Major stock indexes have given up much of their year-to-date gains after the past several days of selling. The year is days away from being half over, and the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index is up a few percentage points, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average is little changed for 2018.

As it stands today, roughly 12 million Baby Boomers own some type of small business, the combined value of which is roughly equal to $10 trillion. This comes at a time when the oldest of them have just crossed into their seventies.

Ten years ago Monday, a pair of Bear Stearns hedge funds that had gorged on subprime mortgage securities filed for bankruptcy, becoming the canaries in the coal mine for the global financial system that collapsed 15 months later.

Some call it altruistic investing. Others use adjectives like responsible, sustainable or social impact. The concept is to strategically choose where to invest so that you can have a positive effect while still making a profit.

Alan Brill has scoured computers for intelligence left by Iraqi forces retreating from Kuwait. He has probed a bank in Bosnia suspected of funding ethnically targeted mass murder. He has investigated the work of hackers who got inside the 2008 presidential campaign networks of Barack Obama and John McCain.

What’s on his radar now? Your kids.

How tech-savvy are you? Recent volatility in popular technology stocks, including Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google parent Alphabet and others, is a reminder to check the tech weighting in your retirement portfolio.

After almost a decade, Americans may finally be turning the corner on saving money. More than 30 percent of them say they have enough tucked away to cover six months’ worth of expenses — a seven-year high for this measure of financial calamity preparedness, a financial planning favorite.

With graduation gifts, it’s the thought that counts. The cash is nice, too. 

Californians are very generous. They donate about 2 percent of their income to charity, which amounted to more than $26 billion in 2013, according to the Urban Institute’s analysis of data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics. If you plan to support your favorite causes this year, consider these simple, tax-smart strategies that help your charitable dollars have more impact.

From police shootings to incidents like the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting, gun violence has been dominating news cycles in recent years. Additional virtual training could help civilians know how to respond in a hostile encounter.

Jason Fountaine, managing director of Gyro-Stabilized Systems in Nevada City, offers his insight into how new technologies are changing digital cinema.  For more from Fountaine, read “Reality Check,” in our March issue. Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll email you when it’s available online.

Are millions of Americans just forgetting to file their taxes this year?

A key Republican Senator is casting doubt on hopes for quick action to dismantle the Dodd-Frank Act or overhaul the U.S. mortgage-finance system, citing the need for bipartisan support in a Congress that seems to be far from providing it.

It seems 39 percent of millennials would rather disclose a preexisting sexually transmitted disease to a potential partner than reveal their debt, according to a survey of 2,000 millennials SoFi conducted, using online poller Survey Monkey. In addition, the survey found that serious debt was the second-biggest romantic deal-breaker, after workaholism.

Thinking about taking a job at a small company? Don’t expect a good retirement plan.

Last quarter was the slowest three-month period for drug company initial public offerings in four years, according to Bloomberg data. And in all of 2016, only 36 biotech and pharmaceutical companies went public in the U.S., according to data gathered by Bloomberg, compared with 68 in 2015 and a record 85 in 2014.

California will be forced to pay billions more in pension contributions for government employees after the state retirement system’s decision to lower its assumed rate of return.

Wells Fargo’s attempt to force aggrieved customers into closed-door arbitration over its fake-accounts scandal is drawing a legislative backlash in its home state of California and risks subjecting the bank to another round as a public punching bag.

Dayton, Ohio, gave the world the Wright Brothers and the electric cash register. As recently as 1990, manufacturing jobs there were the backbone of the local economy. But in the two decades since, the area has lost thousands of blue-collar jobs, and the local housing market still wears the scars of the foreclosure crisis.

Donald Trump wants American companies to bring trillions of dollars in offshore cash back home, arguing that the money could be used to fund a manufacturing renaissance.