Quote of the day

Howard Lindzon, “Stocks crash every day.”  (Howard Lindzon)

Chart of the day

Wheat is having a tough time of it.  (WSJ)

Markets

The year the fear bubble popped.  (Crossing Wall Street)

Top stories of the year.  (The Reformed Broker, IndexUniverse, The Epicurean Dealmaker)

Individual investors are getting overly bullish.  (Horan Capital)

Mid-term election years are not great for the stock market.  (ETF Trends)

The case for silver.  (Market Anthropology)

Solar stocks have rolled over.  (Charts etc.)

Picks

Two investment ideas for 2014.  (Capital Observer)

A survey of some contrarian opportunities.  (Bloomberg)

Credit

Credit spreads are “euphoric.”  (Sober Look)

Everyone loves “dirt bonds.”   (Bloomberg)

Strategy

Corporate America isn’t buying back shares for your benefit.  (The Reformed Broker also Institutional Investor)

Eventually the “unconstrained mandate” will wear out its welcome.  (Aleph Blog)

The case for buying the year’s least-loved stocks.  (Brett Arends)

Companies

Consumers overwhelmed UPS ($UPS) with a late surge in shipments this holiday season.  (WSJ, Bloomberg)

Americans love Amazon Prime.  (GigaOM)

Google ($GOOG) has big plans for Google Now.  (Minyanville)

Blackstone ($BX) has a “Blackfish” problem with its Seaworld ($SEAS) investment.  (MoneyBeat)

Twitter ($TWTR) is on fire.  (MoneyBeat, Business Insider)

Finance

Wealth management M&A is likely to continue in 2014.  (Institutional Investor)

Funds

There is more to fund expenses than the expense ratio.  (Rekenthaler Report)

A look at five somewhat obscure ETFs.  (IndexUniverse)

Global

Why the UK is lucky to have its own currency.  (Capital Spectator)

Economy

Weekly initial unemployment claims decline back to trend.  (Calculated Risk, Capital Spectator)

Nine positive signs going into the new year.  (Pragmatic Capitalism)

What about housing inventories in 2014?  (Calculated Risk)

Why does economic optimism engender so much blowback?  (The Atlantic)

Earlier on Abnormal Returns

What you may have missed in our Tuesday linkfest.  (Abnormal Returns)

Mixed media

On the balkanization of streaming movies and music.  (Pando Daily)

The least important writers of 2013.  (Gawker)

A rave review for The Wolf of Wall Street.  (Joe Weisenthal)

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