This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Doug Kass (TheStreet.com): A force in motion, October 20, 2009. Arguably, the market has begun to decouple from fundamentals; instead, liquidity has overcome almost any other influence as every little setback has been countered with an avalanche of buying. It has fed upon itself, and it has contained corrections as many money managers play catch-up and chase strength.

• Dan Holland (RealClearMarkets): An interview with Jason Trennert, Ocober 20, 2009. Jason Trennert is the chief investment strategist at Strategas Research Partners, a Manhattan-based advisor to institutional investors, which he co-founded three years ago. Institutional Investor magazine has consistently ranked Trennert one of the top strategists on Wall Street.

• Martin Wolf (Financial Times): How to manage

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This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Gerard Lyons (Times Online): Discovering if we learnt the lessons of Black Monday, October 19, 2009. Today (Monday) is the twenty-second anniversary of Black Monday. On this day in 1987 stock markets around the world crashed. The Dow Jones fell 22.6 per cent in one day, London shed one fifth of its value over two days. The newspapers and television were full of pictures of traders in panic. Sound familiar? Reflecting on 1987 is interesting in its own right and has lessons for today.

• Allan Dodds Frank (The Daily Beast): Hedge fund dominoes, October 18, 2009. Friday’s insider-trading charges against the founder of Galleon could be the tip of the iceberg. Other hedge funds and the McKinsey consulting

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In this three-part video interview, Julian Robertson, chairman and CEO of Tiger Management, talks with Chrystia Freeland, US managing editor of the Financial Times, about US debt, China, lessons from the tech bust, the future of hedge funds, gold stocks, taxes and regulations. Good stuff!

Part 1: On the economy and inflation

Click here or on the image below to view the video.

Part 2: On market cycles and hedge funds

Click here or on the image below to view the video.

Part 3: On gold, Norway, and taxes

Click here or on the image below to view the video.

Source: Chrystia Freeland, Financial Times (

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Some of Wall Street’s most prominent bears are turning bullish right now. But that doesn’t mean that your small-cap portfolio is safe. Here’s why these brilliant minds think that we’re back on the path to recovery — and why they’re wrong.

I was in Manhattan last week attending Grant’s Fall Investment Conference. The U.N. General Assembly is meeting there, and the streets were blocked off in places. The NYPD was out in full force. I heard one passerby complain about the inconvenience of it all to one police officer. He responded, “Don’t blame the NYPD, blame the General Assembly.”

With the General Assembly in Manhattan and the G-20 in Pittsburgh, government has taken over the headlines this week. It seems half the world is mostly preoccupied with telling the other half what to do. No doubt, bossiness is in a bull market.

At Grant’s conference, I heard presentations on gold, the dollar, oil,

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Dollar’s rally is cut short…Major problems for loans still exist…Yen rallies on exporter repatriation…Kiwi gets whacked! And Now… Today’s Pfennig!

Good day… And a Happy Friday to one and all! It’s still raining here in St. Louis this morning, but I won’t that get me down, as it is a Friday! G-20 has gotten a bit ugly, folks… Seems everyone just can’t seem to get along! Imagine that! 20 different countries, and now they want to be able to watch another country’s finances and comment on them! Oh, I can see that working out real well! NOT!

So… Yesterday, we had the dollar gaining back the ground that it had lost the previous day, but at the end of the day, we’re looking very much like the currencies hadn’t moved from morning to morning… And overnight, didn’t bring about much movement… So… When you get to the currency round-up below, you’ll

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After being the largest hedge fund strategy in 1990 representing 71% of the overall hedge fund assets global macro has shrunk and now only represents about 15% of total assets.  While most people assume that this dropoff in assets was due to poor performance the numbers actually show a totally different story.  In fact according to the Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fund Indexes, global macro has been the number one investment strategy with a total return of 502% from 1994 through June 2009.  Compare that with a total return of 335% from long short equity or 321% from event driven funds.

Of course most investors also have a misguided perception that every trade is like the trade that “broke the Bank of England.”  That trade in 1992 made Soros and his Quantum Fund over $1 Billion in a few days and garnered a lot of publicity.  The funny thing is

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I'm fully expecting the funds to engage in the usual quarter-ending mark up, which means through the end of the month, I wouldn't be surprised if stocks run a bit. It can easily happen, and likely will. To begin with, volume has been relatively light and usually gets that way in the summer. Bottom line is, the funds like to make their numbers look good. Don't get in their way by trying to go short. br /br /I'm still hoping to buy at some better prices, and that will take a little more time. I'm fully expecting this quarter-end markup to take place as funds are trying desperately to attract that money that's currently sitting on the sidelines.br /br /Have a great weekend!div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/819581243324579563-226785910987827801?l=briskycapital.blogspot.com'//div

Consumer Prices Increase Less Than Expected; Ten Banks Repay TARP Debt; Bankrupt Eddie Bauer Attempts Sale; Berkshire Hathaway Options Begin Trading; FedEx Losses Mount; Saab Cuts Debt; Gas Prices Keep Going, Going, Up; Boeing Gets First Air Show Order; China Will Invest Sovereign Wealth in Hedge Funds; Analyst: S&P 500 Will Hit New Highs By 2012; Bond Yields Drop; Mortgage Apps Plunge

Inflation fears were quelled at least temporarily as U.S. consumer prices were raised only slightly last month, and actually experienced their biggest drop in almost 60 years. Higher gas prices contributed to the 0.1% increase in the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) versus the April’s CPI, which was flat. Financial markets had expected a 0.3% increase. The CPI fell 1.3% versus the same period last year, the largest drop since April 1950. “There is no sign that there has been widespread inflation because of the Fed’s quantitative ...

Whether it’s heading up or down, the oil market usually asserts itself as the leader of the commodities world.  Having plunged from levels around $130 per barrel this time last year all the way down to the $40s, the market has spent the last couple of months striking to the upside again.

As I’ve mentioned in recent issues, oil had near-term targets of $70 in its sights. It hasn’t disappointed, shooting past the $73 mark late last week - a level not seen since the first week of November 2008.

On a technical basis, because oil has not only moved above, but also stayed above all the major moving averages (including the all-important 200-day average), it’s now got $80 in its sights. If any pullback is going to occur, which should happen after solid runs like this, the move down should hold at the $65 per barrel range.

On a fundamental note, we’ve

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a href="http://www.iimagazine.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=1964189"Interesting interview from iimagazine.com/a with hedge fund trader Paul Tudor Jones. He is one of the ones worth listening to. I love this quote from him in this interview:br /br /span id="ctl00_MainBody_ArticlePager"/spanblockquotespan id="ctl00_MainBody_ArticlePager"While I spend a significant amount of my time on analytics and collecting fundamental information, at the end of the day, I am a slave to the tape and proud of it./span/blockquotebr /br /One aspect of trend followers and technicians that I admire is their ability to say at sometimes things are out of their hands. For some reason there is a need to understand and quantify everything, and he touches on this. I think it is due to the immense amount of information on the internet. We just feel like there is nothing we can't find the answer to. Unfortunately, in the market, there is a lot that we can't ...