LOS ANGELES - For art to flourish in a city, it helps to have well-off individuals and institutions with a desire to keep and exhibit it. Diverse, lively, colorful neighborhoods also come in handy, and if they have plenty of room for reasonably priced studio and gallery space, so much the better. You might not find Los Angeles near the top of a list of global art hotbeds, at least not yet. But it features all of these ingredients - plus nice weather - so there is growing appreciation of the...

The top art auction houses had a carefree and comfortable time of it for most of the first couple of centuries of their existence, but lately they have been hustling to adjust to a radical transformation of their industry. New digital technology and new customers with new attitudes in new places, along with new competition from deft and nimble upstarts eager to cater to them, have forced the dominant companies, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, to develop new ways to do business. They are responding...

The British are going! Maybe. A referendum to determine whether Britain will leave the European Union has been set for June 23. Until voters decide whether they would rather be in or out, investors will have to decide whether to be in or out of assets in Britain and other parts of Europe. Neither decision will be easy. The referendum outcome is a tossup in polls, and analysts are divided on whether the country would be better off in or out of the 28-nation bloc. As for the markets, British...

Shutterstock/tanewpix You can use exchange-traded funds to express a view on the stock market. You can also use ETFs to suggest a market view in the first place. One of the biggest points in favor of buying stocks in the last few years has been the prevalence of buybacks. If companies are purchasing their own shares, the thinking goes, it provides two forms of support. Buybacks raise earnings per share by reducing the “per share” part of the fraction as the same earnings are divided by a...

When the British voted in a referendum to leave the European Union, it clouded the political outlook across the region, and that made the economic and investment outlook far murkier, too. It’s still too early to tell, even three months after the vote, how much of an impact the so-called Brexit is likely to have on economic and business conditions, investment advisers say. Calm has been restored, they acknowledge, but they warn that long-term risks remain in Europe, Britain most of all, for...