The Market Structure Map
November 27, 2013
Happy Thanksgiving! Here’s a phrase Karen’s grandmother coined that you may find useful this time of year: “We ate to dullness.” Since many of you are appropriately absent this week from the IR chair (or whichever office you occupy), we’ll revisit past turf. Among the...
November 20, 2013
In the timeless 1987 movie The Princess Bride, Vizzini the Sicilian, played riotously with a lisp by Wallace Shawn, keeps declaring things “inconceivable!” Swordsman Inigo Montoya, portrayed then by Homeland’s Mandy Patinkin, finally says, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means...
November 13, 2013
Today a new era begins. One day in May 1792, 24 brokers gathered beneath a buttonwood tree in lower New York City and agreed to confederate in conducting their stock-in-trade. Thus began the New York Stock Exchange. Today, the NYSE is slated to cease trading...
November 6, 2013
We were in Kansas again. We set a personal record, visiting the state twice last week. Even Wichita is nice this time of year, as this photo shows Saturday from our downtown Hyatt Regency room on the Arkansas River – don’t ask me why that...
October 30, 2013
We were in King Soopers and they were out of lemons. For those of you elsewhere in the country and world, King Soopers is a Kroger-run grocery chain and I’m sure you’re thinking as I did when I first saw one, “Who names a store...
October 23, 2013
Everybody is talking about the weather. Why doesn’t somebody do something? This witticism on human futility is often attributed to Mark Twain but traces to Twain’s friend and collaborator Charles Dudley Warner. A century later, it’s still funny. There’s a lot of hand-wringing going on...