Quote of the day

Mark Buchanan, “If economists jettisoned elegance and got to work developing more realistic models, we might gain a better understanding of how crises happen, and learn how to anticipate similarly unstable episodes in the future.”  (Bloomberg via Pragmatic Capitalism)

Chart of the day

Where did all the new highs go?  (All Star Charts)

Markets

Ugh. The structured note business is booming once again.  (research puzzle pieces)

Time to start looking for some rotation into the laggard sectors.  (A Dash of Insight also Bespoke)

How’s market liquidity look?  (research puzzle pix)

Strategy

Trading isn’t about catching every move.  (HCPG)

A closer look at momentum-based allocation.  (Empiritrage)

Dividend-paying stocks are not simply bonds by another name.  (LearnBonds)

What traders can learn from Rishi K. Narang’s Black Box: A Simple Guide to Quantitative and High-Frequency Trading. (Reading the Markets)

Psychology

Your unconscious brain is messing with your investing.  (Interloper)

Checking in on some common cognitive distortions.  (Big Picture)

Companies

Can Yahoo! ($YHOO) ever regain some of that start-up spirit?  (NYTimes)

Investors are rushing to get a piece of the legal pot business.  (USA Today)

ETFs

How iShares is planning to enter the active ETF space.  (FT)

Not all “index funds” are created equal.  (WSJ)

On the risk-parity industrial complex.  (aiCIO)

Global

Japan is the most interesting story in economics at the moment.  (Wonkblog)

Will China have it’s own financial crisis?  (Breakingviews)

Economy

The American economy remains sluggish.  (Econbrowser)

Why is corporate profitability so high in the US?  (FT Alphaville)

Why the workforce is shrinking.  (WashingtonPost)

Can housing drive the economy in 2013?  (The Reformed Broker also Wonkblog)

Manufacturing robots have an image problem.  (Real Time Economics, TRB)

Earlier on Abnormal Returns

The supply and demand for alpha is not static: why for most individual investors indexing still makes sense.  (Abnormal Returns)

Mixed media

What the media gets wrong about the new financial web.  (Howard Lindzon)

Media types could learn much from Roger Ebert.  (NYTimes also Sun-Times via DF)

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