A new week means a new Ticker Sense Blogger Sentiment Poll with investment bloggers are feeling a little more neutral this week. We wonder if that has anything to do with the much-feared September seasonality.
Our prior post on options backdating somehow got garbled, you can read the corrected version here. On a related front, Robert Schroeder at Marketwatch.com reports on forthcoming Senate hearings on the options backdating scandal.
Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture welcomes starts of the unofficial start of Fall with a handy guide to the bullish, bearish and neutral factors facing the stock market and the economy.
James Picerno at the Capital Spectator reviews the performance of world markets year-to-date and highlights the current valuation picture as well.
Adam Warner at the Daily Options Report tries to tease a useful trading rule from the state of the VIX relative to its moving average.
CXO Advisory Group looks at the confluence between market seasonality and hedge fund performance.
Accrued Interest examines the state of the high yield market and has a simple recommendation: “Don’t buy junk.”
Speaking of junk, Karen Richardson at the Wall Street Journal profiles two managers who have benefited from the tectonic shifts in the emerging market bond market.
Roger Nusbaum at TheStreet.com on the differences between Treasury bonds and some new narrowly-defined bond ETFs.
Speaking of yield curves, Caroline Baum at Bloomberg.com tackles once again the topic of the state of the yield curve and the prospects for an economic slowdown.
Chet Currier at Bloomberg.com on how the bond market has focused more recently on economic weakness in contrast with incipient inflation.
Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser with some “food for thought” on the state of employment and the prospects for a recession.
Ron Scherer at the Christian Science Monitor on the effect of lower gasoline prices on consumer confidence, which could be helped along by this news.
DealBook highlights some Microsoft (MSFT) deal talk – by the way we are (still) in favor of a breakup of the software giant.
Tim Middleton at MSN Money weighs in on fundamental indexing – the WisdomTree way.
Brett Steenbarger at TraderFeed makes an interesting observation on the difficulties we humans face in discerning signal from noise.
In light of our discussion of socially responsible investing, we found this piece by William Samuel Rocco at Morningstar.com on the fact that SRI funds “…are subject to the same sorts of changes as non-screened funds.”
Splogs (Spam + Blogs) are becomingly increasingly annoying to the author of most blogs (including this one). Charles C. Mann at Wired.com with an in-depth piece on the problem of splogs and what providers are doing to try and root them out.
On a more hopeful note, some good news for the ozone layer. (via Science Blog)
To stay up-to-date with all of our posts please add our feed to your favorite feed reader.
