How the Dow Jones industrial average and other major Indexes Fared Monday

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

How the Dow Jones industrial average and other major Indexes Fared Monday

Percentage Drug Co (Photo credit: Paul Lowry)

By The Washington Post

Washington, Apr.16, hot stock picks .- The stock market had its worst drop this year as prices for oil and other commodities fell sharply on concerns about slowing growth in China.

Oil fell to a four-month low, dragging down energy stocks. Mining companies sank after gold had its biggest one-day drop since 1983. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 265.86, or 1.8 percent, to close at 14,599.20.

The S&P 500 index fell 36.49 points, or 2.3 percent, to 1,552.36.

The Nasdaq composite fell 78.46 points, or 2.4 percent, to 3,216.49.

For the year:

The Dow is up 1,495.06 points, or 11.4 percent.

The S&P 500 is up 126.17 points, or 8.9 percent.

The Nasdaq is up 196.98 points, or 6.5 percent.

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Benjamin Graham Was A Crappy Hedge Fund Manager

Jack Bogle, the outspoken godfather of index funds and passive investing strategies, didn't approve of a recent Wall Street Journal article defending hedge funds.

In particular, he took issue with the author's reference to Benjamin Graham, the legendary Columbia finance professor who literally wrote the book on Security Analysis and mentored Warren Buffett.

Bogle wrote a letter to the editor. Here's an excerpt: Citing Benjamin Graham as the first "hedged fund" operator is an especially unfortunate example. "The trick," Mr. Rice writes, was Graham's "clever way to make money . . . whether it [the market] continued to rise, or started to fall." ...

Proposal for New Hedge Fund Fee Structure: 1% + 33% of Alpha

By The Big Picture

One of my pet peeves is the way that insiders -- whether corporate CEOs, hedge fund managers, or elected politicos -- capture compensation (or credit) for normal cyclical gains they had little or nothing to do with.

This is the approach favored by the Crony Capitalists — those people pretending to be free market participants, and who merely pretend to be creating value. They are taking credit for structural successes that would have occurred with or without them. What they are actually doing is capturing value, not creating it — and then transferring it from its true owners (shareholders/investors) to themselves.

This is wrong; it is legalized theft.

If you want to see a good example of how CEOs transfer shareholder wealth to themselves, a good place to start is Roger Lowenstein’s 2004 book, Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing. The section on CEO compensation is astounding; these guys were essentially getting wildly overcompensated for being CEOs during a bull market. The prime example was the CEO of Heinz, who gave himself (with the tacit approval of his Board of~~Crony~~ Directors) a $90 million bonus. And this was back in the early 1990s, when $90 million was real money.

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www.ritholtz.com

Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs Asset Management announced that it would launch a new mutual fund that — apparently — will bring the joy of hedge fund investing to the masses. For as little as $1,000, the Multi-Manager Alternatives Fund (GMAMX) allows mom-and-pop investors to put their life savings into some of Wall Street’s riskiest and most expensive products. This “fund of funds” will, according to its prospectus, let investors gain exposure to the trading strategies of hedge funds...

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10 Publicly Traded Hedge Funds That Pay a Dividend
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Hedge Funds Love These 3 Outperforming Semiconductor Stocks ...
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BMW Pininfarina Gran Lusso Coupé.

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...

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6 Tips to Work From Home Successfully

The future of work is the work itself, not where and when the work takes place. Workplace flexibility programs are already catching on and will soon become standardized as more millennials enter the workplace. All workers, not just millennials,want freedom and flexibility and some are even quitting their jobs to becoming freelancers in order to gain that freedom. oDesk.com has 3.3 million registered freelancers, and Intuit predicts that by 2020, 40% of Americans will be freelancers. When it comes to working from home, 13.4 million people (9.4% of all American workers) work from home at least one day per week compared to just 9.2 million in 1997 according to one Census Bureau.

Today's top Green Energy Good News

Russia is funding research into powering its airplanes with solar energy. The airline industry is being hurt by high fuel prices, and solar-powered planes would not only be cheaper but also would remove a major source of carbon pollution that contributes to global warming.

Texas is set to double its wind energy generation from 60 gigawatts to 120 gigawatts in 2013.

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High-Dividend ETFs with Reasonable Valuations

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