Forbes: Schlonging the Dragon: Three Essays To Get You Into B-School

By SIMON CONSTABLE

If you want to go to B-school you can write an essay which details every certificate you ever earned or every piece of paper you once shuffled. You could spend six months crafting something with many caveats and weasel words about what you did.

Alternatively, you could learn to tell a story. Compelling tales capture the imagination in 

ways that simply listing a series of events cannot. Here are three examples. In the first two cases, you will need to adapt the narrative to your specific work situation. Shoehorn your story into these templates.

The third essay is self explanatory and probably not applicable to most people.

Read more here.

Forbes: Worst Boss Part 9

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Part nine of a continuing series, which outlines how you too can be an appalling manager. Read part eight here.

To be supportive to your employees means that sometimes you must prevent them from hurting themselves. Such interventions can also sometimes cause your department to suffer. Still, it's what a compassionate person does.

Of course, as a potential "worst boss possible" you shouldn't be so caring. Instead, you should exploit your workers at a time when they really need help and compassion. Read more here.

Photo by Hayley Maxwell on Unsplash

U.S. News: Is the End in Sight for the Natural Gas Slide?

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Investors hoping for a turnaround in natural gas prices may have to wait until the second half of the year, at the earliest. 

Prices for the commodity, which is used for heating homes, power generation and to make plant food, have been in a downtrend for almost two years. Front-month futures contracts were recently trading at $2.188 per million British thermal units on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The last major peak in prices was in February 2014 at more than $8, according to the Energy Information Administration. 

Reasons for the rout are legion and include the global decline in commodity demand, increases in supply from new techniques of extraction and a strong U.S. dollar, which makes all dollar dominated materials cheaper. 

Read more here.

Forbes: Snow Day Money Tasks!

By SIMON CONSTABLE

East coast snowpocaplyse shouldn’t become a wasted day. Quite the contrary. It presents the perfect opportunity to review (and plan) your financial life for the year ahead. Instead of binge-watching “Breaking Bad” or the “Making of a Murderer,” tackle these tasks first, then reward yourself with a movie later in the day. Read more here.

Photo by Fabian Mardi on Unsplash

OZY: An Investing Legend on the Global Market Woes

By SIMON CONSTABLE

The bears are coming. Bear markets, that is. Already, stocks in the U.K., France and Japan have plummeted more than 20 percent from their highs in 2015, which is traditionally seen as bear market territory, while U.S. equities have had their worst start to a year on record. 

But you don’t see investing legend and Princeton University economist Burton Malkiel hitting the panic button. In a recent sit-down with OZY, the author of the best-selling investment classic A Random Walk Down Wall Street remained calm as he discussed global stock swings, China’s slowdown and positive prospects for the future of the U.S. economy — as evidenced by what we’ll call the Chewbacca or C-3PO effect. Read more here.

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U.S. News: Why Mutual Funds Lost Their Mojo

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Staying power usually means a lot on Wall Street. But apparently when it comes to mutual funds, hardly any portfolio managers have such mojo. 

Mutual funds with managers who pick securities rather than follow an index – so-called actively managed funds – seem to have little or no ability to stay ahead of the competition, even for periods as short as five years.

"Over a longer-term investment horizon, it is very, very hard for a manager to maintain a top quartile performance," says Aye Soe, senior director of global research and design at S&P Dow Jones Indices.

Read more here.

OZY: When Trade School Meets Wall Street

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Imagine a scene of industrial lathes spinning, sparks flying from a welding torch and flames shooting up from workbenches. It’s a classic industrial workshop, just like the one where I studied for five years during high school in northern England. In a sense, it was like a trade school. We were learning the skills for the workplace, but the relevant jobs had mostly disappeared before we even finished. Now, it’s relevant again, because of increasing calls to encourage more studying at trade school rather than college. Read more here.

TheStreet: Why a Higher Minimum Wage Will Make Workers Poorer

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Sometimes you get two pieces of news so at odds with each other that it defies logic.

The last few days of the old year combined with the first few days of 2016 brought such a mind-muddling mess. On the one hand, 14 states started to implement higher minimum wage requirements on Jan. 1, with the goal of reducing income inequality. Read more here.

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Forbes: GE Heads North And Why You May Get A Deal On A Conn. House

By SIMON CONSTABLE
It’s official: General Electric GE +0.00% is retreating from Connecticut and relocating its headquarters to Boston.

CEO Jeff Immelt says it’s a move to get it closer to an “ecosystem that shares our aspirations.” That and be near all those amazing universities in Cambridge, etc. It makes sense given that the Boston beltway is something of a Silicon Valley of the East.

I guess Yale University being in Connecticut just didn’t sway the powers that be. Still, the move could be good for house hunters looking for a deal in the nutmeg state. Read more here.

TheStreet: 7 Reasons You Should Love -- Or At Least Like -- the Market's Slide

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Ouch. Financial markets' performance this year has been nothing short of painful for many investors.

Chances are, you're still feeling the sting of 6% drops by both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Standard & Poor's 500 last week. It was, in fact, the worst start to a New Year ever for the S&P. There are nonetheless some good reasons to embrace the volatility, though:

Read more here.

U.S. News: Why China's Market Woes Will Hurt Some Emerging Markets

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Ouch! China has unleashed a financial typhoon on world markets. 

It's true that U.S. stocks got broadly hammered. But the real issue won't be how China's slowing economy affects the U.S. – because it likely won't.

Rather, the big impact will be felt by emerging market economies that have historically relied heavily on commodity exports, as well as some non-emerging markets that bet big on the materials business. 

Read more here.

OZY: How China's Money Mess Helps the U.S.

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Assuming he wasn’t much of a markets investor, baseball great Yogi Berra might have taken some odd pleasure in watching the financial markets unfold lately if only to repeat his famous goofy line: It was “déjà vu all over again.” We are talking, of course, about the recent meltdown in China, followed by a pretty nasty start to the year on Wall Street, where investors couldn’t have been pleased by an apparent repeat of August’s China-led stock pullback.

But investors are always looking for silver linings, and some may yet find theirs. At least some folks are promising, hoping and praying as much — that roiling markets in China might make for hay in the United States and elsewhere. What’s more, they could be right. Read more here.

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WSJ: What Is a Reversal vs. Correction?

By SIMON CONSTABLE

What is the difference between a reversal and a correction? 

It could matter a lot if you are trading.

By Wall Street’s rule of thumb, a correction is generally defined as a pullback in a market or index of 10% or more. More colloquially, it means that the underlying trend, either up or down, remains in place. In short, a correction is a temporary blip. Read more here.

WSJ: Commodity Funds Fall Short, Study Says

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Sobering news for investors in specialty-commodity mutual funds: On average, they fall short on key measures, new research has found.

“These categories of funds have not been able to consistently create positive net alphas for their investors over longer time periods,” the report states. Alpha is a measure of the value fund managers add to the investment process when adjusted for risk factors such as volatility.

Read more here.

TheStreet: Mom and Pop Dumped $100 Billion From Stock Mutual Funds Starting Last April

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Mom and Pop investors are dumping stocks in a way not seen in years. It's probably a bullish sign for the major market indices, if history is anything to go by.

Every month from April through Dec. 30 last year, mutual fund investors yanked money from mutual funds focused on foreign and domestic stocks, according to the latest estimates from the Investment Company Institute.

The total outflows over that period adds to a hefty $98.1 billion, a total which is unlikely to being meaningfully changed when the final day's trading (Dec. 31) is added in. 

Read more here.

OZY: The Good-Bad-Ugly Of The Global Economy

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Picture yourself at the racetrack, where two vehicles drive past you. One is a monster-size truck moving along at a steady and measured pace, gently accelerating. The second is a small sports car, which appears to zoom past at high speed. But, as you watch more closely, you begin to notice the car is actually slowing down compared with the truck — so much that you wonder whether it’ll go into reverse. That scene of an acceleration on the one hand and a slowdown on the other is similar to how the global economy will move this year, as far as economists can tell, and there’ll be a world of difference economically depending on where you are. Read more here.

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U.S. News: Why the Dollar Will Surge Again

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Get ready for another rally for the U.S. dollar. It's what economists call "policy divergence," and it means investors will pour their money into greenbacks. Here's how it will work and how investors could profit. 

The Federal Reserve, which is the central bank for the U.S., is expected to have policies that will increasingly diverge from those of the world's other major central banks, such as the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan. 

In the simplest terms, the Fed will continue to increase the cost of borrowing money, while most of the rest of the world will either lower their short-term lending rates or leave them unchanged. Read more here.

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Forbes: How To Be The Worst Boss Possible Part 8

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Part eight of a continuing series, which outlines how you too can be an appalling manager. Read part seven here.

A big part of being a good boss is having your employees view you in high regard.

Likewise, the trick if you want to be a bad boss is to abandon any effort in that direction. When you lose the respect of your team you will ultimately head down a road that will lead to you doing the sorts of things that will put you in the running for ”worse boss possible.”

However, that can be a rather long process.

For fast results, wear a wig. 

Read more here.