The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

1. Exchange Students

With The Wall Street Journal reporting that the New York Stock Exchange is in talks to acquire the American Stock Exchange from the National Association of Securities Dealers, we've got a simple question for the involved parties: Who cares?

Yeah, we know that the Amex does a busy business in options and exchange-traded funds -- funds that trade very much like stocks. And expanding into the Amex's trading floor real estate might solve the overcrowding ills at the NYSE.

But we at the Five Dumbest Things research lab are perennially struck by the staggering irrelevance of the Amex, home to such microcapitalized buttresses of the American economy as car painter Earl Scheib(ESH Quote) and Etch A Sketch manufacturer Ohio Art(OAR Quote). ...