Quote of the day

Peter L. Brandt, “A good trade must be right on both direction and timing. If one of these factors is wrong, the trade is wrong.”  (Peter L. Brandt)

Chart of the day

Long term Treasury bonds have been topping out for some time now.  (Afraid to Trade)

Markets

What sectors to avoid if bond rates rise.  (FT Alphaville)

The stock market to-date is loving inflation.  (Capital Spectator)

On the relationship between policy uncertainty and stock correlations.  (Big Picture)

Here is your wall of worry checklist.  (Time)

The markets are filled with all manner of breakouts and breakdowns.  (Market Anthropology)

Strategy

Low volatility investing does with some performance risk.  (Focus on Funds, IndexUniverse, Random Roger)

If warm weather is driving the stock market should we heed “sell in May” all the more?  (FT)

Research on whether international bonds belong in your portfolio.  (Vanguard)

Demographics are only part of the long term equation for changes in equity valuations.  (Free exchange)

Forget the Volcker Rule, simply “monitor trader biology.”  (FT)

Companies

Married CEOs are dragging down your portfolio.  (NetNet)

The “era of monopoly pricing” is about to end for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters ($GMCR).  (YCharts)

Apple ($AAPL) options are the new Apple stock.  (MarketBeat)

Finance

Warren Buffett always wins: the case of Bank of America ($BAC).  (Money Game)

Let’s rethink the reaction of Bank of America stock to the stress test.  (Dealbreaker)

Bank stock performance four years post-Bear Stearns.  (Dealbook)

Be afraid when the banks want to buy back shares.  (Term Sheet)

Why banks will continue to rip off their clients.  (Felix Salmon, Ezra Klein)

The best hope for money market funds is sterilized bond purchases by the Fed.  (Real Time Economics)

ETFs

A look at the surprising performance of the Barclays S&P 500 Dynamic VEQTOR ETN ($VQT).  (Morningstar)

Why individual investors like target date mutual funds.  (Total Return)

Investors are paying top dollar, premium-wise, for closed-end high yield bond funds.  (Focus on Funds)

Economy

Why the Fed should ignore gas prices.  (Money Game)

Industrial production is unchanged in February.  (Calculated Risk, Capital Spectator)

Things are perking up at restaurants.  (NYTimes)

Cheap natural gas prices have killed the nascent nuclear power revival.  (WSJ)

You can’t solve a debt crisis with more debt, but you can shift debt from one sector to another.  (Gavyn Davies)

Earlier on Abnormal Returns

Incentives matter when it comes to playing the investing game.  (Abnormal Returns)

What you missed in our Friday morning linkfest.  (Abnormal Returns)

Books

Robert Harris talks high frequency trading the basis for his novel The Fear Index.  (PBS)

A good review for Kent Osband’s ambitious new book Pandora’s Risk: Uncertain at the Core of Finance.  (Aleph Blog)

Sports

Would paying college basketball players change things all that much?   (Freakonomics)

The biggest debut in MLB this year may be a new type of glove.  (The Atlantic)

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