An interesting mix of items in today’s linkfest. We apologize in advance for no linkfest tomorrow.

James Picerno at the Capital Spectator highlights a research paper that explores the conditions that were present before the start of meaningful bull markets in the twentieth century.

Toan Tran at Morningstar.com has a nice Finance 101-type piece on optimal capital structures that includes a list of stocks which would be well-served by a leveraged recapitalization. In short, these are potential buyout candidates.

Ticker Sense has some neat graphs showing shifting sector relative strength.

Brett Steenbarger at TraderFeed reviews some relevant research in sports psychology and how it applies to trading.

Karyn McCormack at Businessweek.com has a piece up on whether “hedge funds hold trade secrets.”

Speaking of hedge funds, Roddy Boyd at the New York Post on one hedge fund that is betting “big time” on lower house prices.

Competition for the Alpha Awards, i.e. prime brokerage, was “intense” this year. (via DealBook)

Paul R. La Monica at CNNMoney.com makes the case for Comcast (CMCSK) buying Viacom (VIA).

Amity Shlaes at Bloomberg.com examines the downside of the housing boom.

Thomas Kostigen at Marketwatch.com looks at a surprising capital market disappointment – single stock futures.

Jeff Miller at A Dash of Insight is on “recession watch.”

James Hamilton at Econbrowser looks at the prospects for even lower gasoline prices.

David Leonhardt in the New York Times on the true value of shopping for “bargains” at warehouse stores.

The Seeking Alpha deal with Yahoo! Finance has received a great deal of (not surprisingly) positive coverage from the blogosphere. However Bill Rempel at No DooDahs! has a thoughtful piece on where the value accrues in these sorts of networks. Whereas Roger Ehrenberg at Information Arbitrage sees this as a big step forward for the investment blogosphere.

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