TSC Weekender: Epater le Web Bourgeois

THE PULSE Where TSC feels the market's beat. MORE THE TRADER'S TONGUE JJC translates Street-speak. MORE

This weekend we launch our new Personal Finance Saturday, with more information about the issues that affect your portfolio, your taxes, your investment decisions. To kick off, we have Dagen McDowell and Joe Bousquin debating the merits of FBIOXFidelity Select Biotechnology vs. JAGLXJanus Global Life Sciences. James Brookes-Avey, chief investment officer of MomentumInvesting.com, discusses how to spot emerging technologies before the pros. And, of course, hedge funder extraordinaire James J. Cramer gets in his two cents as well. Plus, we still have favorites like The Coming Week and The Coming Week in Europe and yours truly. Got questions about anything that's going on with the site or your finances? Let us know!

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Strange Days

It wasn't quite anarchy, but this week had its anti-establishment moments. Web vandals attacked several big-shot sites throughout the week, starting Monday with Yahoo! YHOO and continuing throughout the week, hitting eBay EBAY, ZDNet.com ZDZ, E*Trade EGRP and others. The denial-of-service attacks flooded sites with bogus requests that crippled the systems, sometimes for hours.

The seemingly coordinated attacks touched off investigations by the FBI and the Justice Department, who are trying to find the culprit or culprits -- a task that's not so much needle in the haystack as needle in the hayfield. Meanwhile, companies all week set about beefing up their systems to prevent similar attacks from happening to their sites. By Friday, the vandal or vandals seemed to have gone back to downloading pictures of Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and drumming up more impressive prey than Internet fatcats.

On a less ethereal level, a bomb went off on Wall Street on Friday, and we don't mean news of a big merger. An actual bomb exploded in front of Barclays Bank around 5 a.m. One person was injured, treated at the hospital and released. A suspect was seen leaving the area and for all of Friday, several blocks were plastered with "Police Line, Do Not Cross" tape and the area was more heavily patrolled than usual.

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Staff reporter Thomas Lepri contributed to this article.

Reader Michael P. Broida writes: "Over the past few years, I have noticed more and more cases in which companies' earnings fail to meet analysts' expectations. This is, of course, immediately followed by a drop in those companies' stock. Why are the analysts making so many mistakes? Every time the analysts mess up like that, they cost shareholders a bunch of money!" It's possible that your vision may be impaired by the composition of your own portfolio, Michael. The trend you're seeing just isn't there. MORE Enter the Idiot Box, where all your pesky little questions will be treated with kind condescension. As your fifth-grade teacher used to say, everybody else wants to know the answer, too. Please do send your queries.