The deep recession expected in 2009 will likely lead to higher rates of crime. Adam Lass says investors can play this trend by picking up shares of commercial jails. Florida-based Geo Group (NYSE:GEO) operates in several countries and is rapidly expanding its detention facilities. Adam says investors could be in line to double their money by the summer.

This from Taipan Daily:

I’d like to talk to you about prison for a moment.

Now, don’t start panicking or checking your Rolodex for your attorney’s number. I am not looking to prosecute anyone (nor be prosecuted myself for that matter) any time in the near future.

It’s just that jails have been cropping up a bit as I look about the investing scene these days. Sort of a theme, as it were.

The Smartest Guys in the Room Get Burned

For one, there’s that fellow Bernard Madoff.

You know the

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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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h1 style="text-align: center;"bHedge Fund Statistics/b/h1h2 style="text-align: center;"bspan class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(102, 0, 0);"Video Interview on Closures amp; Redemptions/span/b/h2Here is a short interview with a Yale professor who is an expert on hedge funds. He estimates that the industry will shrink by another 25% next year due to poor markets, volatility and low liquidity across many asset classes. He also discusses hedge fund redemption rates and how many institutions need to raise cash and many have lost some faith in hedge funds. This means that many hedge funds have had to restrict the securities which they own so they can meet redemption requests. The reporter also discusses how many hedge funds have been slashing fees to attract more investors. br /br /div align="center"object width="425" height="344"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2p1GSXY3uk8amp;hl=enamp;fs=1"param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2p1GSXY3uk8amp;hl=enamp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/object/divbr /br /br /h4View over 50 additional videos here:span style="font-weight: bold;" /spana href="http://richard-wilson.blogspot.com/2008/04/hedge-fund-videos.html"Free Hedge Fund Videos/a/h4h4Related to Hedge ...

If you’re thinking of getting back into stocks, it’s better to arrive late than too early says Ben Traynor. Yes, losses this year have been spectacular. And the temptation to bargain hunt is strong. But Ben says investors should remember that they still have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lose a lot of money very quickly.

This from Fleet Street Daily:

I attended a most interesting lecture last night at the London School of Economics. It left me feeling that anyone who rushes back into the stock market now must be barking mad (you’ll see why in a moment).

Entitled ‘The Subprime Crisis’, it was given by Professor Robert Shiller of Yale. Shiller’s well worth hearing on this stuff. A former advisor to new US Treasury boss Tim Geithner (“He had no idea this was coming”), Shiller forewarned of both the dotcom bubble and the more recent one in housing.

The lecture kicked off with

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Unless you’re a turkey, Thanksgiving is usually a happy holiday. But Bill Bonner says the crumbling economy leaves all of us fearing the axe this year. The global credit crisis has taken us into unchartered territory. And government bailouts will only draw out the inevitable correction.

This from The Daily Reckoning:

“Until today or tomorrow, the typical turkey enjoyed a fairly decent life…” commented our friend Nassim Taleb, in Zurich yesterday.

Yesterday [Wednesday], the stock market was quiet. The Dow ended up 36 points. Oil held at $50. Gold too…it stayed right where it was, at $820 an ounce.

But the slaughterhouses and gold mints worked overtime.

“You can understand how fraudulent most economic analysis is,” Nassim explained, “just by looking the life of the turkey. The animal is fed for 1000 days…and then it is killed. So, if you plotted out the turkey’s life on a chart, it would look

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Today’s post comes from a guest blog, New Rules of Investing:

Institutional investors have powerful tools at their disposal to screen through reams of data.  Part of the institutional investment process entails screening through thousands of securities looking for a needle in a haystack — stocks that fit certain investment criteria.  From thousands of stocks, analysts can filter through a couple of hundred that fit these so called screens.  With a couple of hundred stocks in hand, analysts set out to do the hard work analyzing these companies, comparing them to one another, speaking to management and whatever else hedge fund and mutual fund analysts do when looking at prospective investments.

If I’m a value investor, I’m probably going to use some metrics that focus on Return on Capital (RoC) or Return on Equity (RoE) and Earnings Yield (E/P).  Growth investors might

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Asset allocation is important to reduce risk.  Approximately 90% of portfolio total return comes from the asset classes you select and the relative weights you give them.

The word “never” is a dangerous term to use, particularly with respect to investing, but we believe it is probably safe to say that an allocated portfolio will never return as much as the best performing asset class, and it will never perform as badly as the worst performing class.

The important assumption is that an allocated portfolio is “expected” over the long-term to produce the blended mean return of the asset classes in the portfolio, and to do so with less volatility and less extreme draw-downs than the more volatile classes in the portfolio.

Unrealistic Expectations:

“Expected” is a tricky operative term.  We always ask new clients to indicate what returns they expect from their portfolio.  The answers are often way out of line with practical

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Although there weren't a ton of comments left on yesterday's video post it appears that quite a few people seem to be on the road to giving up on the stock market.If you are thinking about that, aside from my thinking that long term that is a catastrophic mistake, I would say to wait until the market makes back a meaningful chunk of what it dropped and while you're waiting try to figure out how to save more money.Barron's really outdid itself this week with a couple of very interesting articles.First up was an interview with Donald Coxe from BMO Financial Group. He outlined several longer term themes. He likes all things food as part of the ascendancy theme (this is a term I have been using for a while but he did not use that word). Each ...

More than one-seventh of all the silver bullion ‘thought to exist’ in the whole world was suddenly bought up in less than a year, and yet the price of silver has been pounded down to less than 10 bucks an ounce? No wonder I am so bullish on silver!

The most interesting news item recently was found on the cover of the Financial Times newspaper, where we learn that a guy named Lahde “made tens of millions of dollars from betting against the financial and property sectors during [the] past two years”, and he now wanted to thank “the low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA” who made it all possible for him to find enough suckers.

He noted that “These people who were often truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies

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Benjamin Graham, the teacher and mentor of Warren Buffett, wrote two seminal tomes on value investing called Security Analysis in 1934 and The Intelligent Investor in 1949. I was reading The Intelligent Investor at a time when the bear market following the dot com bubble was in full swing and I remember thinking to myself that some of what Mr. Graham mentions in his book may no longer hold true as even at that point  it was almost impossible to find stocks that met his criteria such as a Price/Book ratio of less than 1.5, a P/E < 15, uninterrupted dividends for last 20 years and an adequate margin of safety. If you like bargain hunting for things, you are probably aware that there is an intrinsic value to things and unless the seller is in distress it is very difficult to ...