Quote of the day

Malcolm Gladwell, “In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals.”  (New Yorker)

Chart of the day

MSFT Total Return Price data by YCharts

Microsoft ($MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer to retire.  (WSJ, Quartz, GigaOM, BI)

Markets

The US is the 4th most expensive market in the world.  (Mebane Faber)

Muni closed-end funds are trading at big discounts.  (Focus on Funds, ibid)

A strange cluster of signs of bearish sentiment.  (Joe Fahmy)

Strategy

How investors hurt themselves in the pursuit of alpha.  (Big Picture)

The top 5 behavioral hazards for managing asset allocation.  (Capital Spectator)

Companies

How Twitter’s IPO will be different from Facebook’s ($FB).  (Pando Daily)

What has really changed at Yahoo! ($YHOO) in the past year?  (Business Insider)

Among Blackberry’s ($BBRY) many flaws was the way it handled its capital structure.  (NYTimes)

How much is Steve Ballmer to blame for Microsoft’s decline?  (The Atlantic, Mark Hulbert, Wonkblog, The Guardian)

Managing a company whose core business is in secular decline, like HP ($HPQ), is not sexy.  (Felix Salmon)

Nasdaq outage

How worked up should we be about the Nasdaq ($NDAQ) market outage?  (Dealbreaker, Felix Salmon, Chuck Jaffe, MoneyBeat)

Market size+Complex systems=More glitches.  (WSJ)

Market glitches could be avoided by slowing down trading.  (Quartz, Capital Ideas)

What to do in the face of the next market malfunction: nothing.  (Random Roger)

Baby Berkshires

Is the newly launched iShares MSCI USA Quality Factor ($QUAL) a better Buffett-clone?  (Morningstar)

If you are going to buy a hedge fund in drag it might as well be run by Charlie Munger.  (Dealbreaker)

Emerging markets

Emerging market bottom fishers don’t need to get too cute.  (IndexUniverse)

It’s too soon to dive into the emerging markets.  (FT)

Now the big emerging markets are defending their currencies.  (FT)

How can India dig itself out of the hole?  (The Economist)

Economy

The American economy needs a boost from kids leaving their parents’ basements.  (Breakingviews)

54 years of real interest rates.  (Krugman)

The top 200 influential economics blogs.  (Onalytica Indexes)

Earlier on Abnormal Returns

Top blogs all financial advisors should be following.  (Financial Social Media)

What you may have missed in our Thursday linkfest.  (Abnormal Returns)

Mixed media

In praise of the Fiery Doritos Locos Taco.  (Slate)

Why is the shelf life of honey so long?  (Smithsonian via Digg)

In praise of the cashew, the non-nut.  (Medium)

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