Indexing has been a winning strategy in terms of risk-adjusted and fee-adjusted performance, and it’s become hugely popular with investors. The problem is determining what an index is. The grandaddies of them all are the Standard & Poor’s 500, originally designed to reflect the largest public companies in the US, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was part of an investment theory developed by Charles Dow. Standard and Poor’s used its index to promote its data and rating services, while the Dow Theory helped promote the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s

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This week, the SEC dealt with some accounting fraud. In the two decades following the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, it’s been (relatively) rare, with executives at public companies choosing to get out in front of wrongdoing to avoid criminal charges and a lot of companies choosing to stay private rather than get caught up in the quarterly earnings chase

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Politicians like to sputter “but what about Chicago?” whenever there’s an outbreak of gun violence or political corruption in their community. The city looms large for its shootings (outsized because of our population) and its sleazy politicians, not for its art museums or Nobel Prize winners. But here’s the thing: The Art Institute of Chicago is an amazing museum. Any town can have corrupt politicians

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