You might find these interesting:

Barry Ritholtz and Robert Reich believe investors should not be pleased with recent positive corporate earnings surprises. Hal Varian reports that Google Trends predicts further reductions ahead in new claims for unemployment insurance. Felix Salmon [1], [2] describes how Larry Summers lost a billion dollars for Harvard. ExxonMobil is investing big bucks in some radical new tools for controlling carbon emissions. Lucian Bebchuk worries that the proposed Goldman Sachs compensations represent a return to a dangerously flawed incentive structure. Dave Altig has a very interesting graph showing just how pessimistic consensus estimates are about this economic recovery. And here's one of the reasons I always try to find something that doesn't come from AP as a source any time I want to link to something in the news.

IndexUniverse reported that in addition to Pimco launching its first ETF it also filed for six more. The one that is trading is called the Pimco 1-3 Year U.S. Treasury Index Fund (TUZ). The six others include several me too bond funds but unique in the filing is a long term TIPS fund and short term TIPS fund. Those could be interesting. Hopefully Pimco is just getting started with this and can bring some other differentiation besides the two TIPS funds. Obviously (to some readers) I'd like to see them do more with foreign bonds. There were a lot of comments yesterday that I could not get to, so.... Early in the day I Tweeted (you know, on the Twitter, like the young people) about a comment from Blackswan Trading. The comment was about students in China laughing ...

Occasionally a bored business publication, goes to the zoo, rents a monkey and pits him or her against a mutual fund manager.  Lo and behold the monkey who doesn’t know a beta from a bunghole beats a significant majority of the active managers.  Barron’s should probably create a yearly Monkey Roundtable.

These Journalists must be pretty good monkey pickers and should probably start a MFoF (Monkey Fund of Funds) charging 2% and 20%.  We are the Third Chimpanzee and it seems as if evolution must have robbed us of our stock picking skills, but boy can we pick monkeys.

So what is going on?  Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett both hint at it in various writings and books, my favorite is Charlie’s Poor Charlie’s Almanack.  Warren calls it de-worsification, or the fact that many portfolios get worse as more components are added to them.  The theory

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Notes from the Investment Underground San Telmo, Buenos Aires, Argentina

April 6, 2009

Why the economy is still heading for a cliff… All the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put the banks back together again… The madness of Sheila Bair… The government lies over banks are paper thin… Infighting at the Treasury… Why Citi’s CEO should go… Banks plunge… “Fake dividend” strategy exposed… Can mark-to-model save them? Selling OTM calls against your financial stocks… What happened on March 9… And more!

*** You’re reading this newsletter because you don’t believe the cheerleaders in Washington and in the mainstream press. You know it’s safer to know the truth about the economy than to believe the hype and the lies and the false optimism. You know that real money-making ideas can’t be found on CNN and

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I will probably have something to say on yet another week of tumultuous events and interesting comments; in particular I think that Krugman and Wolf may soon, very soon, be getting to the crux of things.

Meanwhile, I want to pass on one of Felix Salmon’s latest posts in which he treats the issue of replicability in academic research. Clearly, this is an important issue and not only one of integrity but also one of honesty and simple code-of-conduct. Felix begins …

Falsifiability and replicability are key cornerstones of any academic research. If you’re running an empirical study, and your results aren’t replicable, your study is largely worthless.

I would like to see any researcher disagree with this although I suspect that many economists may silently, or not, retort that sometimes the theory is enough in itself. Ok, that is fair enough even if I think that these endless

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FII to broker: Hold off on those INFY shares, get me a bunch of Hussains & Pynes nstead

Two academics evaluate the returns of the art markets in India, Russia and China over the last decade, using a portfolio theory/ CAPM framework.

Investors constantly hunt for alternative assets that might improve the risk-adjusted returns on their financial portfolios. When stock markets experience a downswing, investors search for more profitable alternatives. Financial newspapers fill headlines with record prices paid for certain works of art, giving rise to the idea that investing in art might be a profitable pursuit. Moreover, Artprice recently reported a booming emerging art market for Russia, 780% growth for the Chinese
15 (contemporary) art market since 2001, and 830% for the Indian (contemporary) art market in
the past decade.

To determine if these reported returns are feasible and indicate reasonable investment alternatives, we analyze whether investing in emerging

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Today's announcement from the Federal Reserve marks the end of the road for Plan A (fighting the recession by lowering interest rates), and the beginning of ... what?

The Fed's announcement begins:

The Federal Open Market Committee decided today to establish a target range for the federal funds rate of 0 to 1/4 percent.

Although that caught the headlines, it's really the anticlimactic part. The actual fed funds rate and short-term T-bill rates had been well below the Fed's previous "target" of 1.0% for some time, making today's announcement little more than an acknowledgement that that's indeed where we are. At least we can all finally agree that further rate cuts from the Fed are completely irrelevant, if for no other reason than because it's physically impossible for there to be any more ahead.

Source: FRED.

The main

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NYSE Gets Approval To Charge More Fees

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that regulators have approved the NYSE Arca's long-standing request to charge more for "noncore" data. 

As explained by reporter Judith Burns, such noncore data include "information such as orders to buy and sell shares at different prices." Core data is defined as information that show "recent trading activity and the best-available current prices," according to the article. 

You can read the story here. 

 

Investors Walk From Mutual Funds Into ETFs

The latest report by TrimTabs Investment Research shows that more than $12 billion flowed out of stock mutual funds in the week ended Dec. 3, according to CNNMoney.com. That reversed the previous week's $10.4 billion inflow into stock mutual funds.

Note at the very bottom of the story that stock ETFs had an inflow of $920 million

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Yesterday I came across three different articles that I thought all tied to a similar theme about whether we should or should not rely on the idea of stock prices going up over the very long term. There were also comments on the blog this weekend along the same lines.Regardless of what the futures holds, asking these types of questions has become much more popular because the S&P 500 is 18% lower than where it was exactly ten years ago and the world is in the middle of a financial crisis that has yet to be sorted out.The first article was by Felix Salmon that makes a case for reorienting expectations toward dividends rather than capital gains.The second article is from David Leonhardt about why prosperity is not an unalienable right.The last one was ...

So goes the title of one of Shakespeare's plays, and as I am slowly adjusting to life in Lausanne and its beautiful environnements I am forced to admit the truthfulness of this axiom. Consequently, and while I have now settled down in a nice shared apartment I feel the need to confess my readers the tremendous difficulty with which I, finally, managed to secure housing in Lausanne. I will not belabor you with details, but merely pass on my humble advice that if you are ever going to Lausanne (indeed, the entire Vaud canton!) looking for short term rental accommodations ... bring valiums or deep pockets, and preferably both!

In any case that is now well past me and to prove that I am now safely and nicely housed I have chosen to flatter this entry

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