Zaldiva, Inc. a leader in Pop Culture collectibles, comic books, memorabilia and auctions, today detailed its acquisition strategy as it continues to focus on rolling-up smaller comic and collectibles retailers under the Zaldiva brand. The company has identified its first 5 targets for acquisition.

“We see the comic and collectibles industry being in a very similar situation to the video rental business of days gone by,” stated Nicole Leigh, CEO of Zaldiva, Inc. “Along came Blockbuster and the whole landscape changed. These smaller comic retailers, the ‘mom and pop’ stores, don’t have the infrastructure to compete in the marketplace. We’ve built a solid foundation with our online www.zaldiva.com store and have backed it up with a successful retail location that integrates eBay online auctions.”

Leigh added, “When we talk about ‘rolling up’ or ‘acquiring’ other retailers we are looking at comic book companies with large ’subscriber’ bases, meaning recurring monthly revenues. Margins

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Companies featured in this edition of the newsletter: CUR, CVM, DKAM, ICLK, IMUC, IWEB, OMCM, ONEZ, SVUL, TAGS

Markets managed to extend their run this week, hitting fresh highs for ‘09 despite coming under pressure from negative economic reports and a significant two week correction in Chinese equity markets. All told, the Dow ended up 2.0%, gaining 184 points to close at 9505, extending its yearly gains to 8.3%. The Nasdaq finished the week up 1.8%, closing back above 2000 at 2020, up 28.1% on the year, while the S&P 500 and Russell 2000 managed to post gains of 2.2% and 3.1% respectively, bringing their yearly gains to 13.6% and 16.4%.

Concerns stemming from weakness in Chinese markets which have surrendered 20% in the past two weeks after climbing 109% from October lows spooked many investors expecting a similar correction in US markets early in the week. US

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With trading strategies that are based on complex mathematical equations, or that are driven by sophisticated “black-box” computer programs, managed-futures programs are usually able to remove human emotion from the investment equation – a reality that certainly helped them post strong returns last year, even as the volatile U.S. stock market whipsawed investors out of about $7 trillion in shareholder wealth.

Managed futures programs - alternative-investment vehicles that enabled professional money managers to take positions in a wide variety of securities and derivatives - posted strong returns in a year that was marked mostly by investment losses. The average managed futures program returned about 14%, according to the Barclay CTA Index, and 11.4% as measured by the Stark 300 Traders Index.  By comparison, theStandard & Poor’s 500 Index and the tech-laden Nasdaq Composite Index each plummeted nearly 40% in 2008, while the Dow Jones

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Hardly a day goes by without another government bailout plan, and this week was no different. In Arizona on Wednesday, President Obama rolled out a plan designed to reduce foreclosures.

The multipronged plan has several moving parts. Since it could have an impact on both your personal finances — and your investing strategy — I want to give you some straight talk on it right here in Money and Markets.

First, let’s start with some background …

On Wednesday, President Obama rolled another bailout plan. …

pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/tTdw6bmsqqfpzOMvnTcyu1AgYbE/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/tTdw6bmsqqfpzOMvnTcyu1AgYbE/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pIt has been an amazing two weeks of positive bounces. Here are the top dozen:br /br /1. First you read about the bounce in the a href="http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/02/global-economic-activity-on-rebound.html"Baltic Dry /aIndex jumping up 210%.br /br /2. Then January Retail Sales bounced by a surprising 1% month over month. (a style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);" href="http://mast-economy.blogspot.com/2009/02/retail-growth-already-skyrocketing-in.html"12% annualized/a) With Walmart, Walgreens and Amazon leading the way.br /br /3. Next the Institute for Supply Management Indexes both a style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);" href="http://mast-economy.blogspot.com/2009/02/contraction-also-slowing-in-non.html"headed north/a in January.br /br /4. And the Intel's announcement a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Intel-to-invest-7-billion-in-rb-14308394.html"to invest $7B/a soon followed.br /br /5. There was even a international glimmer of hope for GM, when their January car sales in Brazilspan style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);" /spana style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);" href="http://mast-economy.blogspot.com/2009/02/in-brazil-automobile-production-up-92.html"surged by 30%/aspan style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"./spanbr ...

M3 Money through Oct. 10th is sitting at approximately $14 Trillion, and 16% year over year rate of increase. I have said this before, but if you have not figured it out yet, if money supply is expanding at 16% that means your investments MUST grow at more than 16% or you are going backwards.

On the gold shortage front, a recent letter from Bill Murphy over at GATA caught my attention:

Bill,

I talked to the chief broker in charge of the precious metals dept. of one of the largest metals banks in the Netherlands this morning. He told me that his bank had no gold in the vault for the first time in one hundred and forty seven years of its history! He had clients waiting in line for bullion coins of any type, and for the first time in his career,

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Most popular investment books are published for the already rich and famous, by an industry that has become just too good at the business of selling books. Rarely will a publisher take a chance with the work of an unknown author. Certainly, it’s a no brainer to sell a Jim Cramer, Peter Lynch, Robert Kiyosaki, or Maria Bartiromo effort while a uniquely new approach to solving the puzzles of Wall Street, presented by an unknown writer or commentator, requires some major financial risk.

Big publishers want to sell already big names; discovering new ones is not in their wheelhouse. Are they responsible for the problems in the financial markets? Of course not, but they do have a perverse, if indirect, impact. By constantly publishing the same Wall Street friendly message, they contribute to the brainwashing.
Without a wider distribution of new …

As oil and gas keep hitting new records this week, an electric car dealership opened in West Palm Beach, Florida offering a new affordable design for city-speed driving called the ZAP (OTCBB: ZAAP) Xebra.