This Is What Happens When Anonymous Tries to Destroy You

“There’s nothing stopping them. They feel like they have the right to do anything they want to anyone who gets in their way.” What they want, in this case, is to hurt her and her family. Or at least to jabber at length about maybe doing it.

Read the article here.

Bill Luby summarizes what he considers to be all the significant pullbacks since the bottom in 2009. He also includes a very helpful graphical overview of the same data.

Read the article here.

Some light reading to take your mind off of Europe. This research shows your guess at someone’s sexual orientation is probably 60% correct, even if you’ve seen their face for less than a second.

We conducted experiments in which participants viewed facial photographs of men and women and then categorized each face as gay or straight. The photographs were seen very briefly, for 50 milliseconds, which was long enough for participants to know they’d seen a face, but probably not long enough to feel they knew much more. In addition, the photos were mostly devoid of cultural cues: hairstyles were digitally removed, and no faces had makeup, piercings, eyeglasses or tattoos.

Even when viewing such bare faces so briefly, participants demonstrated an ability to identify sexual orientation: overall, gaydar judgments were about 60 percent accurate.

Read the article here.

Merryn Somerset Webb is seeing buy signals, primarily generated from the Cape ratio.

So what should you do while everyone panics? You might want to take a very deep breath and buy some European stocks.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that, on the cyclically-adjusted price/earnings (Cape) ratio, several markets were beginning to look very cheap indeed. They are now cheaper.

Read the article here.

Merkel has the EU by the short hairs. It appears she will keep pressing for ambitious reforms, and why not? Without the support of Berlin, the EU fails…

(Reuters) – When Jean-Claude Trichet called last June for the creation of a European finance ministry with power over national budgets, the idea seemed fanciful, a distant dream that would take years or even decades to realize, if it ever came to be.

One year later, with the euro zone’s debt crisis threatening to tear the bloc apart, Germany is pushing its partners for precisely the kind of giant leap forward in fiscal integration that the now-departed European Central Bank president had in mind.

Read the article here.

Posted over at Ritholt’z blog. Another must-read from Mauldin.

Read the article here.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble are urging Spain’s government to take an international bailout as it struggles to shore up the country’s banks, Der Spiegel magazine reported, without saying where it got the information.

Read the article here.

Urged? Perhaps “begged” would be more apt. Either Germany goes all in for the single currency model or the model is blown to bits. I believe Germany will cave, but not until the get terms that are agreeable to them.

Read the article here.

…the Wall Street Journal is reporting that traders are turning to old-fashioned microwave relay towers to speed deals between New York and Chicago. The newspaper reports that 10 companies have filed applications with the Federal Communications Commission to build such links.

Isn’t the speed of light fast enough? Read why microwaves transmit faster than fibre.

Read the article here.

Jeffrey Carter writes, “This post isn’t designed for the active day trader. It’s designed for the average investor. The American that works a job, saves their money for retirement in a 401(k).”

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“The Securities and Exchange Commission approved two proposals to alter trading curbs meant to curtail volatility in the U.S. stock market.” I think iBC readers will agree that the “price bands” are going to be heavily exploited.

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Hilarious: “For 15 years we were told the West is nothing like Japan. We agree. It is worse!”

Read more commentary by Edwards and see a couple of interesting charts, here.

The Reformed Broker is out with a provocative piece detailing why you should be up early tomorrow for The Least Important Jobs Report of All Time. Or not.

Read the article here.

Could it get worse for $FB? It appears that it can…“Let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else, we don’t crash EVER!” – ‘Mark Zuckerberg’, The Social Network.

Read the article here.

A couple of must-see charts from Weisenthal…You won’t believe them.

Read the article here.

Perhaps it is because $FB can allow the prying eyes of mom and dad access to messages…Or perhaps $FB is just losing its cool factor?

With more than 900 million users, Facebook remains the most popular online hangout. But some young people are turning their attention elsewhere. They are checking out new mobile apps, hanging out on Tumblr and Twitter, and sending plain-old text messages from their phones. Their goal is to hook up with smaller circles of friends and share their thoughts and feelings away from the prying eyes of Mom and Dad.

Read the article here.

Final List of Participants

Chairman

Source

Via Bespoke, this is research is a must-read.

We track every Drudge headline at 9 AM, noon and 4 PM on daily basis going back to 2003 and tally the number of stories that were finance related using the Drudge Report’s massive archives service.  We essentially wanted to see how often a financial news story was a front-page headline and not just a Money section headline.  From a contrarian perspective, when financial stories dominate the front-page headlines on a regular basis, it’s probably getting close to an inflection point for the market, whether it’s a bottom or a top.  (We counted any story that involved the economy or any asset class as a finance related headline.)

Read the rest here.

Tyler Durden — “Bottom line: Jamie Dimon’s “tempest in a teapot” just became a fully-formed, perfect storm which suddenly threatens his very position, and could potentially lead to billions more in losses for his firm.”

Read the article here.