Fred Wilson, who I think has taken more vacations in the last year than Michelle Obama (off the top of my head, for Fred: Buenos Aires, Vail, Paris, someplace in Italy), hopes the Skype IPO will be the one to “get things going again.” Maybe. But when early investors (the smart/lucky money) are selling, someone [...]

In a post Thursday (“Road to Nowhere”), Tim Knight wrote,
With the exception of commissions-based brokers, it’s hard to believe there’s anyone out there who has really enjoyed the stock market over the past few months. I mean, just look at the ES [S&P e-mini futures] below.

Tim Knight still thinks the S&P’s going to decline to [...]

A comment I left on Josh Brown’s post about value managers complaining about getting scalped by high frequency traders:
I suspect that HF traders overstate the extent to which their algorithmic trading provides any liquidity or price discovery benefits to the broader market. On the whole, it seems like an enterprise which throws a lot [...]

One problem with some of the conventional wisdom regarding investing is that it doesn’t distinguish between secular bull and bear markets. What makes sense in a secular bull market doesn’t necessarily make sense during secular bear markets.
Conventional wisdom says that long-term investors should generally eschew hedging, since the costs of hedging can lower long-term returns. [...]

Via Tim Knight, interesting chart from Martin Pring:

In the course of a conversation with Matt today about some upcoming projects, he asked, essentially, whether there was any rhyme or reason to the recent flurry of trades I’ve mentioned here and elsewhere. This post is my answer distilled.
The Big Picture:

– John Hussman, Vitaliy Katsenelson*, Jim Rogers, and Tim Knight all believe [...]

Over on an investing website today, with the stock indexes posting egregious losses, someone posted the sort of pablum one typically hears from long-only, un-hedged money managers, who skim management fees off of big piles of money for a living. I’m not going to link to the fellow’s post, as I don’t mean to attack [...]