From the blog EV Grieve: Something that all the foreclosed homeowners out there might not find so amusing. A 13,000-square foot dog facility is opening up near Wall Street. The Fetch Club will include an indoor dog park, “social club,” hotel/spa, and boutique. Great. The Fetch Club. When they open up The Kvetch Club, gimme [...]

“Unless you’re in the habit of buying new highs, the ascent of this market has been way less enjoyable over the last 6 weeks than the headlines would lead outsiders to believe.” We are heading into the home stretch here at EconomyBeat — the project concludes at the end of April. Thus, this will be [...]

A new paper that will be published in the Journal of Investment Management posits the theory that economists suffer from “physics envy,” aspiring to create economic models “as predictive as those in physics. While this perspective has led to a number of important breakthroughs in economics,” says the abstract, “‘physics envy’ has also created a [...]

Take a look at this chart of the S&P 500, and note the big dip starting in 2000 and repeating in 2008. If you happen to be an investor who went on that roller coaster ride both times, you can probably be forgiven for being too dizzy at this point to delve into the obfuscatory world of 10-Qs, 10-Ks, and other byzantine company filings mandated by the SEC in the interest of transparency.

Unfortunately, however, maybe that’s the only way these days to get the real scoop on a company’s financial health. Investor outsourcing of crucial due diligence to the media, stock analysts, and even the ratings agencies led to massive losses in the accounting scandals in early last decade and in the financial collapse later on.

So when it comes to your money, how can you trust anyone but yourself these days?

“While there aren’t a lot of hard and fast rules for mining SEC filings for interesting nuggets, it’s a pretty safe bet that if the words “company yacht” are mentioned in the filing, it’s worth at least a quick skim.” The web site footnoted.org received a lot of favorable press last year, including this report [...]

Michael Silverstein is a financial writer and former senior editor for Bloomberg. But more recently, he’s known as The Wall Street Poet, writing market commentary in the form of satiricial verse. A regular contributor to Minnesota Public Radio, he also has his own web site, WallStreetPoet.com, featuring a substantial archive. Those in the know about [...]

From The Awl: What a Blowout Year! Wall Street Rocking Without All Those Pesky Former Employees. Profits and net revenues are back up for Wall Street firms. Can bonuses be far behind?

Nate Silver of the political polling site FiveThirtyEight suggests the performance of health insurance stocks might be one way to neutrally evaluate the chance of health care reform’s success: It’s a bit hard to assess where we are in the health care debate. On the one hand, the (House) Democrats pushed through and passed a [...]

Whether we’re experiencing another stock bubble now is a matter of opinion. But this post from The Consumerist pointing to the front page of the Wall Street Journal the first time the Dow broke 10,000–in 1999–is a good reminder of the kind of cheering-section sentiment tossed around in the middle of such an asset-inflated period. [...]

Yesterday we reported on well-regarded assets manager Jeremy Grantham’s prediction that the stock market is cruising for a 15-20% correction sometime this winter. In a section titled “The Last Hurrah and Markets Being Silly Again,” he makes the comparison between the current rally and the 46% gain in the S&P 500 between November and April [...]