Gay Porn Interrupts Canadian Local TV Newscast

A botched repair job by a local cable company had shocked CHCH-TV viewers watching around three minutes of indecent sex scenes as they sipped their morning coffee.

By BEN LEVISOHN And JOE LIGHT

How do you like them apples?

Investors got a scare on Monday when Apple, AAPL -2.46% among the best-performing stocks of 2012, tumbled 4.2%, capping a five-day stretch during which it lost 8.8%. The stock continued its slide later in the week, finishing Friday down 10% from its all-time high.

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An alarming news report from Iran’s Press TV, a propoganda arm of the Iranian government, showing American professors gathering in Tehran to discuss the Occupy Wall Street Movement:

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But we’ll also confess to getting a bit nervous right now.

Why?

Two reasons:

First, the Apple zealots have gone silent.

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Great article about Ebay from Bespoke…

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So with the stock already up 15%, should you ‘Buy it Now’ or keep it on your watch list?  The table below shows the 24 days since it came public in 1998 that EBAY rose more than 15% in a single day.  For each day we calculated the stock’s average and median returns over the next week and month.  As shown, the average returns over the next week and month are both convincingly positive.

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A good Rolling Stone article about Levon. Yours truly highly recommends Dirt Farmer and Electric Dirt.

Robert Sinn the Stock Sage

For roughly six months during 2006 I worked as a proprietary trader at a small but well known prop trading firm in South Florida. It was a small office with about a dozen experienced traders (some much more than others but there were no newbies) who traded anywhere from $500,000 to $5 million accounts. The guy who invited me to work in this office was also a veteran trader himself who happened to also be one of the firms managing partners. His name was Mark and he also happens to be the best trader I have ever personally had the pleasure of witnessing with my own eyes.

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By BRETT ARENDS

Is it true that stocks are cheap “when compared with bonds”? That’s the line on Wall Street. If you haven’t heard it from your broker yet, you will. Indeed, in a recent report, some investment strategists from big brokerages, in their enthusiasm for stocks, argued that they were at record lows compared with bonds.

The comparison doesn’t come out of the blue. It has a long tradition in finance, where it is known as “the Fed model,” because the ratio once appeared in a Federal Reserve report.

The argument is pretty appealing to many — especially now, when bond yields are so low. The stock market today sells for about 14 times forecast earnings — or, to put it another way, if you buy $100 worth of stocks, they should generate, or yield, about $7 in after-tax earnings. That’s on par with historical averages. But that 7 percent “earnings yield” looks enormous when compared with the pitiful 2 percent you’ll earn from 10-year Treasury bonds. Wall Street will offer data going back to the 1960s that shows the two yields moving in tandem.

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Everyone in the country has heard of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman but few know the name of Trevor Dooley–a central Florida man who shot and killed a neighbor, David “DJ” James, and is defending himself using Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. 

The James case has a number of similarities with the Martin case, but has not been the subject of the mainstream media meltdown nor the focus of cries of racism, even though the shooter and the victim were both of different races (Dooley is black, and James was white).

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by Keith Koffler on April 18, 2012, 9:16 pm

Thanks to Janice, the human half of Granny Jan and Jihad Kitty, who found this photo tweeted by @hilohaw.

SOURCE

April 17 (Bloomberg) — Andrew Balls, head of European portfolio management at Pacific Investment Management Co., talks about Pimco’s investment strategy for Europe and the region’s bonds.

D.M. Levine

Mark Gorton is sitting in the Zen garden on the roof of his office in downtown Manhattan, squinting into the sunlight and telling me he’s not evil.

“If you listen to some of the rhetoric in the press recently, you’d think we were killing babies,” Gorton says, in between sips of organic blood-orange soda as he leans forward in a wicker chair. He’s upset that his business is being “tarred” by the bad publicity plaguing the rest of Wall Street. “What we’re doing is a net positive for the world.”

This is an interesting complaint because in many ways Mark Gorton is the new face of Wall Street. Gorton is a high-frequency trader. His company, Tower Research Capital LLC, with its 275-person global staff of engineers and computer science and physics majors, is part of an industry that today is responsible for more than half of all stock trading in the United States, according to the Tabb Group, a financial markets research and strategic advisory firm. Gorton’s is an industry under scrutiny.

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via Systematic Relative Strength

Being an investor is tough.  Nothing moves in a straight line, except maybe a fake Bernie Madoff-type account.  Everything proceeds in sawtooth fashion, and each up and down seems cleverly calculated to play on your emotions just enough to tempt you to take action at the wrong time.  In fact, we could be headed into a correction right now.  Carl Richards of Behavior Gap has an awesome illustration of the basic problem:

Source: Carl Richards/Behavior Gap  (click to enlarge)

According to DALBAR data, the dips are pretty good at causing investors to bail out.  DALBAR’s most recent study released in March 2012 showed that the average stock fund investor made annual returns of only 3.49% over the last 20 years versus an annual return of 7.81% for the S&P 500.  The average investor “generally abandons investments at inopportune times,” according to their research.  That’s a polite way of saying that investors panic when the market goes down and they sell out, often near the lows.

And there is plenty of temptation.  According to uber-reliable Ned Davis Research, as summarized in this Wells Fargo market update, there have been 294 dips of 5% or more since 1928.  In other words, you usually have three or four chances a year to screw up.  Considering that most investors have a 20-30 year life cycle, that’s a lot of dips to deal with.

Read the rest here.

Ivanhoff lists the 4 stocks with new all time highs on the StockTwits 50 list.

Eric Platt

Traders are quick to talk trash on the floor, especially when its a stock they’re short.

But there are a number of companies that have developed a rabid like following — some good, most bad — that get investors talking.

Business Insider compiled a list of the 21 most controversial stocks.

The companies have made headlines over the past year for possible fraud, massive growth, a sex scandal, hostile shareholders, and poor executive decisions, among other reasons.

Read the rest here.

Joe Weisenthal

The latest quarterly letter from GMO’s Jeremy Grantham is out (.pdf), and as always it’s a must read.

If you’re an investor, especially one inside the industry, it’s especially valuable.

Basically, he talks about one of the main reason that anyone trades: To keep their own careers. And it’s this career preservation that causes the kind of wild herding that causes the market to move like crazy. That’s because in a desperate bid to avoid missing any big moves, investors’ attempts to catch everything exacerbates the moves.

via Wayne Hale’s Blog

Now that Discovery is safely delivered to the Smithsonian, I think I can tell the story of how we nearly lost her in July of 2005, and how well intentioned, highly motivated,  hard working, smart people can miss the most obvious.