Imagine, for a moment, an investor who bought stock in Sears, Roebuck & Co. in the middle of 1993 — the last year the company produced its signature Big Book catalog — and then forgot about it until now.

At that moment a bit more than two decades ago, Sears had just recently lost its status as largest U.S. retailer to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), but was still a dominant mall anchor and one-stop Main Street department store. The company had also built a “financial supermarket” of insurance, lending and investment businesses. The stock by then had been in the Dow Jones Industrial Average for seven decades. It was close to the definition of a conservative, blue-chip stock.

As every shopper and all investors know well, the subsequent two decades have been a steady, steep decline for Sears, which, along with Kmart, forms the present-day Sears Holdings Inc. (SHLD). The core retail operations have been marginalized by Home Depot Inc. (HD), Target Corp. (TGT) and other, younger big-box chains,

Sometimes profane and frequently combative, Carl Icahn long ago established he has no strong desire to be loved. But he seems intent on demanding a bit of respect — both for himself and his life’s work of activist investing.

As his publicly traded investment vehicle Icahn Enterprises LP (IEP) reported strong quarterly results Monday, thanks mostly to his investing profits, Icahn offered a vigorous defense of his high-pressure approach to forcing corporate action for the benefit of today’s shareholders.

In a press release statement (which Icahn flagged to his Twitter followers as being “of interest to all shareholders), Icahn asserted, “I believe that by far the best method to utilize in investing is the ‘Activist’ model. I have spent a great deal of time and effort perfecting its use and I am happy to say that IEP has been a beneficiary of this.”

This is true: Icahn Enterprises partnership shares (which represent ownership in some Icahn investment funds and a few wholly owned energy

Some of the cool-kid CEOs have taken to talking down their companies’ frothy-looking stocks. Is this about to become a trend, with other business honchos attempting to tamp down speculative momentum for stocks riding high on investor excitement?

Reed Hastings of Netflix Inc. (NFLX) and Elon Musk at Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA) each recently sprinkled some verbal cold water on true-believer investors who've propelled their stocks up 256% and 379%, respectively, this year.

In his quarterly investor letter accompanying the video-streaming company’s strong results last week, Hastings gently cautioned on the shares, trading at 100-times 2014 forecast profits: “In calendar year 2003 we were the highest-performing stock on Nasdaq. We had solid results compounded by momentum-investor-fueled euphoria. Some of the euphoria today feels like 2003.”

The stock opened strong the next day, but has since declined close to 10% from before the report, after it was disclosed that investor Carl Icahn had

Could the fix for our convoluted, hyper-fast stock market be something as old-fashioned as nickels and dimes?

Payphone calls cost five cents until 1951. The first Superman comic book carried a 10-cent cover price in 1938. And the idea of trading stocks in wider “tick sizes,” such as five or 10 cents, has been in the Wall Street air almost since the moment the exchanges and the Securities and Exchange Commission implemented “decimalization” in 2001, mandating that most stocks be quoted in penny increments. This ended the days of fractional trading in sixteenths and eighths of a dollar.

Now one of the biggest investment houses, Citigroup Inc. (C), has filed a formal comment letter with the SEC suggesting a pilot program to test five- and 10-cent wide trading increments in some smaller, less-liquid and very high-priced stocks.

“We believe wider tick sizes would help enhance liquidity and therefore we support a tick size pilot program with such a measurable goal, one that can be evaluated at

The Street is cheering Corning Inc. (GLW) on Wednesday, lifting shares more than 13% to above $17 on news it will take control of its LCD joint venture with Samsung Electronics Co., which in turn will make investments that give the South Korean electronics giant an effective 7.4% stake in Corning.

A venerable, patient company, Corning has operated at the pace of scientific inquiry for 160 years. With its deals struck with Samsung, Corning has shown it is also capable of moving to the quicker rhythms demanded by Wall Street.

Samsung’s $2.3 billion financial investment in convertible preferred shares implicitly values Corning on paper at $31 billion, some 25% above its current market value. The deal also liberates close to $2 billion in cash that sits at the joint venture, which Corning will use to repurchase more shares, and comes along with a 10-year LCD glass-supply agreement, signaling a greater role for Corning in developing future Samsung products. The venture also supplies

Investors have been waiting more than two weeks for overdue economic data held hostage to the 16-day federal shutdown. But even after such an unwelcome delay, is Wall Street prepared for a potentially strong jobs report on Tuesday?

From the very start of the government shutdown and Congressional dithering on a debt-ceiling increase, Wall Street has been fixated on what it sees as a silver lining to the fiscal follies: The Federal Reserve will likely wait to reduce its monetary stimulus efforts until well into 2014, according to the emerging consensus.

This makes perfect sense, given all we know about Fed policymakers’ thinking. In refusing to pare back its $85 billion in bond buying in September, the FOMC cited the potential drag on growth from fiscal disruptions — which now appears to have been presciently appropriate. The policy committee also suggested the housing recovery had not been sufficiently stress-tested by slightly higher mortgage rates to begin withdrawing its

Since Obamacare became law in 2010, big retail chains have been prominent among the private employers shunting workers off their insurance rolls and onto public health care exchanges. Home Depot (HD) and Trader Joe’s each announced such plans in recent months for part-timers.

Costco Wholesale (COST), though, went the other direction, creating a partnership last year with Aetna (AET) to offer personal-insurance plans designed to be cheaper than at the state exchanges.

While most retail executives are vocal in their opposition to a higher minimum wage, Costco CEO Craig Jelinek came out in favor of lifting it – a stance that echoes the warehouse-club’s longtime policy of paying its employees a starting wage well above the legal minimum.

One of the few complaints Wall Street has ever lodged against Costco – among the best-performing consumer companies of recent decades – is that it gives its employees and customers too good a deal. While sales growth has been stellar throughout the

Here’s a timely warning for investors navigating this earnings season: The friendlier the analysts are who get to ask company executives questions on conference calls, the more shareholders should worry.

Happy talk between corporate honchos and the Wall Street analysts who cover their companies is a regular, often grating element of quarterly Q&A; sessions. But according to a recent study by Harvard Business School researchers, all those “congratulations on a great quarter” and lobbed softball questions are more than just an annoyance to skeptical investors listening in -- they are more likely to be obscuring negative company developments that eventually emerge to hurt the stock.

In “Playing Favorites: How Firms Prevent the Revelation of Bad News,” HBS associate professors Lauren Cohen and Christopher Malloy, along with Dong Lou of the London School of Economics, find evidence that companies that “cast” their conference calls by taking questions only from analysts with positive ratings