“Markets work best when investors are thinking for themselves, and tend to go awry when the obsession with what everyone else is doing becomes a dominant concern.”  (NewYorker.com)

“Diversification, to put it simply, did not work in October…”  (Capital Spectator)

Bull market or bounce?  (WSJ.com)

How the S&P 500 could work its way to 600.  (Clusterstock)

“The story of ETNs resembles that of many other fixed-income instruments: a good idea that may have overexpanded in the waning days of the bull market and now faces a very difficult sell with newly skeptical investors.”  (WSJ.com)

“While the black-swan strategy has paid off handsomely this year, it hasn’t always.”  (WSJ.com)

No KKR IPO until 2009.  (CNNMoney.com)

The upside of a smaller financial sector.  (breakingviews/NYTimes.com)

Activist hedge funds are re-tooling for “new market realities.”  (TheDeal.com)

“The lesson [of AIG], of course, is simple, but hard to learn: it’s not the risks you measure which bring you down, it’s the risks you don’t measure. But protecting against those risks is very, very hard.”  (Market Movers also Clusterstock)

Recent market volatility ranks up there with prior catastrophes.  (Trader Mike)

What the spread between the VIX and historical volatility tells us about future market performance.  (VIX and More)

Microsoft (MSFT) finally wins one.  (Silicon Alley Insider)

Convertible arbitrage’s “once reliable stream of mid-teens annual returns has pretty much evaporated over the last few years.”  (NakedShorts)

Deleveraging will “stifle the economy, impair spending, and make it very difficult to get the economy growing again.”  (A VC)

The many shapes of the economic recession.  (Curious Capitalist)

There is no doubt that this is a global crisis.  (FT Alphaville)

“I think that macroeconomics has suffered a crash.”  (EconLog)

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