Joseph Pisani

Amazon, the internet goliath that revolutionized the way much of the world buys books, toilet paper and TVs, hit a new milestone Tuesday. Its stock surpassed the $1,000 mark for the first time. That price put Amazon’s market value at about $478 billion, double that of the world’s biggest traditional retailer, Wal-Mart, and more than 15 times the size of Target. A $1,000 investment on Amazon’s first day of trading in 1997 would be worth more than $500,000 today. Not only has Amazon changed the retail landscape since it became a public company 20 years ago, it’s now part...

Women CEOs earned big bucks last year, but there’s still very few of them running the world’s largest companies. The median pay for a female CEO was $13.1 million last year, up 9 percent from 2015, according to an analysis by executive data firm Equilar and The Associated Press. By comparison, male CEOs earned $11.4 million, also up 9 percent. But the number of women in CEO roles has barely budged. Just 6 percent of the top paid CEOs in the U.S. last year were women, according to the Equilar and AP analysis, a slight increase from about 5...

Want to save some cash while holiday shopping? The best tool can be a smartphone packed with the right apps. Some apps give you coupons you can hand to the cashier to scan, while others let you flip through advertising deals and promotions. Others let you scan barcodes at the store and check if there are cheaper options online. I found four apps to recommend after testing more than a dozen over the past month. All four are easy to use and nicely designed. Before you hit the mall, though, you might want to turn off notifications for these...

NEW YORK, N.Y. – It’s a shopper’s nightmare: Buying something, then seeing it cheaper at another store. Thanks to price-comparison apps, there’s no need to guess if you’re getting the lowest price. All you need is a smartphone and some downloaded apps. Smartphone owners have been using the price-comparison apps for the past couple of years. But they’ve improved a lot recently. They’re faster and easier to use than earlier versions. They’ve become a bigger threat to retailers who don’t want customers using their stores as showrooms. I have been using Amazon.com Inc.’s price-checking app for about a year...