Every three months, publicly traded companies report both their actual financial earnings and their expected prospects over the near future. Investors closely watch these reports for signs of promise or trouble, in a ritual not unlike reading tea leaves. But with the COVID-19 crisis upending business plans left and right, interpreting those leaves is more challenging than ever.

Millions of investors have heard the same two pieces of retirement advice: your portfolio should be split 60/40 between stocks and bonds, and you should plan on withdrawing no more than 4% of your savings annually after leaving work. Following those rules may have been wise in the past, but experts say they don’t hold up in today’s world of staggeringly low interest rates.

While this year’s tax deadlines have been delayed for 90 days, returns will still need filing out eventually. Fortunately, at a time when cash flow is so iffy, there are a number of programs that can help you calculate or file your taxes for free.

For retailers, old is, increasingly, becoming the new new. With retail industry revenue growing at a modest 4% a year, some brands are finding triple-digit growth by selling used goods that appeal to bargain hunters and eco-friendly consumers alike.

For decades, bonds have offered a kind of fallout shelter for jittery investors in uncertain times. But recently, the bond market has looked more like the tip of a warhead aimed at their portfolios.

A funny thing has happened since Vanguard set up its first index fund in 1976: Most active mutual funds have underperformed the broader market over the past 20 years, while continuing to charge investors high fees for the privilege. Meanwhile, the Vanguard 500 Index Fund how has nearly half a trillion dollars in assets under management.

As yet another tax-filing deadline approaches, taxpayers who want to maximize their return (or minimize how much they owe Uncle Sam) would be wise to get familiar with a handful of key changes taking effect this year. The good news is the tax code didn’t undergo a massive overhaul in 2019.

The aggregate cost of the outage on northern California businesses has yet to be tallied. But the final tally could be far different: many populated areas were in the dark for less than half that time; and that figure does not include costs of, for example, spoiled foods at restaurants and grocery stores.

In some notable ways, the IPO market isn’t quite what it used to be. These six influential offerings show how trends in raising corporate capital are evolving, as well as how tastes among investors have also shifted over time.

Banks are especially sensitive to interest rates because they collect higher interest from loans, while offering lower interest for deposits. With interest rates overall falling, it's gotten harder for banks to eke out significant profits from their interest-dependent business lines. That's the bad news for shareholders. The good news is that some of the conglomerate banks are finding other ways to make money.

CEO departures rose 12% year-on-year to 1,480, only four exits shy of the record set in 2008, during the turmoil of the global financial crisis. But unlike 2008, this isn’t a period of eco­nomic turbulence.

In a decade when FOMO became a widely acknowledged malady, there's always this uncomfortable itch that needs to be scratched—the perverse knowledge of what we could have earned had we been gifted ten years ago a magic crystal ball that revealed what the ten best performing stocks of the decade would be trading at today.

Here's a look back on some of the most notable acts of whistleblowing in the past several decades. While some have been celebrated in film, including Oscar-nominated performances by Meryl Streep and Russell Crowe, the more common fate for whistleblowers is to have their lives turned upside down in the form of job losses, court battles, and personal debt.

The 2010s were a busy time for mergers and acquisitions. As the global economy recovered from the biggest financial shock since the Great Depression, the healthiest companies emerged ready to swoop with big-dollar deals. All in all, the 2010s a 25% rise in M&A transactions worldwide.

When Marcus Baker’s grandfather asked him to be executor of his will and a successor trustee of his trust, Marcus didn’t hesitate. The two had long confided in each other about various investment opportunities. When his grandfather passed away, however, Marcus discovered that the trust’s structure and the estate itself were far more complex than he had anticipated.

If shipping giant FedEx is often regarded as a canary in the global economy coal mine, this canary is looking a little peaked.

This member-only article was unlocked for you by Kevin Kelleher. Unlock expires 1 day, 23 hours from now. For unlimited access to all of Pando, become a Pando member for just $10 a month. For decades, Silicon Valley venture capital has operated on the principle that bigger is not always better. The dot-com bust left seasoned VCs with scars that still serve as a reminder that simply throwing money into emerging technologies isn't enough – it's identifying, and nurturing, the promising startups that works best.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, the automobile — that most American of possessions — is being remade. Self-driving cars from Google’s new Waymo subsidiary will hit the streets next year. Tesla’s fully automated cars will arrive in 2018. Uber is testing its own self-driving fleet in Pittsburgh. More than a dozen other companies have AI-powered vehicles in the works. Conspicuously left out out from the self-driving car boom has been Japanese auto makers.

For some retirees, it may be time to retire the word retirement. For the decade ending in 2024, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a 55% rise in labor participation among those 65 to 74 years old and an 86% increase for those 75 and older—compared with an increase of just 5% for the labor force as a whole during the same period.

Since launching Goop in 2008, actress Gwyneth Paltrow has been a divisive presence in the burgeoning wellness industry. Her comments in a Wall Street Journal Magazine profile, in which she claimed claimed credit for making yoga popular, may end up making that ambivalence even stronger.