Consumer discretionary and technology are experiencing a bounce above their 200 day moving averages.  (Bespoke also The Reformed Broker)

Have “catch-the-falling-knife afficionados” given up on the natural gas play?  (Sentiment’s Edge)

Do quant factors persist any more?  (Zero Hedge)

Activist investing a casualty of the credit crisis.  If so, is that such a bad thing?  (Breakingviews)

McDonald’s (MCD) excels when it sticks to its core values.  (Value Plays)

On the ease in which M&A rumors can be disseminated these days.  (greenfaucet.com)

Financial advisers are ditching their ‘buy and hold‘ methodologies.  (WSJ.com)

Mutual funds that tend to alter their risk levels over time tend to underperform.  (SSRN.com)

Two titans:  Microsoft (MSFT) and Bloomberg need to innovate, and fast.  (Zero Beta, ibid)

Ken Lewis does not have much support out there.  (Breakingviews, Money & Co., naked capitalism)

“After the Federal Reserve’s stress tests identify the country’s sickest banks next week, who will bear responsibility for shoring up their balance sheets?”  (NYTimes.com also Clusterstock)

“The bottom line is that policy makers should not assume that there is no cost to offering guarantees of private debt.”  (Clusterstock also Alea)

“When epistemology meets the discipline of economics, the limits of knowledge always win. Being a contrarian does not mean much when the other side is shooting blanks.”  (24/7 Wall St.)

“Taxpayer, kiss your $6 billion or $8 billion goodbye. The restructuring of Chrysler will have cost you more than $12 billion. Just to make cars that nobody wanted and save jobs that couldn’t be saved.”  (Deal Journal)

“Policy makers now have an opportunity to increase transparency and rebuild credibility, both of which have been damaged as policy makers have had to focus on a series of immediate crises without the luxury to think through all of the implications.”  (The Hearing via Interfluidity)

The bad news.  1Q GDP sinks at a 6.1% rate.  (Big Picture, Curious Capitalist, Economix, Felix Salmon, Capital Spectator, Alea, WashingtonPost.com)

The good news.  Reasons for economic optimism.  (Real Time Economics, Calculated Risk, Clusterstock, The Stash)

What the slope of the yield curve implies about future economic growth.  (Cleveland Fed via Bob Brinker)

Forecasting is difficult.  Hurricane researchers do no better forecasting than a simple average of past hurricane activity.  (WSJ.com)

“You can have the most complicated and complete model in the world to explain asset correlation, but if you calibrate it assuming housing prices won’t fall on a national level, the model cannot hedge you against that happening.”  (Free exchange)

The way our brains work makes the swine flu story seem more important than it actually is.  (Predictably Irrational)

Whatever happened to the avian flu?  (Slate.com)

“The venture capital asset class does not scale.”  (A VC)

“Side projects sound fun and hip, but they will get you broke as fast as day trading if you don’t respect the work it takes to succeed.”  (Howard Lindzon)

What defines successful financial blogging.  (A Dash of Insight)

Prepare to be disappointed, Wall Street 2 is coming to the big screen.  (market folly, quotes from Wall Street)

A rave review of T.J. Stile’s biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt “The First Tycoon.”  (NYTimes.com)

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