms in 1933 and 1934.

There are a lot worse things you can do with all your bucks than giving them to even a mediocre mutual fund - such as, for example, giving them to a mediocre hedge fund. If supporting the lifestyle of a mediocre fund manager is your favorite charity, who am I to stop you?