Quote of the day
DH, “If you’re a trader, who cares if you can rattle off the GDP of every Baltic state for the last 10 years. That’s not your job. Your job is to enter trades with low risk and exit with a profit. That’s it.” (Dynamic Hedge)
Chart of the day
Can the Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF ($GDX) break out? (All Star Charts also Focus on Funds)
Markets
High correlations and the momentum mindset. (Aleph Blog)
A gap between realized and implied volatility has opened up. (Investing With Options)
A look at S&P 500 sector breadth. (Bespoke)
Why VIX futures don’t cut it as an effective hedge. (FT Alphaville)
What market breadth is telling us at the moment. (Market Anthropology)
TIPs breakevens keep coming down. (MarketBeat)
Strategy
What are the ultimate investment lessons of the BP ($BP) Deepwater Horizon disaster? (The Psy-Fi Blog)
Howard Lindzon, “We are terrible at measuring and valuing all the time we spend worrying, thinking and talking about money.” (Howard Lindzon)
The world needs more food; therein lies an opportunity. (Fortune via TRB)
Why you can’t invest like Warren Buffett. (Slate)
Three lessons from Bill Gross’ “mistake.” (CBS Moneywatch, Marketwatch)
Companies
Will AOL ($AOL) go private? (Felix Salmon)
About that AT&T ($T) takeover of T-Mobile….(Dealbook, Planet Money, TRB, Felix Salmon)
Should Apple ($AAPL) fear low-end iPad competitors? (Asymco)
Hewlett-Packard ($HPQ) gave up on R&D to the benefit of margins. (research puzzle pix)
The case for Citigroup ($C) vs. Bank of America ($BAC). (market folly)
Don’t tell the credit card companies the consumer is ailing. (Dragonfly Capital)
Finance
Should commodities traders be forced to disclose their positions? (WSJ, FT)
Why a gold bubble wouldn’t really matter all that much. (Dealbreaker also Dealbook)
Taking another whack at the loan loss reserves of Bank of America. (Business Insider)
Do we really want our bank regulators to have a profit motive? (Freakonomics)
Funds
It wasn’t a lost decade for investors who broadly diversified. (Bucks Blog)
Pimco has another offering in the ‘hedge fund lite’ category. (WSJ)
Do value managers add value? (Globe and Mail)
Sophisticated ETFs can trip up overconfident investors. (Morningstar)
Building a better target date ETF. (IndexUniverse)
Global
Are expectations for emerging market growth simply too high? (FT)
Demand for Swiss assets remains “rampant.” (WSJ, FT Alphaville)
A slowing Canadian economy points to US weakness. (Real Time Economics)
Economy
Chicago PMI comes in better than expected. (MarketBeat)
A chart for those of you who don’t think the ADP numbers don’t matter. (Capital Spectator, Calculated Risk)
What if anything can turn consumer sentiment around? (Buttonwood)
What does elevated job anxiety imply for the economy and stock market? (Big Picture, Capital Spectator)
Is an aging population putting a cap on the US economy? (Bloomberg)
Americans are driving less per dollar of output. (The Street Light via Economist’s View)
Earlier on Abnormal Returns
The diversification debate. (Abnormal Returns)
What you missed in our Wednesday morning linkfest. (Abnormal Returns)
Mixed media
Failing is different than being a failure. (Tyler’s Trading)
Abnormal Returns is a founding member of the StockTwits Blog Network.
