U.S. stocks rose Friday, for their second consecutive weekly advance, as upbeat earnings reports from a number of companies, including Walt Disney and JC Penny, spurred optimism that the economic recovery is gaining momentum.  A dip in the value of dollar, on concerns consumer spending is likely to remain bleak, sent shares of commodity-related companies up. 

On Friday, the 30-stock Dow Jones industrial average rose 73 points, or 0.72%, to 10,270.47. The broad Standard & Poor's 500-stock index was up 6.24 points, or 0.57%, at 1,093.48. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index advanced 18.86 points, or 0.88%, to 2,167.88.  For the week the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index jumped 2.3% to 1,093.48.  The Dow average rose 247.05 points, or 2.5%, to 10,270.47, following its 3.2% advance the prior week.

The spike in commodities came after the greenback fell Friday on news that the trade deficit widened more than expected in

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This is Part 2 of a guest contribution by David Kotok* and Bob Eisenbeis** of Cumberland Advisors. (Click here for Part 1.)

Note to Readers:  This is the second of our two-part commentary on the Fed’s exit strategy and the role the Fed has played in complicating its own operating strategies and ability to conduct monetary policy.

In their Wall St. Journal op-ed entitled “The BLOB That Ate Monetary Policy” (September 27, 2009), the Dallas Fed’s Fisher and Rosenblum use the movie metaphor of the BLOB to describe the “too big to fail” banks.  They argue that these BLOBs stood in the way of the Fed’s monetary policy’s low interest rates and thereby “gummed up” the “monetary policy channel,” which would otherwise be able to stimulate economic activity.

The op-ed doesn’t name names.  But we will.  If you examine the list of the Fed’s primary

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This is Part 1 of a guest contribution by David Kotok* and Bob Eisenbeis** of Cumberland Advisors. (Part 2 follows tomorrow.)

Note to Readers:  This is the first of a two-part commentary motivated by speeches and editorials from Federal Reserve officials about possible exit strategies from its current quantitative easing policies.  We comment on some problems that the strategies may pose.  We also identify subsidies in the Fed’s current policies.  In part two we comment on the Fed’s own operating policies that may have played an important role in creating the too-big-to-fail problem.  This last issue was overlooked by the Dallas Fed’s Fisher and Rosenblum in their WSJ op-ed piece of September 27, 2009.  They lamented the bottleneck that the concentration of banking resources now creates as the Fed attempts to exit its QE strategy.  They fail to mention how the Fed’s determination of primary-dealer status has

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Earlier this week, Shutterfly Inc. (SFLY) bought Tiny Pictures for $1.3 million in cash and another $1.3 million in restricted stock with some performance triggers to employees. The acquisition will help Shutterfly to expand its mobile offerings by using Tiny Pictures’ mobile expertise.

Tiny Pictures has been facing tough competition from the flurry of photo sharing sites on the Web in recent years. Investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Reid Hoffman, Joi Ito and Mohr Davidow Ventures expect the company to produce very low returns going forward. Since its inception in 2005, Tiny Pictures has raised $11.2 million in two installments.

Tiny Pictures runs a site called Radar.net, which allows mobile sharing and is integrated with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social networks. Shutterfly wants to apply some of these social media features to its own service.

After buying publishing service Nexo Systems for less than $15 million last year,

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Found a couple of things I wanted to pass along. (Both from Bloomberg)br /br /br /1) a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20603037amp;sid=a.pZggcuVEp8"Chinese Stocks to Recover From Plunge, Fisher Says/a.br /br /blockquoteChinese a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=SHCOMP%3AIND" onmouseover="return escape( popwQuoteShort( this, 'SHCOMP:IND' ))"stocks/a will recover from their steepest drop since November and end the year higher as speculation that the government will limit bank loans is unfounded, billionaire investor a href="http://search.bloomberg.com/search?q=Kenneth+Fisheramp;site=wnewsamp;client=wnewsamp;proxystylesheet=wnewsamp;output=xml_no_dtdamp;ie=UTF-8amp;oe=UTF-8amp;filter=pamp;getfields=wnnisamp;sort=date:D:S:d1" onmouseover="return escape( popwSearchNews( this ))"Kenneth Fisher/a said. pThe nation’s economy is “gangbusters compared to the rest of the world, why would they try to kick that?” said Fisher, who has about $900 million invested in Chinese shares among the $28 billion he manages as chief executive officer of Fisher Investments Inc. in Woodside, California. “They have zero incentive” to curb lending, he said. /p/blockquotepbr //ppZero incentive? How about the incentive to avert a massive ...

Right up there with swine achieving flight and hell freezing over, the probability that European bureaucrats would succeed in building the Nabucco natural gas pipeline was, at least up until a year ago, firmly placed in the realm of impossibility.How things change.  Though nothing is yet guaranteed, on Monday officials from the five transit countries signed a formal agreement in Ankara, Turkey to proceed with the project, injecting fresh optimism into the initiative which could shatter Gazprom's supply monopoly."It's one of those steps that moves Nabucco out of the possible column and into the probable column," one energy analyst told CNN.  "My own guess is roughly by the end of the year, it will be pretty clear that Nabucco will be built."...

Fellow Masters, passing on a great article from OldSchoolValue.com on a company called AeroGrow International, Inc. (NASDAQ:AERO) that trades for $2.67 a share. Their AeroGarden that grows plants using just air and water is amazing, but can it get the backing from Wall Street? Be sure to read Jae Jun's detailed analysis which in the end scores 11 of the 15 points where 3 of the points come out neutral. Never heard of AeroGrow? At first glance, I'll admit, I thought the AeroGarden had a fad feel to it, maybe the new Pet Rock of 2008. Just imagine those bad boys with some bubble eyes glued on and flashy packaging, it could happen? AERO shares have tanked over the last year, down 61% so right ...