Among the problems for the publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times and several other papers in the Chicago area, the NYSE says: For more than a month the Sun-Times Media Group's market capitalization has languished under $75 million while its shares have traded under $1.

Also, "the Company informed the NYSE that it does not expect to submit a business plan to bring it into conformity with continued listing standards." The company CEO says the delisting doesn't affect "the way we conduct our business" nor its plans "to explore strategic alternatives for the company."

To say the least, the market seems skeptical of the Sun Times' ability to find a buyer. Trading at 40 cents, Sun-Times shares have plunged 93% in the past year.

Compare the Sun-Times' market value of $75 million to the $650 million that Cablevision (CVC) will pay for suburban New York City newspaper Newsday, owned by the Tribune Company. (Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. reportedly offered $580 million but withdrew its bid over the weekend.)

BusinessWeek colleague Joe Weber wrote about the Sun Times' plight in the April print edition of BW Chicago , which can be accessed here.

Like other newspaper companies, the Sun-Times faces declining advertising revenue. But in addition, the Sun Times must deal with the legacy of the ownership of Conrad Black (recently convicted for his crimes), the fallout from a circulation scandal (which also hit Newsday), and a tough competitive position as the number two paper to the Chicago Tribune.

The Sun-Times' best but fading hope is a deep-pocketed buyer, a company like News Corp. or Cablevision betting that the decline of the newspaper business is a temporary rough patch rather than a long slide toward extinction.

As far as the neck-n-neck heated public current race goes, it appears that we are near an end, but it’s not over yet. Currently milk is selling for $3.89 a gallon vs. $3.61 a gallon for regular gas. While Oil has the momentum, $126.20 high set today, Milk's got that $4 finish line in site.

He points to a surprising statistic: Adult women have gained nearly 300,000 jobs since November, while men have lost 700,000 jobs.

"You might even say American men are in recession, and American women are not," he writes. "What's going on? Simply put, men have the misfortune of being concentrated in the two sectors that are doing the worst: manufacturing and construction. Women are concentrated in sectors that are still growing, such as education and health care."

So is there an investing angle here? Stereotypes can be simplistic and silly, but how valuable are they when picking stocks?
Maybe we should be shorting companies with lots of male customers, like Smith & Wesson (SWHC) or Cabela's (CAB). Meanwhile, we might buy shares of Avon Products (AVP), Estee Lauder (EL) and Ann Taylor Stores (ANN).

Has anyone spotted any evidence this is actually true -- that economic gender disparities are hurting or helping particular companies?

The problem, as Coy points out, is that many men and women share household finances. A woman whose husband has just been laid off is likely to forego a new top at Ann Taylor Loft. Plus, pain could soon spread from male-dominated industries to the rest of the economy.

Citing possible conflicts among the many partners in the new Clearwire, a relatively modest service roll-out plan and strong comeptition expected from new cellular phone networks, Rollins concludes: "Our revised valuation analysis reflects our concern that the combined Clearwire is not pursuing a substantially larger coverage opportunity, while spreading the equity over a larger share base."

Around the blogosphere, reaction was mixed but skeptical. Om Malik calls the deal a "spaghetti-like mess of conflicts and self-interests." Kevin Tofel over at the winning mobile tech blog jkOnTheRun is a little more hopeful but warns that LTE, the competing next-gen wireless broadband standard from cell phone companies, could beat Clearwire to the punch. And Niley Patel at Engadget is even snarkier:

We're not certain why Big Cable is so eager to dump money on Sprint after two previous ventures both folded recently, but if this goes down, it's a pretty big boost for WiMAX, which was looking pretty sickly lately. Still, asking consumers to have faith in Sprint and Comcast and Time Warner Cable is pretty ballsy -- between the three of them, they've probably burned everyone in America.

Today, however, Wall Street's mood darkened: The broader market fell almost 2% and the transportation index dropped 3%.

For most of this year, railroad stocks and trucking stocks have tracked each other closely.
But while railroad stocks (measured by the Dow Jones U.S. Railroad Index) dropped 2.7% today, trucking stocks (the Dow Jones U.S. Trucking Index) plunged 4.5%.

Why the difference? Today the price of oil rose another $2 per barrel, getting awful close to $124 per barrel. This hits truckers harder than railroads because trains are far more energy efficent than trucks.

Trucks are "three times more fuel intensive," according to Lee Klaskow of Longbow Research.

There's another reason railroads might be favored by investors: The freight they handle is arguably less sensitive to an economic slowdown. "Railroads tend to haul more defensive freight than trucks, in our view," Klaskow wrote May 6.

For more on transportation stocks, check out Eric Roseman's interesting post on the topic.

There's a simple explanation -- well, it's simple because it's all so darn complex. Unlike a regular merger, where shareholders get a price for their stock, this is a complex restructuring that doesn't pay anyone cash but rather gives them shares in a newly formed company with the same name and ticker symbol. Each shareholder gets one share in new stock for each share of old stock.

But the new bigtime investors like Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (TWC) get a different deal. Their investments will be valued in new shares at between $17 and $23, depending on how new Clearwire shares trade in 15 randomly selected trading days out of the 30 trading days just prior to 90 days after the deal closes. If the new shares trade outside the range, the new investors would face an immediate profit or a quick loss. The market's currently betting that the new shares will trade at the low end minus a discount for the delay in closing the deal of about 9 to 12 months.

You'll notice that even in the unlikely event that new Clearwire's shares take off, the ranged merger price will never match the company's IPO price of $25 from last March. Anyone who bought at the IPO, which we tried to warn you about back then, is a validated loser now.

Of course, it's a much different equation for the big companies and insiders that provided initial funding for Clearwire. As the company's IPO prospectus explained last year, those insiders, including Intel (INTC), Motorola (MOT) and Craig McCaw, paid an average of $11.35 for their shares. So the merger agreement provides a guaranteed win for them.

I'm not sure either. But I like this comment in a research note from Steven Weiting of Citigroup on May 5: "It almost seems that going from near-collapse of the financial system to 'business as usual' has come deceptively easy over the past month."

Sandy on the Housing Depression blog raises this same issue. "I do not see any fundamentals having changed since the Bear Stearns collapse - except [the] Fed bailing out everyone left and right." If this is indeed the worst financial crisis since World War II, "then a mere 10% decline from the top does not seem like it's enough."

It's true that the financial crisis and housing and mortgage troubles have hit the credit markets far harder than the stock market.

The recent rally is a good time to "take money off the table if you have any," Peter Cohan says. "Why? Things are not good for the consumer who accounts for 70% of economic growth."

But if only the housing and mortgage markets could stabilize, the bulls might be proven right.

Cyril Moulle-Berteaux argues in the WSJ today that the housing market is hitting bottom right now, putting an end to the crisis. Home prices are now low enough to attract buyers, he says. "Numerous households that had been priced out of the market can now afford to get in."

Rolfe Winkler likes Moulle-Berteaux's emphasis on affordability, but gives good reasons home prices could continue to fall. Inventories of unsold homes are still "off the charts," and affordability would be hurt if incomes fall or interest rates rise, he writes.

UPDATE: Lenn Harley, a real estate broker in Maryland and Virginia, thinks Moulle-Berteaux is engaging in some "wishful thinking." She writes: "Inventory is still growing. Move up buyers are still unable to sell or unwilling to sell at today’s market prices. Further, financing guidelines are keeping many credit worthy buyers out of the market."

"Wall Street Weather" also has an interesting take here.

(For more: A good recent take on the implications of a weak dollar by BusinessWeek colleague Peter Coy is here. And this, from the Chicago Fed, gives some basic background on the issue.)

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, especially for my own industry, but using what happened at IDG as a map for the rest of the publishing industry would be like using Christopher Columbus's charts to fly to the moon. There's a publishing pink elephant in the room that nobody in the NYT's story seems to notice. Most of IDG's publications are what's known as controlled circulation. Readers paid nothing but were selected to receive titles like Infoworld gratis based on their attraction to certain advertisers. There is no subscription revenue to the publisher and the publisher still bears all the costs of printing and mailing. So when IDG shifts a publication to the web and stops printing, it can cut costs to the bone and shift advertisers to its web site.

But most publishers charge for subscriptions -- in fact they charge a lot. The New York Times collected $227 million from subscribers in the first quarter, for example, along with $458 million in ad revenue. For mainstream publishers, that's a much bigger potential loss from the seemingly obvious and simple shift online depicted in the IDG story.

The article also raises questions about advertiser behavior. A tech-industry trade publication's advertisers come from a narrow slice of the entire ad market, a slice that's likely more comfortable going online and more likely to be selling directly online than other segments. But when you look at the whole ecosystem of advertisers, especially the big players in mainstream publications, you find a rather different attitude. It's a lot easier to imagine Cisco Systems and Salesforce.com shifting ads to a web-based version of Infoworld than it is to see Tiffanys or Bulgari moving from the New York Times Sunday Magazine to the web. Research I've cited in the past examining the revenue shift for mainstream publishers concluded that its an almost insurmountable mountain.

Finally, I'm also a little wary of stories about private companies that don't disclose all their financial information the way public companies do. We know that publishing is only one part of IDG's business but not how big a part. We know the publishing division got a higher percentage of revenue from the web in 2007 than in 2002 but not anything about the dollar amounts involved. I emailed a PR rep at IDG to see if they'd disclose more info but haven't heard back. In the meantime, there's less than meets the eye for the rest of the publishing industry from IDG's transformation.

UPDATE: Some good commentary around the web further parsing the IDG story...web designer and former newspaper industry guy Mark Cahill emphasizes the differences between IDG and more mainstream media outlets:

Of course, numbers can be made to lie, and the statements they don’t make leave an awfully big whole in the story.

Has overall media revenue increased, decreased, remained the same?
What’s the comparision of Ebita for the past few years?
What’s the net affect on employment - more or less jobs (I’m guessing less…)?
In short, is I.D.G. really doing better now than they were in say 2002?
I don’t mean to sound snarky - I am really and truly hoping this is working as well as the NYT would have us believe. Yet, it doesn’t offer a complete roadmap for newspapers, as I.D.G. is really in the tech news sector, and let’s face it, none of us are willing to wait over 30 days for a full print cycle to get our tech news. We want to get it now, and that’s why they’ve got to deliver online.

Former Wall Street analyst Lauren Rich Fine does a nice job explaining why it's so much harder to make the same money off an online reader as a print reader:

Certainly newspapers have garnered solid traffic online and seem to be doing a pretty good job of monetizing that traffic. But with better measurement of this traffic relative to the print version, coupled with the likelihood that an online newspaper reader will spend less time online than with the print paper, newspapers are going to have tremendous difficulty regaining lost print ad revenue ground with online. Newspapers still need to generate other revenue sources, and quickly.

And finally former journalist, now Lenovo guy Dave Churbuck has a quick optimistic take (be sure to read his replies in the comments):

I joined IDG for a brief period in 2005 to help with that transition, ultimately leaving at the end of the year to come to Lenovo. What I saw was a company in the throes of a difficult transition from decades of print excellence to the more ephemeral but pressing world of online news. Print and online dichotomies were tough, but in the end it was the red ink that pushed the print legacy to one side (InfoWorld went online only) and broke down the old artificial barriers between print and online editorial staffs.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I worked at an IDG magazine called The Industry Standard for a few years that was shut down by the company.

From where I sit I would want to know what is under the hood of a fund like this if I owned it, especially with the actively managed funds in order to minimize the chance of getting blindsided. Notice I'm saying minimize as opposed to avoid. Every so often you are going to get blindsided by something but the extent to which knowing some details about what you own and paying attention to the news might spare you a little.

Obviously, it's important to review a fund's holdings when you buy it. Over-concentration in one sector or asset class or country can be a red flag, depending on the type of fund and what you're seeking by investing in it. For example, see how all those supposedly safe dividend funds have done since the financial sector crack-up?

But the need to check a fund's holdings is a kind of periodic and perpetual task that never ends. You have to keep up on it even after you make that initial purchase decision. Too many investors want to buy and hold forever. Fund managers are constantly making changes, sometimes radically altering the risks in their portfolios.

Minor update: Franklin Resources, manager of the fund, says exposure to Argentina is 9.8% of assets as of the end of February (Scroll to bottom and click on link for PDF listing).

But if the Fed did just what everyone expected, why the sell-off, why the disappointment? Start by looking at the evidence. What sold off and what didn’t? A quick check of the Wall Street Journal’s sector watch shows energy and basic materials stocks ended the day with gains. Retailers, homebuilders, financials and tech stocks got smooshed. Gold stocks were particularly strong, up 3%, as the dollar fell against all major currencies. Yields on bonds also declined. So what didn’t add up in today’s Fed move? The big pause signal seems to have gotten obscured by some static.

If the Fed isn’t pausing and may cut rates again soon, inflation could rise further and fewer investors will be attracted to keep their money stashed in dollar deposits. That seems to be the message of higher prices for gold and stocks of materials and energy producers. A weaker dollar and lower bond yields also signal anticipation of further rate cuts. The market’s also not showing much confidence that the Fed has a handle on the financial sector, though news and earnings reports from banks and brokers were mostly bad throughout the day.