Weekend Reading: Rally Hats Donned

Good Sunday. Here are some articles and papers worth reading. First, however, a look back at the week that just finished, and a look forward at the week ahead.

The major markets all advanced last week. The Dow advanced 1.2%, while the S&P 500 gained 1.8%. The Nasdaq Composite leaped 3.8%, for its biggest weekly gain since August 2004. Click here for the weekly performance.

It was a good week last week, with a wider set of investors wearing a "rally hat." While economic and company results were not world-changing, there was enough optimism around to keep the previous week's rally going, and to even juice it up a little. Generally speaking, there is reason to expect this week will see more of the same, with optimism about holiday retail sales (oh, that subject is back again!) growing. There is, however, some nervousness about energy prices, with the recent price declines having reversed somewhat. This will undoubtedly make skittish traders even jumpier than usual.

Turning to the holiday-shortened economic week ahead, it will be a light few days for news. On Thursday, data on the U.S. international trade deficit, as well as on import prices, will be released, and we will also see the University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey.

Next week will be fairly quiet in terms of earnings reports, but there a few worth watching. The list includes El Paso (EP Quote), Cisco Systems (CSCO Quote), Dell (DELL Quote) and News Corp. (NWS Quote), .

Finally, here are some articles and papers worth reading:

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• Steve Case wants to save the U.S. healthcare system (Fortune)
• Bill Miller won't give up on his massive Kodak (EK Quote) investment (Fortune)
• Rupert Murdoch wants to be in broadband, and he'd like to buy The Wall Street Journal (Reuters)
• Industry summit on semiconductors (Reuters)
• Thinking about the real role of gold in a modern portfolio (FT)
• The emergence of derivatives on hedge funds themselves is causing some head-shaking (IDD)
• Scandals continue to juice the market for corporate sleuthing (IDD)
• Golf & the business life (BusinessWeek/Golf Digest)
• Why the next Bill Gates will come from biotech (BusinessWeek)
• Scathing article on big pharma's risky practices in human testing, and SFBC International gets named (Bloomberg Markets)
• Airlines' cumulative historical losses almost double their historical profits (Bloomberg)
• Henry Blodget's back selling Internet moonshine -- despite his industry ban (Bloomberg)