Investing

The first time the Obama administration did a hatchet job on Boeing (NYSE: BA), it was just business. This time, it feels ... personal.

Well, that could have been embarrassing. Pfizer (NYSE: PFE)
bought Wyeth in large part for one of its top-selling products --
pneumococcal vaccine Prevnar. Now, just a month later, the newly merged
pharmaceutical giant faces a potential disappointment over the
product's next generation, Prevnar 13. Fortunately, the vaccine seems
to have slipped through its Food and Drug Administration advisory
committee unscathed.

You probably know that most managed stock funds underperform the overall stock market. You can bypass that danger by investing in index funds. Or you can seek out the relatively few funds with above-average records and prospects.

Between shareholder-friendly stocks expected to underperform the market, and highfliers that pay little heed to their owners' interests, you'll find top-flight companies that also treat their shareholders with respect.

Together, we are all trying to build our fortune by finding well-run
companies at bargain-basement prices. But it takes work -- scouring
company earnings reports, scrutinizing key data, and assessing the
competition.

Together, we are all trying to build our fortune by finding well-run
companies at bargain-basement prices. But it takes work -- scouring
company earnings reports, scrutinizing key data, and assessing the
competition.

Now that AT&T has been shot down in its attempts to get Verizon
Wireless to take down its "there's a map for that ads" promoting
greater 3G coverage, it's rolling out its own attack ads.

Guest columnist Alice Schroeder is author of The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. Schroeder is a noted insurance industry analyst and writer who was a managing director at Morgan Stanley.

A year and a half ago, I thought I was seeing double in the solar space. Two solar reports -- those of Canadian Solar (Nasdaq: CSIQ) and Solarfun Power (Nasdaq: SOLF) -- were just uncannily similar. Here's how the numbers stacked up back then:

At The Motley Fool, we poke plenty of fun at Wall Street analysts and
their endless cycle of upgrades, downgrades, and "initiating coverage
at neutral." So you might think we'd be the last people to give virtual
ink to such "news." And we would be -- if that were all we were doing.