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Views/Blog

APPLYING PRACTICAL INSIGHT TO
COMPLEX FINANCIAL CONCEPTS

Karen Firestone has spent over thirty years honing skills applied to
the investment world, while at the same time navigating a path through the work/familyscape. She considers many issues from an unusual angle, including stock market movement, factors facing professional women today, and how to think in simple terms about some complex financial structures. Karen shares her observations in posts that also appear in the Harvard Business Review and Huffington Post. As the CEO of Aureus Asset Management, a former fund manager at Fidelity Investments, and the mother of four grown children, Karen has a rare perspective into which she injects humor and some irreverence.

HBR: How Investors Have Reacted to the Business Roundtable Statement

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When the U.S. Business Roundtable announced that it was redefining the purpose of a corporation to accommodate a broader group of stakeholders – extending beyond shareholders to include employees, customers, suppliers and communities – the stock market didn’t seem to react. I saw no thick reports from market strategists detailing how these new principles would affect company…

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CNBC: Here’s why this week’s rotation from winners to losers won’t last

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If you’ve recently watched sixty seconds on any financial news network or read the business section of any publication, you’ve now heard about the vicious “rotation” occurring this week in the stock market, from growth to value, momentum to cyclical, or any other two dissimilar groups that would suggest an intentional trade by millions of…

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The Common Risks in Trade War and Social Media

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Written by Kari Firestone We all know, deep down, that there is no “free lunch.” The most obvious case of this are the lunches that all buy side investors are invited to featuring the management of companies that are going public or already public. If you are not a client of the hosting firm, you…

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WSJ: As Global Order Crumbles, Risks of Recession Grow

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The countries who have tended to focus on their protectionism – US, England, several European countries, definitely not China – seem to be the ones where there is a fear, real or induced by politicians, that the working class is losing out because of globalization.  This fear is either due to “foreigners” that are taking…

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CNBC: Investor Karen Firestone: How Vanguard could potentially shake up this closed market

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Vanguard, the non-profit financial giant that single-handedly revolutionized the investment management world, reportedly wants to join the private equity party train. Is this another market that it intends to overhaul by passively managing and micro-pricing index fund offerings to the masses, or is Vanguard worried about missing a possibly overheated market that its clients find sexier than…

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