Archives: September 2007

Bernanke: More As on His Report Card

Posted by: Lauren Young on September 28

Earlier this week I blogged about what grade Kenneth Volpert, Vanguard's bond index guru, would give to Ben Bernanke's performance thus far. I'm going to stick to this theme for...

Credit crunch shouldn't be a reporter's crutch

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 28

There's some intellectual laziness floating through the world of finance lately. Everyone knows that the subprime mortgage mess has reduced demand from investors and lenders for riskier stuff. And everyone...

Defense stocks provided haven in market's swoon

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 27

The war in Iraq grinds on and now President Bush is looking for a big increase in defense spending. There's an obvious beneficiary in the land of exchange-traded funds, as...

A Transportation Safety Board for hedge funds?

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 26

For years and years, one of the most reliable ways for hedge fund managers to make money was to play in the convertible securities market. Converts are similar to a...

Plenty of good ways to ride the tech wave

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 25

Amidst the rough and tumble of this year's stock market machinations, it's rapidly turning into the fall of technology, or should I say the autumn of technology. Today, for example,...

No investing signals hidden in dividend cuts

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 24

With behavioral or psychological stock market analysis in vogue, many researchers have concluded that investors systematically under-react to news events like a jump in corporate profits or a dividend cut....

Fed Cred: What grade would you give Bernanke?

Posted by: Lauren Young on September 24

What was supposed to set Ben Bernanke's Federal Reserve chairmanship apart from that of Alan Greenspan is transparency as well as plain talk. And that's why the Fed's decision to...

Concrete signs the Fed's move is working, a little

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 21

Northern Trust economist Asha Bangalore has a useful chart out today (PDF file) on the impact of the Federal Reserve's rate cuts on Tuesday. Bangalore looked at three spreads that...

Fear of risk should boost Riskmetrics IPO

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 20

Talk about timely - with all the world worried about excessive risk taking, one of the premier risk management firms just filed to go public. Riskmetrics Group, which started as...

Sharp takes on Fed's big cuts

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 19

Okay, as promised, here's some annotated linkage from around the web analyzing yesterday's surprisingly large rate cuts by the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee. For context, the stock market appeared...

Investors lap up Bernanke's rate cut

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 18

Sometimes a picture tells the whole story. Here's the story on the Federal Reserve's decision just now to cut both of its benchmark interest rates by half of a percentage...

Deeper look at VMWare's results spooks investors

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 18

When software hotshot and EMC (Symbol: EMC) spin-off VMWare (VMW) went public last month at $29, demand from investors was feverish and the shares shot up 76% on their first...

The flight from risk hit muni bonds, too

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 17

The $2 trillion market for tax-free bonds, generally those issued by states, cities and other municipal government bodies, has long been considered a sleepy corner of the fixed-income world. And...

Don't copper-coat your recession forecast just yet

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 12

There's an old saw on Wall Street that so goes the price of copper, so goes the economy. And it's true that both of the last two recessions were preceded...

Harvard's top investor heading back to PIMCO

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 11

Surprising news out of Harvard University today that Mohamed El-Erian will step down as head of the school's $35 billion endowment investment company. El-Erian is going back to Bill Gross...

First tax-free bond ETF hits the market

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 10

Barclays today opened the first exchange-traded fund that holds municipal bonds and pays tax-exempt interest. But the big appeal here isn't the fact that here's now a minute-to-minute trading price...

Gotta go to Kohl's

Posted by: Lauren Young on September 06

I am not a motivated shopper by nature, but I plan to get up early on Sunday morning to be there when the doors of my local Kohl's open. That's...

Credit crunch still threatens, Mr. Bernanke

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 06

"There is a girl in New York City, Who calls herself the human trampoline, And sometimes when I'm falling flying Or tumbling in turmoil I say Whoa so this is...

Finding bank "babies" thrown out with the bathwater

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 05

The financial sector has been at the epicenter of the current market turmoil. With big trouble in real estate lending, obviously a lot of lending institutions are also in hot...

Microsoft shares tread water even if they stay afloat

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 04

Ever since April, when computer tech guru Paul Graham declared that "Microsoft is dead," the debate has raged on. Meanwhile, the software giant's shares (Symbol: MSFT) had a nice little...