Quote of the day

Brad Balter, “(T)here are thousands of long-short equity hedge funds out there already—who needs another?”  (NetNet)

Chart of the day

SPY Total Return Price Chart

SPY Total Return Price data by YCharts

Guess what stock has added the most points to the S&P 500 this year? (Businessweek)

Markets

On the prospects for small cap outperformance.  (John Authers)

Why stock investors should keep an eye on high yield bonds.  (All Star Charts)

The case for financial stocks.  (BCA Research)

The case for commodities and emerging market equities: continued growth in 2014.  (Market Anthropology)

Strategy

Rick Ferri, “Financial advice is not about finding the best returns.”  (Rick Ferri)

How to survive a market crash.  (Your Wealth Effect)

Our brains are pattern-seeking machines.  (Adam Grimes)

What drives the returns of the equal-weighted S&P 500?  (Turnkey Analyst)

Companies

IBM ($IBM) is opening up “Watson” to all comers.  (NYTimes, AllThingsD, FT)

The risk of a misstep at Twitter ($TWTR) is high.  (Herb Greenberg)

Apple ($AAPL) and Samsung are the only companies making money in mobile phones.  (AppleInsider, AlphaNow, Business Insider)

SnapChat thinks it is worth more than $3 billion.  (Digits, Term Sheet, Pando Daily, Business Insider)

Finance

They call it “insider selling” for a reason.  (WSJ)

The IPO market seems to be cooling off post-Twitter.  (WSJ)

Decimalization skilled the small cap IPO.  (peHUB)

Global

The Eurozone economy barely grew in Q3.  (Free exchange, FT)

Economy

Weekly initial unemployment claims continue to trend lower.  (Calculated Risk)

We know the what, just not the why of Fed policy shifts.  (Tim Duy)

Some signs that the housing market seems to be cooling.   (Bloomberg)

Rural America lost big in the Great Recession.  (Wonkblog)

Earlier on Abnormal Returns

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

Mixed media

How to teach yourself to focus.  (The Kirk Report)

Coding skills are enough to successfully run a company.  (Information Arbitrage)

Business Insider has passed CNBC.com in a key traffic measure.  (24/7 Wall St.)

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