Quote of the day

Satyajit Das, “The unpalatable fact remains that Europe may not have the capacity to rescue everybody that now seems to need rescuing without imperiling the financial health and ratings of stronger countries such as France and Germany.”  (Wilmott)

Chart of the day

Check out the rally in homebuilders.  (Money Game)

Markets

On the narrowness of the current rally.  (MarketBeat)

October is on track towards record performance.  (Crossing Wall Street)

The day of the week seasonality of the $VIX.  (MarketSci Blog also MarketBeat)

Occupy Wall Street as a sentiment indicator.   (The Reformed Broker)

Investor sentiment is once again neutral.  (The Technical Take)

Changing paths for the S&P 500.  (Political Calculations)

Hedge funds are poised for redemptions in Q4.  (WSJ)

High yield bonds as equity substitute.  (Bespoke)

How the rush of end-of-day trading affects prices.  (FT Alphaville)

Strategy

Euro hiccups are buying opportunities.  (The Reformed Broker)

Peter L. Brandt, “To me, a trade is nothing more than a reward to risk matrix.”  (Peter L. Brandt)

A look the return to seasonal investing.  (Big Picture)

Utilities and consumer staples continue to lead the market higher.  (Dragonfly Capital)

Too many black swans make the metaphor useless.  (Alice Schroeder)

CEO overreach as a negative indicator.  (Falkenblog)

What it feels like to be John Paulson at the moment.  (Clusterstock)

Companies

Facebook may be more profitable than Amazon ($AMZN) this year.  (Uncrunched)

McRib is back. What does it mean for McDonald’s ($MCD) stock?  (Money & Co.)

Just who owns the “147 companies that run the world“?  (Tech Musings)

Apple

Apple ($AAPL) is now a price leader, not laggard.  (NYTimes)

Hope for an iTV buoy Apple stock.  (MarketBeat, SAI)

Just in case you thought Apple wasn’t putting cash to work.  (Asymco)

Google and Apple think very differently about talent.  (Eric Jackson)

Finance

Leveraged loans have taken up the slack of the junk bond market.  (WSJ)

Do the details surrounding Groupon matter to investors?  (Herb Greenberg)

The US Treasury is thinking about launching floating rate Treasury notes.  (FT)

What took them so long?  Feds plan to loosen rules to make mortgage refinancings easier.  (WSJ, WashingtonPost)

Funds

The two very different kinds of fund managers.  (The Interloper)

Tough times for bond fund managers this year.  (WSJ)

ETFs are not the only game in town for those looking for cheap, index exposure.  (Morningstar)

A really unnecessary ETF.  (ETFdb)

Global

How Germany could end the Euro crisis.  (Free exchange)

All eyes are on the spread between German and French yields.  (MarketBeat)

Italy is still the weak link in the Euro chain.  (FT)

Three items working against emerging market growth.  (FT Alphaville)

Economy

The stock market is voting for future growth.  (Capital Spectator)

Just how far below potential is the US economy?  (EconomPic Data)

The case for the USA.  (Daily Telegraph)

Jobs

Small companies are not the drivers of the US economy.  (New Yorker also Felix Salmon)

Your competition is a machine write Brynjolfsson and McAfee in Race Against The Machine.*  (NYTimes)

Scott Adams, “The most objective explanation of our problem is that the economy is changing faster than humans can adapt.”  (Dilbert Blog)

Companies plan to continue cutting jobs.  (WSJ)

Workers aren’t wanted.  (YCharts)

Why technology won’t gut higher education.  (EconLog)

Earlier on Abnormal Returns

Macro talk aside, the US stock market is taking its cue from the better than expected US economy.  (AR Screencast)

Real traders trade real money.  (Abnormal Returns)

What you missed in our Monday morning linkfest.  (Abnormal Returns)

Mixed media

Should you care how many followers some one on Twitter or StockTwits has?  (bclund)

Reviewers love the Walter Isaacson biography Steve Jobs.*  (Atlantic Wire)

A sign of the times.  Sitcoms are making a comeback.  (NYTimes)

Abnormal Returns is a founding member of the StockTwits Blog Network.

*Amazon affiliate. You know the drill.

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