Weekend Linkfest

(Editor's note: To access some of these stories, registration or a subscription may be required. Please check the individual links for the site's policy.)

Helluva week month quarter, Bernie.

Markets softened a bit this week, following the previous week's best-week-in-four-years rally. Barron's Trader column called it "An Orderly Ebb for Stocks," and that sounds just about right:

"As the second quarter begins, the stock market is opting for a narrower interpretation: Risk is the prospect of a debilitating economic slowdown -- and the creeping likelihood that persistent inflation could prevent the central bank from swooping in to cut interest rates."

However, whatever alarm this risk caused just a month ago seems to have abated. Stocks are now almost 4% above their first-quarter lows.

For the week, the Dow slipped 1%, while the S&P 500 and Russell 2000 gave back 1.1% and the Nasdaq fell 1.4%.

We have lots for you to peruse this week, so loosen up those clicking muscles, stretch your mouse hand, and get busy. It's Linkfest time!

INVESTING & TRADING

• Volatile Markets Ruffle Investors But Haven't Spooked Them Yet: "The Dow chart for the past month is a choppy picture. The volatility on display has jolted professional investors from their tranquility of the seven preceding months, which saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average rise 19%, but they don't yet hear the bear growl." (The Wall Street Journal)

• A market correction is coming, this time for real: "Market developments in the past few weeks should be seen as a warning. What has been evident for a number of months is that, in the US, we are seeing lagging inflation and slower growth. Whether this means that we are going to have to fend off recessionary tendencies is not yet clear. However, what is clear to me is that in the next year a material correction in the markets will occur." (FT)

• Gas & Oil: On Monday, I warned that $64 was the line in the sand for crude, and a move through that would set a high-60s/low-70s target.

• The not-inverted yield curve: "There is no consensus among economists concerning which particular maturities should be focused on when determining whether the yield curve is inverted. One pairing that is widely used, however, is the difference between the yields on two-year and 10-year Treasuries." (MarketWatch)

• The Return of Geopolitical Risk.

• In the ABCs of the NYSE, Macy's Snags the 'M': "After years of sitting on the shelf, one of the stock market's vanity plates finally has an owner. But it isn't who you might think. The New York Stock Exchange said one of its coveted one-letter stock symbols, 'M,' would be assigned to Federated Department Stores Inc., which plans to change its name to Macy's Inc. While a symbol change isn't normally big news, this one is noteworthy because the M letter was long thought to be reserved by Big Board officials for Microsoft Corp., should the software titan ever decide to leave Nasdaq Stock Market Inc." (free WSJ)

• Ken Fisher on Redefining 'big' and 'small': "Small stocks have socked it to their big brethren for seven straight years. Does this mean big's reign is overdue? No! Size cycles last far longer than folks fathom. But whether big is booming or small is soaring, most folks can't seem to seize the size swing. Fact is: Stocks you see as big are often small. When it's time to go big, you'll likely be stuck small -- missing the market move." (MarketWatch)

• What are "Kagi Charts?"

• A study proves that the bigger his house, the worse the CEO: I wonder how much Warren Buffett skews this data. (Slate)

• Beware of "Investment Porn" "Weston Wellington looks out at his new recruits and warns them of one of the great evils of Wall Street: 'investment pornography.' Wellington, a vice president at Dimensional Fund Advisors Inc., flashes slides of magazine headlines such as 'The Next Microsoft' and 'Tech Stocks, Everyone's Getting Rich.' Investors who read this stuff and scour stock research are deluding themselves, he tells the packed conference. (Bloomberg)

---

ECONOMY

The Wall of Worry continues to build:

• Final Q4 GDP: Goldilocks has left the building See also: Q4 '06 GDP: 2.5%.

• Economists Cut Back Forecasts for Growth: "As the housing and auto slumps have deepened while business spending has started to wane, economists are taking another whack at their GDP forecasts. Earlier this month, the consensus estimate of economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal called for GDP to grow about 2.3% in the first quarter, down from an estimate of 2.5% a month earlier." See also, Productivity Lull Might Signal Growth Is Easing. (WSJ)

• Income Gap Is Widening, Data Shows. (The New York Times)

• Pain From Free Trade Spurs Second Thoughts: "Some trade critics are bothered by the disappointing performance of Latin America since it slashed tariffs in the 1980s and 1990s while more protectionist China and Southeast Asia sped ahead. Others are struck by the widening gap between economic winners and losers around the globe. The rethinking on trade issues is the most significant since the early 1990s when many in the U.S. worried that Japan would overtake the U.S., a fear that has since abated." (free WSJ)

• 7 retail pricing secrets revealed. (Money)

---

HOUSING

• Case Shiller Housing Composite Flips Negative.

• 'Tsunami' of adjustable-rate mortgage resets coming: "More than $2.28 trillion worth of ARMs were originated in 2004, 2005 and 2006, at the peak of the recent housing boom, according to a study released this week by a unit of real estate data company First American." (MarketWatch)

• HUD foreclosure tracking.

• The Downward Spiral: "An increasing number of analysts are adopting D.R. Horton CEO Donald Tomnitz's view on housing in 2007: it's going to 'suck' for the rest of the year. Data on analyst earnings revisions shows just how polarized researchers are on homebuilders right now, as revisions have been uniformly negative in the last four weeks. Today's results from Lennar won't alter this view, as the home builder became the latest to say it would fail to meet expectations for 2007." (WSJ Marketbeat)

• New Home Sales: 7-Year Low.

• California foreclosure sales accelerate: "This dollar volume surpassed the prior record reached in the third quarter of 1996, and represents a 48 percent increase from December 2006." (Central Valley Business Times)

• Doug Kass on The Simple Math of Subprime's Slide. (free Street Insight column)

• Unwinding the Fraud for Bubbles: "Telling the difference between the victims and the victimizers, the predators and the prey, and the fraudulent and the defrauded, is getting a lot harder when you have borrowers not required to make down payments able to lie about their incomes in order to buy a home the seller is overpricing in order to take an illegal kickback. The lender is getting defrauded, but the lender is the one who offered the zero-down stated-income program, delegated the drawing up of the legal documents and the final disbursement of funds to a fee-for-service settlement agent, and didn't do enough due diligence on the appraisal to see the inflation of the value." (Calculated Risk)

• In Japan, Economic Change Propels Big-City Prices. (free WSJ)

---

FEDERAL RESERVE

Lots of Fed-speak this week, and commentary also:

• Bernanke Testimony. (abbreviated version)

• Fed Has Trouble Getting Across Nuanced Message: The WSJ's Greg Ip gets the call, and states "Outlook for Economy Looks Bleaker, but Rates Aren't Likely to Change". (WSJ) If you lack a WSJ subscription, see What is the Fed Really Thinking?

• Fed Powerless to Fix Part of Inflation Puzzle: "The Federal Reserve has an inflation problem that it is almost powerless to attack: rising rents. Increasing the Fed's target for the overnight lending rate, now 5.25 percent, likely would make the problem worse, not better, because it's largely the result of the boom and bust in home prices. Raising rates might push home prices down even more." (Bloomberg)

• Globalization & Inflation: In a little noticed May 2 speech at Stanford, Chairman Bernanke acknowledges that globalization is not reducing inflation, and demand from China and India may indeed be actually contributing to it.

---

SENTIMENT/PSYCHOLOGY

• Excellent overview: A Sentiment Primer.

• In a development that is hardly shocking, it turns out I am Biased.

• The Science of Lasting Happiness.

---

WAR/MEDIA/POLITICS/ENERGY

• To be filed under HOLY SCHNIKES! Undercover agents slip bombs past DIA screeners: Agents were able to sneak about 90% of simulated weapons past TSA screeners in Denver. (9News.com)

• How an Open Market Might Save the Planet: "Buy every customer a Terrapass, and the Big Three could instantly be carbon-neutral." (like Al Gore) (free WSJ)

• Farmers Head to Fields to Plant Corn, Lots of It: "With demand for ethanol pushing corn prices to $4 a bushel or higher, it was not a surprise that farmers intended to plant a lot more corn this season. What was surprising about the Agriculture Department report released yesterday was just how much they intended to plant -- a staggering 90.5 million acres, the most since World War II and 15 percent more than last season." (The New York Times)

• Life is over as we know it: "Fresh on the heels of the news that InfoWorld was abandoning its 29-year-old print magazine in favor of a purely online life comes news that LIFE is moving in the same direction." (Good Morning Silicon Valley) See also, 'LIFE' Cut Short: Time Inc. Shutters Newspaper Supplement.

• As America falters, policymakers must look ahead: "While it would be premature to predict a US recession, there are now strong grounds for predicting that the US economy will slow down very significantly in 2007. Whether in retrospect 2007 will prove to have been a 'pause that refreshed' a nearly decade-long expansion like the growth slowdowns in 1986 and 1995 or whether it will see the end of the expansion is not yet clear." (FT)

---

TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE

• The Wired 40: Google(GOOG Quote) and Apple(AAPL Quote) top the list. (Wired)

• Stealth Inkjet Printer Startup Could Rock Industry: "An Australian entrepreneur betting his company on a nanotech-fueled, consumer inkjet printer that can print sixty pages a minute for under $200 has successfully demonstrated the technology. Silverbrook Research has spent the last ten years developing Memjet, a printer that uses an array of ink jet nozzles that spans the width of the paper. Company executives have said they feel that they can ship an 8x10 color inkjet by the end of 2008 that will cost less than $200 and print 60 pages a minute." (PC Magazine)

• The First Annual YouTube Video Awards. Also, Silicon Valley's YouTube Envy and Catching Google's YouTube won't be easy.

• Slate's Daniel Gross writes: The CD Is Dead! Long live the CD!

• Webcasting The Who

• Google Maps replaces Post-Katrina imagery with older, pre-hurricaine photos: "Some recent imagery update, the satellite photos of the hurricane-devastated city were apparently replaced with pre-Katrina pictures showing homes, parks and landmarks that no longer exist. Some suspicious souls in the city, already feeling forgotten and neglected, were left wondering if this was part of some effort to paper over the Crescent City's continuing misery or whether politicians lobbied for the change."

• MIT Engineers create SpaceNet--the supply chain.

• Netflix vs. Naysayers: "In the decade since Netflix Inc. began renting DVDs online, CEO Reed Hastings has faced down a murderers' row of rivals -- Wal-Mart, Amazon.com and Blockbuster. So far, Neflix has outlasted them all." (free WSJ) See also: Vacation policy at Netflix: Take as much as you want.

• Nikon Web pages shows the complete universe and its contents, from subatomic particles to Galaxies and everything in between: Universcale.

• How Radio Listeners Will Fare in a Merger Of Sirius and XM: "Depending on antitrust regulators in Washington, the market for satellite radio may soon undergo a 2-for-1 deal of its own. In this case, the winner would involve a marriage of two incumbents, XM and Sirius, who have asked the Federal Communications Commission to be allowed to merge. A decision isn't expected for several months." (free WSJ)

• How passwords get cracked.

• The Consumerist asks, Why Are Text Messages Marked Up 7314%?.

---

MUSIC, BOOKS, MOVIES, TV, FUN!

• Friday Night Jazz: Duke Ellington. A new box set looks very promising!

• Time discusses The Armageddon Gang and gives lots of ink to trader Michael Panzner and his new book, Financial Armageddon.

• Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are possibly teaming up again to film "The Wolf of Wall Street," the story of Jordan Belfort, the Stratton Oakmont penny-stock broker who went to prison for refusing to cooperate in a massive 1990s securities fraud case.

• Wonders Never Cease On 'Planet Earth': We watched the first few episodes of Planet Earth, and the photography was astounding. The Washington Post's TV critic says it "sets a new standard in nature documentaries. The 11-part BBC series is full of astonishing sights -- views of the Earth and its nonhuman creatures that outshine virtually anything seen on the screen before."

• Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez pick their 10 favorite movie posters.

• Israel group nixes pot on Passover: Good to know! "In bad news for its religious Jewish supporters, an Israeli pro-marijuana party announced Tuesday that pot is forbidden on Passover. Cannabis is among the substances Jews are forbidden to consume during the week-long festival, which begins Monday, said Michelle Levine, a spokeswoman for the Green Leaf party."

• We can always count on the ONION for a fabulous combination of bad taste and hilarity: Anna Nicole Smith Finally Reaches Target Weight.

That's all from our little corner of the world, where I will be unpacking boxes for what is likely to be the next 31 months. Enjoy the spring weather!