Rochester Business Journal Leading source of business news and information in Rochester, N.Y.

Mutual funds are essentially a 1920s innovation. The modern mutual fund dates back to 1924 with the creation of the Massachusetts Investors Trust by the company now known as MFS Investment Management. But the mutual fund’s antecedents reach back much ...

Tagged with: David Peartree The Informed Investor

History is a little sketchy here, but Australians claim this tradition of wearing numbers in team sports can be traced to a rugby match in the Land Down Under just before the start of the 20th century. It took us ...

Tagged with: On Sports Scott Pitoniak

“The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.”–Mohammed Data, informatics, data analytics, financial analysis, benchmarking, key performance indicators—the continued rapid advancement in technology capabilities (e.g., Apple sold 217 million iPhones last year) has resulted ...

Tagged with: Gerald Archibald Non-profit Management

Philip Seymour Hoffman. Prince. Tom Petty. Heath Ledger. John Belushi. Janis Joplin. All celebrities who died of an opioid overdose. The list goes on and on. It seems like the opioid crisis is always in the news, and for good ...

Tagged with: On Health Travis Heider

Marv Levy would pose the question just before games kicked off in the stadium then known as Rich. With his Buffalo Bills players huddled around him, the legendary coach would bellow above the roar of 80,000 vociferous spectators: “Where else ...

Tagged with: On Sports Scott Pitoniak

“What gives with weird job titles? We are adding a new tech-related role in our office and people are worried that we won’t draw the right type of candidate if we don’t give it a really cool name. Since when ...

Tagged with: Kathleen Driscoll Managers at Work

In his book “The Tipping Point,” Malcolm Gladwell observes: “The best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise ...

Tagged with: Business Ethics Jim Nortz

  In the exceedingly low interest rate environment we’ve witnessed over the last 10 years, high yield debt has been the No. 1 performing category in the fixed income assets class, cumulatively returning 122.1 percent from 12/31/07 through 8/31/18, according ...

There was a moment there in late August, when the Boston Red Sox were slumping and the New York Yankees were surging, and it appeared that maybe, just maybe, 1978 was about to repeat itself. That was the unforgettable year ...

Tagged with: On Sports Scott Pitoniak

New York state has followed the example of six other states by allowing its local governments to use an administrative tool called Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) to gather the buying power of their residents and small businesses to contract for ...

Many industries, and particularly those in creative and tech fields like the advertising industry Dixon Schwabl works in, struggle to fill creative positions with women and people of color—especially creative leadership positions. And it’s not just in the United States. ...

Tagged with: great workplaces Lauren Dixon

As part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Congress created a new and much-publicized passthrough deduction, designed to provide owners of non-corporate entities with benefits similar to the reduced tax rates for corporations. Determining who would receive the benefit—already ...

Tagged with: Josh Gewolb Taxing Matters

The Rochester economy contracted slightly in 2017, according to newly released data by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Real gross domestic product—the inflation-adjusted value of goods and services produced in the metro area—declined by 0.4 percent.    This compares to a ...

Resplendent in his trademark “victory red polo,” Tiger Woods won a PGA tournament late Sunday afternoon for the first time in 1,876 days. NBC executives were ecstatic because a Tiger in the hunt is the ratings equivalent of a hole-in-one. ...

The IRS recently approved an employer’s proposal to offer a “student loan repayment nonelective contribution” under its 401(k) plan. The ruling provides welcome guidance to plan sponsors seeking to provide employees with the opportunity to save for retirement while repaying ...

Tagged with: Jeremy J. Wolk law