Alex Berenson Stock Quotations

Insider trading is hard to prove. To be convicted, a person must have bought or sold a stock based on material information that is both unknown to the general public and likely to have had an important effect on a company's stock price.

On the New York Stock Exchange, all buy and sell orders are routed through a single 'specialist,' guaranteeing that most small trades can be matched directly. But most larger trades are delivered to the specialist on the floor of the exchange by human brokers, a system that big investors view as increasingly inefficient.

Institutions like mutual funds often worry that if they disclose their plans to buy a stock, copycats will move quickly and drive up the stock before the purchase is completed.

At any moment, one company stands in the spotlight of the middle ring in the stock market's never-ending circus. It may not be the biggest corporation in the world, or the most profitable, but somehow it both mirrors and leads the market's broader action.

It's one of the fundamental principles of the stock market: When interest rates go up, stocks go down. And along with financial companies and cyclicals, technology companies - with their sky-high price-to-earnings multiples - should be among the biggest losers in an environment of rising rates.

Technology investment drove growth in the 1990s, both directly and by fueling a rising stock market that led to increased consumer spending.

The details of the personal expenses that executives put on the company tab often are not known because loopholes in federal disclosure rules let publicly traded companies generally avoid disclosing the perks they give executives along with pay and stock options.

The stock prices of networking equipment companies like Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks sometimes seem as if they are priced for perpetual success.

Short sellers sell stock they have borrowed, hoping to buy it back later when its price has fallen.

The biggest profit center for investment banks is the hefty fees they charge for underwriting stock offerings and giving financial advice, and analysts put those profits at risk if they publish negative conclusions about the companies that pay the fees.

John W. Snow was paid more than $50 million in salary, bonus and stock in his nearly 12 years as chairman of the CSX Corporation, the railroad company. During that period, the company's profits fell, and its stock rose a bit more than half as much as that of the average big company.