Have you ever been to a Wall Street Christmas party?

I mean like a legit one, with everyone wearing three thousand dollar suits and stumbling through mountains of cocaine? I mean the old school ones from before Dodd-Frank and the credit crash when they used pick out their own live lobsters from a crystal tank and make them fight each other in a ring on the floor before boiling and eating them. I mean the parties that began at 6pm at Cipriani and ended in the VIP room at the club Marquee (which was itself a giant VIP room during the good old days) and then at one of Amy Sacco’s…

Social Media IPOs Take Honors in This Year’s Investing Fads List

Another year in the books and I’ve updated my Investing Fads and Themes by Year guide accordingly.  It begins with 1996 because that was my first summer working on The Street and my earliest exposure to the market.

So what was 2011 about?

Well, it was basically about Risk-On Risk-Off.  Stocks were the most correlated they’d been in 80 years and by the fall it was shown that 84% of S&P 500 stocks were moving in the same direction as the S&P 500 each day.

This meant that investors could skip out on doing…

The Apple iPod: The Device That Changed Everything

The below press release came out exactly ten years ago today.  It would change the world, my life and probably yours as well, the product that started it all…

Apple Presents iPod

Ultra-Portable MP3 Music Player Puts 1,000 Songs in Your Pocket

CUPERTINO, California—October 23, 2001—Apple® today introduced iPod™, a breakthrough MP3 music player that packs up to 1,000 CD-quality songs into an ultra-portable, 6.5 ounce design that fits in your pocket. iPod combines a major advance in portable music device design with…