Quote of the day

Ben Bernanke, “Life is amazingly unpredictable; any 22-year-old who thinks he or she knows where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination.”  (Calculated Risk)

Chart of the day

Unrest in the streets has put a damper on the Turkish stock market.  (beyondbrics)

Markets

A look at the no-to-hot May asset class returns.  (Capital Spectator)

Retail investors are still scared of equities.  (Reuters)

Welcome to the rolling correction.  (The Reformed Broker)

Cyclicals are breaking out versus consumer staples.  (All Star Charts)

Gold market timers have awful track records.  (Mark Hulbert)

Rates

How to play agency mortgage REITs.  (Mark Dow)

Why is everyone so freaked out about Fed tapering?  (LearnBonds, Pragmatic Capitalism)

Why it is time for the Fed to stop QE.  (Inside Investing)

Active vs. passive

The argument for doing too little vs. too much when it comes to active management.  (The Reformed Broker)

Investors always want the best of both worlds.  (Joe Fahmy)

Endowment funds would do well to ditch alternatives.  (Rick Ferri)

Strategy

How much money do you need to trade for a living?  (Brian Lund)

A look at Bob Rice’s new book pitched to retail investors The Alternative Answer: The Nontraditional Investments That Drive the World’s Best-Performing Portfolios.  (All About Alpha)

Companies

Google’s Android is set to pass Apple’s iOS as an app platform.  (FT)

Microsoft ($MSFT) is thinking about shaking things up.  (AllThingsD)

Muddy Waters wants to make a splash in Silicon Valley.  (WSJ)

Enterprise investments are “the bread and butter” of VCs.  (Tomasz Tunguz)

Hedge funds

Big US hedge funds are giving up on Europe.  (FT)

Institutional investors are increasingly giving up on hedge funds.  (Institutional Investor)

Hedge funds have more access to company managements.  (FT)

Alternatives have been a disaster for pension funds.  (Cassandra Does Tokyo)

Low vol investing

A deep dive into recent low vol underperformance.  (IndexUniverse)

The low vol effect is better described as the high vol anomaly.  (Portfolio Probe)

Funds

Check out the “ghost ship” of the fund world.  (WSJ)

Brokers don’t always pass along mutual fund communications.  (WSJ)

You are overpaying for money management.  (Marketwatch)

Global

Chinese companies are bullish on Europe.  (Time also beyondbrics)

European manufacturing is improving albeit slowly.  (MoneyBeat)

Is Greece stabilizing?  (Sober Look)

Economy

The May ISM manufacturing report falls below 50.  (Calculated Risk)

Is US business now too risk-averse?  (WSJ)

Why September is important to the Fed.  (Tim Duy also MoneyBeat)

Does QE just make the rich, richer?  (Buttonwood)

Earlier on Abnormal Returns

What books Abnormal Returns readers purchased at Amazon in May.  (Abnormal Returns)

Mixed media

Fact checking Meredith Whitney’s The Fate of States: The New Geography of American Prosperity.  (Bloomberg)

On the bear market in law school applications.  (WashingtonPost)

The benefits of free-riders.  (Seth Godin)

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