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Short sellers sell stock they have borrowed, hoping to buy it back later when its price has fallen.
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For investors who do want to speculate in high-yield bonds, one alternative may be a junk bond mutual fund, which can offer investors the relative safety of diversification.
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As they grow, companies saturate their markets, become more complex and difficult to manage, and face larger and more entrenched competitors.
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As the Nasdaq soared in 1999 and early 2000, demand for many offerings far exceeded the supply of shares available at the initial offering price.
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Most unfortunately, Enron's plunge into bankruptcy court also cost many of its rank-and-file employees their savings.
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Big swings in the wholesale price of electricity are not unusual in the summer, when high demand taxes generators' ability to supply power.
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Did anyone in the White House or the N.S.A or the C.I.A. consider flying to Hong Kong and treating Mr. Snowden like a human being, offering him a chance to testify before Congress and a fair trial?
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One of the Internet's highest-profile companies, Priceline once dreamed of transforming the way consumer goods are bought and sold by offering customers the chance to 'name your own price' for a variety of products, including airline tickets.
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Evidence of defendants' lavish lifestyles is often used to provide a motive for fraud. Jurors sometimes wonder why an executive making tens of millions of dollars would cheat to make even more. Evidence of habitual gluttony helps provide the answer.
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In market valuation, Yahoo is worth about as much Walt Disney and the News Corporation combined.
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Volatility may be rising simply because investors must digest more information every day.
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Technology investment drove growth in the 1990s, both directly and by fueling a rising stock market that led to increased consumer spending.
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Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data.
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For chat-room tyros who expect to make their first million day-trading by age 27, paging through the Sunday newspaper with a pair of scissors just to save a couple of cents on Cheetos seems so, well, old economy.
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Investors have been too willing to buy stocks with strong reported earnings, even if they do not understand how the earnings are produced.
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For a developing country, average long-run growth of 5 percent a year per capita is excellent, and 7 percent is stellar.
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Mr. Snowden did not start out as a spy, and calling him one bends the term past recognition. Spies don't give their secrets to journalists for free.
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Normally, banks record profits on loans only as they are repaid, whether they securitize the loans or hold them on their books.
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Most of America never noticed, but the 1990s were good times for trailer homes, a.k.a. manufactured housing. From 1991 to 1998, annual sales of manufactured homes more than doubled, to 374,000 from 174,000.
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Never underestimate the power of Abby Joseph Cohen.
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Plumbing is usually boring.
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In a Ponzi scheme, a promoter pays back his initial investors with money he has raised from new investors. Eventually, the promoter can no longer find enough new investors to pay off the people who have already put up money, and the scheme collapses.
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Would-be drug companies must either produce medicines that stand up to federal scrutiny, demonstrate that their data has value to other companies, or go out of business.
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For a spy novelist like me, the Edward J. Snowden story has everything. A man driven by ego and idealism - can anyone ever distinguish the two? - leaves his job and his beautiful girlfriend behind. He must tell the world the Panopticon has arrived. His masters vow to punish him, and he heads for Moscow in a desperate search for refuge.