Don’t buy ‘lottery tickets‘ to try and get your portfolio back in shape. (WSJ.com)

“Investing is hard. The simple buoyancy of the human spirit is not sufficient to develop returns in any market except a badly inflated one.” (finem respice)

Why indexing beats active management, in short expenses. (NYTimes.com)

Should commodities play a role in your portfolio? (WSJ.com also ETF Trends)

“The genius of DCA [dollar cost averaging] is that it makes it easy to get over the psychological barriers to investing in down markets, when stocks are cheap.” (Market Movers)

S&P 500 dividends might drop “only” 13% in 2009. (WSJ.com also Big Picture)

“Credit bets are asymmetric. Leveraged bets more so.” (Aleph Blog also Zero Hedge)

Ten pieces of time-tested advice. (The Ideas Report)

Are Loews (L) and Northern Trust (NTRS) financial-related stocks you can actually own? (Barrons.com, ibid)

Why people are so down on Berkshire Hathaway (BRK). (Dealbreaker)

What was the attraction of Sirius XM (SIRI) to John Malone. Tax losses of course. (Silicon Alley Insider)

“The fact is, Google (GOOG) is starting to act like an aging, mature company in slow decline.” (GigaOm)

“(A)sk yourself if letting GM continue as it is could be any riskier, and any more costly, than it’s been as a public company under Mr. Wagoner.” (Jeff Matthews)

Not the way Barack Obama wanted to start his administration, i.e. with the second worst first month stock market performance since 1900. (Bespoke)

“Losing trades can be the best learning experiences, but only if we’re not mechanically repeating our losing psychological patterns.” (TraderFeed)

How big a haircut should we give to hedge fund index performance due to survivor bias? (Dollars & Sense)

Speculative grade bond maturities will rise dramatically in 2010, 2011. (EconomPic Data)

Public pension funds are going to come under greater scrutiny post-market meltdown. (Zero Hedge)

An interesting interview with Barry Ritholtz. (Bloomberg Surveillance)

Does talking so much about the Great Depression make another one more likely? (NYTimes.com)

The government already controls big chunks of the banking sector, why not make it explicit? (WSJ.com also Street Capitalist)

What nationalization would really mean for a number of major banks. (24/7 Wall St.)

On the prospects of, and problems with, bank nationalization. (naked capitalism, ibid)

We need to get to 3% inflation to declare demand stimulus a success. (Econbrowser)

The situation in Eastern Europe is bad. Time is of the essence. (Clusterstock, Baseline Scenario)

The potential ‘failure’ of the Mexican state is a looming problem for the US. (WSJ.com)

What it is going to take to wind down and “break the back of risk” at AIG Financial Products. (WashingtonPost.com)

“We are watching in real time the death of newspapers (the market is valuing the print operations at zero), and even the death of certain online news businesses (The Street.com is valued at the cash on it’s books).” (Howard Lindzon)

The Bailout Nation kerfuffle goes mainstream. (Newsweek)

Are you curious what other bloggers are saying about Abnormal Returns? So are we. Feel free to check out a compilation of reviews.