Ten years later, “It’s tempting, but wrong, to write off the tech mania as mass insanity by the ignorant and ill-informed.”  (WSJ)

“Misallocation of capital is everywhere and anywhere a fallout of bad government policy.”  (Andy Kessler)

Small cap outperformance isn’t a new phenomenon.  It has been going on for ten years now.  (Bespoke, ibid)

Options traders, as measured by the put/call ratio, have gotten a bit too complacent.  (Quantifiable Edges, Trader’s Narrative)

What does the RVX/VIX ratio tell us about market turning points? (Investing With Options)

Deep value opportunities in insurance stocks.  (Street Capitalist)

Hedge funds love high quality growth stocks.  (market folly)

Regulators are misguided in preventing banks from paying dividends.  (Clusterstock)

Pre-holiday trading has lost its edge.  (MarketSci Blog)

Speculation about what bank should Barclays (BCS) buy?  (Deal Journal, MarketBeat)

The Russian ruble (and bonds) are  on quite a run of late.  (FT Alphaville, WSJ also BusinessWeek)

What Tilson and Tongue are buying.  (Tech Ticker)

An interview with microcap investor (and professor) Paul Sonkin.  (Value Walk)

Wall Street is cleaning up on Build America Bonds.  Should you?  (WSJ also IndexUniverse)

Coming soon an international, investment grade corporate bond fund, the Barclays Capital International Corporate Bond (IBND).  (ETF Trends)

Big pharma is increasingly relying on their animal health businesses to weather drug patent expirations.  (Minyanville)

Let’s end the debate over the tax treatment of carried interest once and for all.  (peHUB, Clusterstock)

How to regulate CDS.  (Felix Salmon)

David Merkel, “Unless there is a natural purchaser of an exposure that one is trying to hedge, someone must speculate to a degree to allow you to hedge.  If the speculator is undercapitalized, risks to the financial system rise.”  (Aleph Blog)

Why the SEC’s Chief Economist really quit.  (Dealbreaker)

Economists should focus on the lead up to the housing bubble as the popping of the bubble.  (Econbrowser)

The Federal Reserve needs more governors with expertise in financial markets.  (Mark Thoma)

What the tick up in tax withholdings is saying about the health of the economy.  (Big Picture)

A notable tick up in job openings.  (EconomPic Data, Calculated Risk)

The A.D.S. Business Conditions Index is indicating slower growth ahead.  (The Pragmatic Capitalist)

First the Olympic hockey gold medal and now this:  Canada’s economic growth is better balanced.  (Economist’s View)

Has nuclear energy missed its chance?  (Gregor Macdonald also Humble Student)

Why the new Cisco (CSCO) router won’t make your Internet experience any faster.  (Silicon Alley Insider also Seeking Alpha)

Quantifying the benefit of free content to Seeking Alpha.  (World Beta)

An in depth piece on the ugly TCW-Jeffrey Grundlach breakup.  (Fortune)

Newspapers need to a better job of engaging their readers.  (GigaOM)

On the value of interaction:  StockTwits vs. CNBC.  (ValuePlays)

Why we fixate on enemies and inflate their perceived power.  (Marginal Revolution)

Abnormal Returns Now is the real-time component of this site.  Check it out.

Is the risk trade back on again?  (The Money Game)

Shiller vs. Siegel on market valuation.  (WSJ also Crossing Wall Street)

Lessons learned a year from the market bottom.  (Big Picture, MarketBeat, Morningstar, Marketwatch)

Country stock market performance one year into the bull market.  (Bespoke)

Are mutual funds truly “burning through cash” or is there another explanation?  (Don Fishback also Behind the Headlines, Mish)

The top ten buys and sells of ultimate stock pickers.  (Morningstar)

Brett Arends, “By any measure of shareholder value, GE has been a disaster under Jeffrey Immelt. Investors haven’t made a nickel since he took the helm as chairman nine years ago. In fact, they’ve lost tens of billions of dollars.”  (Marketwatch)

Noted value investor Bruce Berkowitz thinks Citigroup (C) is cheap.  (CNNMoney)

Brett Steenbarger, “My own experience is that I have lost good amounts of money when I’ve stuck with discipline over trusting my gut.”  (TraderFeed)

Calculating returns for the Fosback Seasonality system.  (MarketSci Blog)

Three new broad-based equity ETFs coming from Claymore.  (IndexUniverse)

On the use of market cap/GDP as a valuation measure.  (Data Diary)

Risks in the capital markets are numerous and often unquantifiable.  (CXO Advisory Group)

Given the profits on buying General Growth Properties (GGP) securities in bankruptcy no wonder investors are lining up to help them emerge.  (WSJ, ibid)

Everybody wants to own farmland.  (Clusterstock)

The case for commercial real estate.  (Infectious Greed)

The hold CME Group (CME) has on Treasury futures is under assault.  (FT)

“The very notion of mobs and herds evokes a certain spontaneity. But with the gold bubble, we are moving on to a concept of herding by appointment.”  (Rick Bookstaber)

Hedge fund managers continue to expand operations in Asia.  (FT Alphaville)

Should the NBER classify GDP recessions and jobs recessions separately?  (Department of Numbers)

Economic sentiment is not improving.  (Real Time Economics, Free exchange)

Tim Geither right on crisis, wrong on reform.  (The Atlantic also MarketBeat, Credit Writedowns)

“Making grandiose, nonsensical pronouncements that all bankers are crooks just doesn’t help matters, and it focuses attention and energy away from real problems which need to be addressed posthaste.”  (The Epicurean Dealmaker also Interfluidity)

The administration’s lack of a “too big too fail” policy is a failure of regulatory politics.  (The Balance Sheet)

The Fed does NOT want a GAO audit.  (Huffington Post)

What questions should we ask of forthcoming Federal Reserve governor nominees?  (Big Picture)

David Cottle, “Instead of railing against the markets, European leaders might do well to appreciate their warning shots.”  (The Source also Buttonwood)

What would a European Monetary Fund (EMF) look like?  (WSJ, FT Alphaville)

“If America loses its position as the world’s largest and most powerful economy does it really matter?”  (Free exchange)

Two lines of thought on the nascent state of the economic recovery, post-credit crisis.  (HBR, Credit Writedowns)

US Treasuries are “the only game in town” for China.  (24/7 Wall St.)

Public pension funds are reaching for returns.  (NYTimes, Clusterstock)

John Carney, “Carried interest taxation as capital gains is not a loophole. It’s a straight-forward application of basic tax rules to the partnership structure of hedge funds.”  (Clusterstock)

Part 2 of an interview with James Montier.  (Simoleon Sense)

Ten guidelines for enjoying the stock market.  (Howard Lindzon)

What are the unintended consequences of commission-free ETF trading?  (Morningstar)

Carl Richards, “We need to recognize that we’re not as smart as we think we are. In fact, the smartest investors (and frankly the smartest financial advisers) are the ones that acknowledge that they’re dumb.”  (Bucks Blog)

The mainstream media has learned the wrong lessons from the blogging revolution.  (Clusterstock)

On “ethic of the web” and the value of a link.  (GigaOM, True/Slant)

The “third wave” of coffee purveyors is looking to wean consumers from corporate coffee providers like Starbucks (SBUX). (Time)

Abnormal Returns Now is the real-time component of this site.  Check it out.

How overbought are the markets here?  (Trade to Learn)

The Nasdaq Composite is above pre-Lehman levels.  (Bespoke)

Equity mutual funds are burning through their cash on hand.  (Bloomberg)

Why a 17 or so VIX is not that surprising. (Options Zone)

Barton Biggs thinks global large cap stocks are wicked cheap.  (The Money Game)

Outperformance aside, by one measure small caps are still cheap.  (Trader’s Narrative)

Americans much prefer overseas stocks to their own.  (WSJ also The Money Game)

International diversification, over the long term.  (CXO Advisory Group)

The world’s biggest hedge fund managers.  (Pensions & Investments)

Why hedge funds like Mead Johnson Nutrition (MJN).  (market folly)

Whatever happened to nanotech?  (Bespoke)

Be careful when quoting fund dividend yields.  (EconomPic Data)

Why does J.P. Morgan (JPM) trade at book value?  (Breakingviews)

AIG (AIG) is out of “crown jewels” to sell.  (DealBook, Deal Journal)

John Hussman, “A deleveraging cycle is much like a secular bear market in that the market experiences a great deal of volatility, but tends to establish a sequence of troughs, each at lower levels of valuation (even if not at lower absolute prices).”  (Hussman Funds also The Technical Take)

Sorry critics, Tim Geithner’s plan worked.  The financial system was saved.  (New Yorker also Baseline Scenario)

Roger Lowenstein, “Protecting consumers and breaking up large banks is fine. But neither will prevent banks from acting stupidly again. The surest safeguard is to ensure that, when they do, they aren’t up to their necks in debt.”  (Bloomberg)

A new index of financial conditions.  (Econbrowser, FT Alphaville)

The Greek crisis has faded.  (MarketBeat, Clusterstock)

Portugal tries on an austerity program.  (FT Alphaville)

The problem of the long term unemployed remains.  (Calculated Risk)

Why a tax advantage for carried interest continues.  (New Yorker also Private Equity Beat)

An interview with the always interesting James Montier.  (Simoleon Sense)

On the benefits of regulatory vagueness.  “Like firemen, regulators confronting a financial emergency must have the freedom and the tools to do what they need to do.”  (The Epicurean Dealmaker)

“At its best, the econo-blogosphere can be the last haven of truly independent, non-captured, and crucially, informed, commentary able to affect policy and opinion makers positively. It used to do just that.”  (Ultimi Barbarorum)

Felix Salmon, “Big mainstream-media publications, when they hire people to write their blogs, generally hire people with no blogging experience at all — something which is both ill-conceived and dangerous. Some journalists make good bloggers; most don’t.”  (Reuters)

Transparency is the new alpha.  (Howard Lindzon)

Abnormal Returns Now is the real-time component of this site.  Check it out.

Just because the VIX is  well below 20 does not mean investors are “complacent.”  (Barron’s)

The VIX methodology is taking over the world.  (CME Group)

The state of market sentiment at week-end.  (Trader’s Narrative, The Technical Take)

The market has moved on from a long list of possible negatives.  Should you?  (The Reformed Broker)

A surprising comparison of the yields on bonds and equities.  (SurlyTrader)

Apple (AAPL) could soon pass Wal-Mart (WMT) in market cap.  (Tech Trader Daily)

How one trader won while trading very little.  (WSJ)

Four reasons to be bullish on Google (GOOG).  (Silicon Alley Insider)

Why the financial industry thrives on complexity.  (The Psy-Fi Blog)

David Merkel, “There is no net hedging in the market.  At the end of the day, the world is 100% net long with itself.  Every asset is owned by someone, regardless of the synthetic exposures that are overlaid on the system.”  (Aleph Blog)

Don’t kid yourself, the new shorting regulations will not prevent a stock or the market from declining.  (Barron’s)

The shorts had nothing to do with the collapse in Citigroup (C) stock.  (FT Alphaville)

A blueprint to move Wall Street forward by looking back.  (TheDeal)

Reform, not stimulus, is the way forward for the US economy.  (Infectious Greed)

Steve Randy Waldman, “This never was just a financial crisis. It was, and is, an economic and political crisis, and we are only a very short way down the path towards resolving it.”  (Interfluidity)

An employment chart round-up.  (Big Picture)

“The bottom line is that payroll figures are much better than they appear at first glance. Red Alert! The markets don’t know this.”  (The Money Game)

The US economy is in transition from the bubble economy.  Will we make the right decisions?  (Clusterstock)

Robert Shiller, “But what is the long-term justification for putting taxpayers on the line to subsidize homeownership?”  (NYTimes)

Consumer credit is finally growing again.  (Atlantic Business)

Iceland wants no part of a deal to reimburse bank losses.  (Felix Salmon, Telegraph)

Gretchen Morgenson should probably skip this post.  (Stone Street Advisors also Felix Salmon)

Reducing executive pay to a single number is a fool’s errand.  (WSJ)

Why Harry Markopolos is one of the “weirdly authentic” heroes of the financial crisis.  (NYMag)

Are regulators trying to kill retail forex trading?  (Clusterstock)

Can high frequency finance turn economics into a hard science?  (voxEU)

Charles Kirk, “..I really encourage you to find and explore new and creative ways to make trading and investing fun especially with others who share similar interests.”  (Kirk Report)

Silicon Alley is back.  (NYTimes)

Kevin Kelleher, “All it will take is one big deal to start a wave of web mergers. It might not even come from Google or Microsoft.”  (GigaOM)

Marc Andreesen thinks big media needs to “burn the boats” and commit wholeheartedly to the open Web.  (TechCrunch)

John Gruber, “Web page views are a terribly inaccurate, if not outright misleading, metric for attention. Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the most attention, but generate among the least web page views.” (Daring Fireball)

Without even knowing it you may be an accidental curator.  (Silicon Alley Insider)

Abnormal Returns Now is the real-time component of this site.  Check it out.

A couple of approaches to improve on buy-and-hold returns.  (MarketSci Blog, Big Picture)

Mark Twain on why your bet on green energy will likely not work out.  (Street Capitalist)

Is the stock market 26% overvalued according to long-term P/E ratios.  (The Pragmatic Capitalist)

“It is difficult not to notice the weak breadth and volume that has accompanied this recent bounce in equities.”  (Trader’s Narrative)

Mark Hulbert, “Based on the several hundred investment advisers I track, I’d have to say that bullish sentiment is approaching dangerously high levels.” (Marketwatch)

Six reasons to short the asset managers.  (TheStreet)

Preferred stocks have rocked since the end of the crisis.  (Bespoke)

Have transportation stocks had their run?  (Minyanville)

The Goldman Sachs VIP list of hedge fund holdings.  (market folly)

Dean Foods (DF) as a value play.  (Crossing Wall Street)

Investing with Warren Buffett bested every mutual fund over 45 years.  (WSJ, 24/7 Wall St.)

Using style analysis to classify Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A).  (MPI Blog via the research puzzler)

Cliff Asness on the attraction of a managed futures strategy.  (Morningstar)

Corporate bond default rates have ticked down.  (FT Alphaville)

Build America Bonds are booming.  (Institutional Investor)

Russian IPOs have been a big disappointment.  (WSJ)

Is Brazil at risk of overheating?  (FT Alphaville)

Is Mexico the new Brazil?  (IndexUniverse)

“The situation in Japan is about to get a lot worse.  (The Money Game)

Iceland doesn’t care much for the proposed Angl0-Dutch bank pact.  (DealBook)

A sign that the Greek crisis is over, for now.  (The Money Game, Marketwatch, DealBook)

Feel free to ignore any single month of the Non-Farm Payroll numbers.  (Big Picture)

Non-farm payrolls come in better than expected.  (MarketBeat, Calculated Risk, Floyd Norris, EconomPic Data, Economix, ibid, Atlantic Business,  Real Time Economics, DJ Market Talk)

One upside from a higher unemployment rate, less influenza.  (Real Time Economics)

“Rail freight is showing the same robustness as the ISM reports in recent months.”  (The Pragmatic Capitalist)

Protestations aside, does any one believe “too big to fail” has gone away?  (WashingtonPost, (24/7 Wall St., Felix Salmon, Clusterstock, DJ Market Talk)

Why did the US ignore the regulatory lessons of the LTCM crisis?  (Zero Hedge)

The forgotten lessons of 2008.  (Farnam Street)

(Good) advice to a young market participant.  (Big Picture)

Happy blogiversary (and good luck) to Jake.  (EconomPic Data)

A review of “Diary of a Hedge Fund Manager” by Keith McCullough.  (Traders Magazine)

Eugene Fama, “My Life in Finance.”  (DFA)

The real-world fallout of the hedge fund-Euro collusion story.  (CJR)

On Mark Zuckerberg and the controversial origins of Facebook.  (Silicon Alley Insider)

Steve Jobs vs. the patent process.  (Slate)

What do bankers and movie stars have in common?  (Atlantic Business)

Forget the Oscars.  What companies made the most in film finance last year.  (The Big Money)

The economics of lobsters are out of whack.  (CNNMoney)

How do rogue waves work?  (Time earlier Abnormal Returns)

The “You Era” is over.  Quit your blogging and get back to work.  (Adam Lashinsky)

Abnormal Returns Now is the real-time component of this site.  Check it out.

Inflation fears are overblown.  Expect low interest rates for some time to come.  (WSJ)

Three fundamental factors supporting the market recovery.  (The Reformed Broker)

Can the VIX go much lower in this cycle?  (Options Zone, WSJ also VIX and More)

Ignore the jobs report.  “The market is going to interpret the report however it wants to.” (Joe Fahmy)

On the status of gold as an asset class.  (The Pragmatic Capitalist)

Companies are starting to tap their cash hoards for acquisitions.  (WSJ)

REITs love a steep yield curve.  (World Beta)

Some quirks Michael Burry and John Paulson have in common.  (Deal Journal earlier Abnormal Returns)

More data on the surge in passively managed funds.  (Morningstar)

Forewarned is forearmed.  The odds against trading success.  (Abnormal Returns)

Whitney Tilson is killing it this year.  (Clusterstock)

Bill Ackman has made a killing on his stake in General Growth Properties (GGWPQ).  (market folly also Clusterstock)

Activist investors are back.  Did they ever go away?  (Breakingviews)

Is the Blackstone Group (BX) back?  (DealBook)

It would be difficult proving hedge funds did anything wrong in shorting the Euro.  (Deal Journal contra Clusterstock)

Hedge funds are getting demonized for the problems in Greece and the Euro.  (MarketBeat)

Eric Uhlfelder, “Most observers expected big banks that survived the credit crisis to reflexively suspend preferred stock dividends to husband cash. Instead, virtually all banks — domestic and foreign — continued to pay dividends on their U.S.-traded preferreds.”  (Institutional Investor)

The CFTC promulgates the “Eddie Murphy” rule for insider trading of commodities.  (FT Alphaville)

Sovereign credit default swap rates have declined in the past month.  (Bespoke)

At the right price investors are willing to buy Greek bonds.  (Money Supply, The Source)

How vulnerable is the rest of Europe?  (FT Alphaville, NYTimes, Credit Writedowns)

Why the Chinese Yuan NOT undervalued.  (The Money Game)

Jobless claims continue to drop, albeit slowly.  (Bespoke, Calculated Risk, The Capital Spectator)

On the relationship between unemployment and mortgage delinquency rates.  (Calculated Risk)

Simon Johnson, “At current scale, our megabanks bring no social benefits and great social risks.”  (Economix)

Felix Salmon, “Robert Rubin, Goldman Sachs arbitrageur and chairman, US treasury secretary, and Citigroup grandee, was the Forrest Gump of this crisis, turning up in all the key places at all the key times.”  (Reuters)

The Federal Reserve is going to be transformed with members who take a pay cut.  (Economist, Real Time Economics)

Facebook is going public.  Just not yet.  (WSJ)

Hulu is doomed.  Viacom (VIA) is pushing it along.  (Minyanville)

The smartphone war:  Google (GOOG) vs. Apple (AAPL).  (CNNMoney)

TED’s finance-related book reading list.  (The Epicurean Dealmaker)

Can emotional intelligence kill your portfolio?  (Stuart Schneiderman)

StockTwits figures in a guide to online investing.  (US News)

Too big to adapt?  Andrew Sorkin’s “Too Big to Fail” coming to HBO.  (Deadline also Dealbreaker)

Abnormal Returns Now is the real-time component of this site.  Check it out.

Carl Richards at the Bucks Blog notes how using small sample sizes can get us in trouble when it comes to investing.  Investors oftentimes focus on their own experiences rather than relying on larger, and more statistically valid, samples of investor returns.  Richards writes:

Forming our sense of the future based on our own limited experience is just part of being human. But when it comes to investing, this wiring leads to some major mistakes..So next time you’re thinking about making a major change to your investment strategy, try expanding your sample size and looking beyond your own limited experience. Remember, just because it was sunny on top of the mountain last time doesn’t mean it will be this time.

Mark Hulbert at Marketwatch adds some additional data by which we can assess the probability of success of an active investor.  Hulbert notes that more money has been flowing into passively managed funds over time, due in part to the inability of mutual funds to outperform the market.  In regards to the newsletter writers Hulbert follows, he writes:

My three decades of tracking investment advisers has shown that, over long periods of time, about one out of five advisers are able to do better than simply buying and holding an index fund. While that means it isn’t impossible to outperform the market over the long term, the odds are stacked against us.

The point in all of this is not to dissuade anyone from becoming an active investor, or taking it to the extreme, a full-time trader.*  It is helpful to recognize that many other people have tried, and failed, to do what you are trying to accomplish.  Hopefully this gives you some sense of the tough task ahead of you.  As they say, “forewarned is forearmed.”  Consider yourself warned.

*For an interesting discussion of what it takes to be a full-time trader check out this post by QuasiD at Tickerville who discusses the capital requirements (and required return) a trader needs to make a serious go at trading full-time.

After a flood of inflows will the new bond fund investors stick around?  (Morningstar)

Is it time to retire the Baltic Dry Index as an economic indicator?  (WSJ)

The expectations ratio continues to fall.  (The Pragmatic Capitalist)

What is T. Boone Pickens’ BP Capital up to these days?  (Bespoke)

The percentage of assets in equity mutual funds that are actively managed continue to decline.  (Marketwatch)

Why your individual experience with stocks is meaningless.  (Carl Richards)

Are obsessive tendencies necessary for success in the markets?  (Abnormal Returns)

Governments are not happy with the big bets investors are making these days.  (MarketBeat, Clusterstock)

How AIG (AIG) blew itself up.  (Clusterstock)

Why the Consumer Financial Protection Agency is necessary.  (Big Picture, Felix Salmon)

Some sort of financial regulation will pass, here’s hoping it doesn’t include the Volcker Rule.  (Dealbreaker)

The jobs picture is going to be particularly murky this month.  (Real Time Economics, Macro Advisers, DJ Market Talk)

Another month of weak auto sales.  (Econbrowser, EconomPic Data)

David Leonhardt, “The economy’s biggest problem has not changed. When bubbles pop, they wreak enormous, lasting damage. Credit stays hard to get for years because banks need to rebuild their balance sheets.”  (NYTimes)

Why did the emerging market economies come through the economic crisis so well?  (John Taylor)

Michael Pettis, “Chinese household consumption will undoubtedly rise as a share of Chinese GDP over the next decade or two, but the process nonetheless can be disappointing for growth.”  (China Financial Markets)

Is pressure off Euroland and the Euro for now?  (The Money Game, Daily Options Report, FT Alphaville)

Greece unveils its austerity program.  (Money Supply, WSJ, The Source)

The issue of executive pay has been with us for a long time.  (The Crosshairs Trader)

How the US Postal Service is in the spam business.  (Zero Beta)

What uber-blogger Felix Salmon reads.  (The Atlantic Wire)

Tim Sykes vs. Shaq.  (Clusterstock)

Abnormal Returns Now is the real-time component of this site.  Check it out.

Warren Buffett modestly says he was lucky that his brain is wired in a way that suits the times. A few hundred years ago he would have been the crazy peasant who was always talking about ways to increase crop production if only he had the capital.

It often seems that the best investors (and traders) seem to obsessed with their work.*  Another example of was recently in the news.  In Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis profiles Michael Burry who was among the first portfolio managers to both recognize and bet that the subprime mortgage market was dangerously out of whack.  What maybe more interesting for our purposes is why Burry uncovered this market opportunity.  Lewis writes:

People with Asperger’s couldn’t control what they were interested in. It was a stroke of luck that his special interest was financial markets and not, say, collecting lawn-mower catalogues. When he [Burry] thought of it that way, he realized that complex modern financial markets were as good as designed to reward a person with Asperger’s who took an interest in them. “Only someone who has Asperger’s would read a subprime-mortgage-bond prospectus,” he said.**

The point being that Burry’s particular cognitive processes made him able to focus on the many details of subprime that other investors had happily glossed over.  This single-minded focus has served both Buffett and Burry well.  One could argue that having some diminished capacity to read the emotions of others may in fact be valuable in success as a contrarian investor.

Some investors refer to contrarian investing as a phenomenon that takes advantage of reversion to the mean.  In short, cheap stocks become more valued by the market and expensive stocks less so.  For our purposes a contrarian investor is one who takes a position in the market contrary to overwhelming popular belief.

To hold that sort of position, like shorting subprime mortgages when every one thinks the value of real estate can’t go down, is an emotionally taxing proposition.  You are constantly being bombarded by news and opinion that you are in fact wrong.  However for those individuals who are less able to read emotional cues this contrarian investment process may come more easily.

This discussion of compulsion and dedication need not be limited to contrarian investors.  By extension this sort of analysis could cover other styles of investing.  For technicians it may be the ability to scan and analyze more charts.  For quants it may represent testing more variables and writing better code.  The point being that great investors often demonstrate a level of dedication to their chosen process.

This is not to argue that Asperger’s-like personality traits are necessary to investment success.  The takeaway is that when you invest you are in a real sense competing with those individuals who do have obsessions (healthy or not) with the markets.  The question you need to ask is whether your level of research, analysis and discipline can match theirs.  If it can’t, you may want to re-think your investment plans.

*For the purposes of simplification I am using interchangeably: obsession, compulsion and dedication.

**Hat tip to Heidi Moore and Epicurean Dealmaker.

ETF Deathwatch for March 2010.  (Invest With An Edge)

IBD upgrades its market outlook to positive.  (The Pragmatic Capitalist)

Be careful using century old data to justify your position.  (The Reformed Broker)

The US and foreign markets have never been more correlated.  (Financial Armageddon)

Mixed results for hedge funds in February.  (FINalternatives, DealBook, WSJ)

Money flowing into Asia-focused hedge funds could drive prices higher.  (Clusterstock)

Can the IPO market get its mojo back?  (Renaissance Capital)

Why Chile’s stock market didn’t plummet post-earthquake.  (Marketwatch)

Play the (trading) ball where it lies.  (Abnormal Returns also Daily Options Report)

What it takes to be a full-time trader.  (Tickerville)

On the folly of forecasting.  (World Beta)

Can you tell a real chart from a fake chart?  (CXO Advisory Group)

David Merkel, “Thus, my view of Berkshire Hathaway is that it is more critical as to who is the CEO/COO rather than who is the Chief Investment Officer.  The greater need is to manage the businesses, rather than manage slack cash for high returns.”  (Aleph Blog)

Pfizer (PFE) has become a hedge fund favorite.  (Reuters)

Slow down.  People are not cutting the cable cord to go all-Web.  (Tech Trader Daily)

Another example of why Wall Street is not your friend.  (Felix Salmon)

The Britsh pound is short-term oversold, but the longer term picture holds little hope.  (Barron’s also MaoXian)

Add the Euro to the oversold category.  (The Money Game)

Australia has it going on.  (The Money Game, Money Supply)

Another 25 bp hike Down Under.  (Money Supply, MarketBeat)

Fed governors are singlehandedly reducing the unemployment rate.  (WashingtonPost, DealBook, Big Picture)

Andrew Clavell, “Politicians are anti sovereign CDS as their existence accelerates the requirement for a response to deal with local country deficits and structural eurozone imbalances.”  (Financial Crookery)

On the benefit of naked CDS.  (Felix Salmon, FT Alphaville, Atlantic Business)

Mark Thoma, “However it’s measured, output is far too low, unemployment is far too high, and disinflation is still a worry. Don’t let the deficit and inflation hawks convince you otherwise.”  (Economist’s View, ibid)

The next ten years may be marked as the ‘austerity decade.’  (Guardian UK also Economist)

What role do low interest rates have on the savings rate?  (EconomPic Data)

Is Goldman Sach’s business truly at risk to bad publicity?  (DealBook, Curious Capitalist)

An extended profile of Larry Fink, CEO of money management giant Blackrock (BLK).  (Vanity Fair)

The first review of Michael Lewis’ “The Big Short.”  (Salon)

Barry Ritholtz talks with Russ Roberts on the history of bailouts and the role of the Fed in the stock market.  (EconTalk)

Spring is here!  A new paper, “Detrending career statistics in professional baseball:  Accounting for the steroids era and beyond.”  (arXiv.org via pkedrosky)

Abnormal Returns Now is the real-time component of this site.  Check it out.