Did a Big Bet Help Trigger ‘Black Swan’ Stock Swoon? – WSJ.com. “Normally there can be hundreds of offers to buy the iShares Russell 1000 Growth Index exchange-traded fund, but at 2:46 p.m., there were just four bids north of $14 for a fund that had been trading at $51 minutes earlier”. So basically all liquidity in the market is hedge fund robots.

How to buy in to Warren Buffett – The Globe and Mail. they’re splitting the Berkshire B class shares 50-to-1.

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups – Vimeo. 20 minute talk about the last 3 years of mint.com. interesting talk as he had just sold mint to intuit for $170M and he uses their actual numbers for costs and equity shares. I though the most informative slide was about their projected revenue per user based on cost-per-acquisition deals (jump to 14:00 for this).

Audio: Jim Rogers answers your questions – The Globe and Mail. my question was the first one asked which was kinda odd to hear.

How To Brace Your Portfolio for Inflation – WSJ.com. or more so, hyper-inflation. not a ton of options for average folks though he does mention the option of grabbing a 10-year fixed rate mortgage for 5%.

Talking Business – Poking Holes in a Theory on Markets – NYTimes.com “Our default reflex is that the world knows what it is doing, and that is extravagant nonsense”

FRONTLINE: the madoff affair. as usual, frontline manages to reveal an angle on the story that i never heard anywhere else.

Investors behaving badly — Canadian Capitalist. “while the S&P 500 has returned 8.35% over a 20 year period ending in 2008, the average equity investor earned just 1.87%, which was less than the inflation rate of 2.89%. Bond investors fared no better. They earned returns of just 0.77% compared to 7.43% for the index.” Summary of a great report about average investors buying and selling at the worst times.

globeadvisor.com: The manager who gave back his fees. Chou funds is returning the majority of their management fees for one fund for the last 6 years because of it’s underperformance.

Carl Icahn – We’re Not the Boss of A.I.G.. NYTimes op-ed about utter lack of power shareholders possess.


Daily Show on CNBC. Stewart just blasts them.

NPR: TED Spread Party!. The TED spread, the difference between the interest rates on interbank loans and US T-bills, has finally returned below 1. This is a big deal. Time to get back in the market!

How Fractals Can Explain What’s Wrong with Wall Street: Scientific American reprint of an article by Benoit Mandelbrot about fractal geometry and the failures of modern portfolio theory.

China Is Losing Its Taste for U.S. Debt – NYTimes.com. I’ll pair this with a recent Barrons article about US T-bills entitled “Get Out Now!“

Asset Class Returns for 2008 “Emerging Markets: -43.72% (-53.10% in US Dollars)”. ouch.

Oil Traders Find A Profit In ‘Voodoo’ Science : NPR. I’d recommend listening to the recording over reading the article as Kenstenbaum’s tone is kinda humerous.

FT.com – Letter from Iceland. that’s some depressing shit. via ram.

The End of Wall Street’s Boom – Portfolio.com. fantastic storytelling by Michael Lewis.

Why it pays to hang tough in a take-no-prisoners market – Oct. 28, 2008. John Bogel, who in recent books said we shouldn’t expect more than 6-7% return from US markets, is saying that buying now could return up to 10% annually for the next decade.

How Porsche took the wind out of the hedge funds’ sails – Telegraph. Porsche basically owns VW now and in doing so created a short-squeeze: “All day yesterday, the panic to get out compounded the situation: at one stage, VW temporarily became the world’s biggest company by market value”. phenomenal article.