The Holiday Portfolio: Labor, Indeed

As we use this holiday Monday to take a look at the Holiday Portfolio, it's hard to imagine a better descriptor than "labor" for these markets.

Call it what you want -- the subprime crisis, the housing bubble or the liquidity challenge -- the month of August was laborious for nearly all investors. As one longtime fund manager (and good friend) said Thursday, "Challenging markets come and go but truly confounding markets like this are incredibly rare."

Indeed! If anything can be said of August 2007, it's that it has been confusing: What should work, hasn't; what shouldn't work hasn't, either. ...