Quote of the day

TR, “Almost every innovation in the financial services industry that we’ve ever looked at serves to disadvantage private investors.”  (The Psy-Fi Blog)

Chart of the day

About that whole high stock correlations problem.  (Money Game)

Markets

The demise of Wall Street and the magazine cover indicator.  (Big Picture, TRB)

The ‘dumb money’ is extremely bullish.  (The Technical Take)

A look at the many markets in bull mode.  (Humble Student of the Markets)

What is Bill Gross talking about?  (Daniel Drezner)

Strategy

“Investors on their own, I suspect, could figure out a way to perform poorly even if they had tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal.”  (Systematic Relative Strength)

Investors need to avoid playing the loser’s game.  (WSJ)

What it is to be a “financial weatherman.”  (Tradestreaming)

Companies

Beware the value trap of the deep cyclical stocks.  (ContrarianEdge)

The “consumerization of IT” crushed Research in Motion ($RIMM).  (New Yorker)

Amazon ($AMZN) is going to kill off the book publishers.  (Pando Daily)

What tickers everyone was talking about on StockTwits in January.  (Howard Lindzon)

Finance

Keep an eye on companies with large pension funding gaps.  (FT)

The true failure of big finance in the housing crisis.  (Big Picture)

Big talk aside, the big banks just keep on getting bigger.  (Sober Look)

How a broker might sell the Facebook IPO.  (The Reformed Broker)

What firms gained the most customers from the demise of MF Global?  (Reuters)

Hedge funds

Institutional investors are going to cull their hedge fund investments in 2012.  (Pensions & Investments)

Hedge funds are fee hogs.  (Verisi Data Studio)

ETFs

Fund sponsors are in a war for good ETF ticker symbols.  (WSJ)

Are ETFs going to kill the 12b-1 fee?  (WSJ)

What fund categories did people hate in 2011?  (Morningstar)

The ETF industry needs to do a better job of educating the public.  (Rick Ferri)

Global

Assessing the chance of fiscal crisis is not an easy task.  (Gavyn Davies)

A market blind taste test.  (beyondbrics)

There is no ring fence around Europe.  (Free exchange)

What currency pairs the market likes to trade.   (FT Alphaville)

Not surprisingly Greece and Portugal top the country default risk chart.  (Bespoke)

Economy

Another sign the housing market is bouncing back.  (Money Game)

More thoughts on the improving employment situation.  (Big Picture, Capital Spectator)

Marriage is for rich people.  (Economix)

Earlier on Abnormal Returns

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

Mixed media

You can’t blog these days without engaging with the Twittersphere.  (The Fly)

Is Suze Orman a journalist?  (Bloomberg)

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