Shareholder meetings are not usually the occasion for utter candor - or for that matter, arch sarcasm - by chief executives.

Companies buy customers when they cannot win new business on their own. They merge when their executives do not have a better idea of what to do.

Beware of the egos of chief executives,

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.

Soldiers willingly, sometimes foolishly, risk their own lives to keep their comrades out of enemy hands.

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.