Weekend Reading: A Day Late Edition

Links for the Week ending Feb-13, 2011

I apologize for the delay. I had a rather busy weekend and did not get this out yesterday. Here are some of my favorite reads from last week but first the early candidate for quote of the week comes from John Hussman. As always his weekly market comment is a must read if you have not already done so.

And here we are again. This is not to say that we can rule out yet higher valuations, but with no transformative technologies driving the economy, little expansion in capital investment, and ongoing retrenchment in consumer balance sheets, I can’t help but think that the “virtuous cycle” rhetoric of Ben Bernanke is an awfully thin gruel by comparison. We should not deserve to be called “investors” if we fail to recognize that valuations are richer today than at any point in history, save for the few months before the 1929 crash, and a bubble period that has been rewarded by zero total return for the S&P 500 since 2000. Indeed, the stock market has lagged the return on low-yielding Treasury bills since August 1998. I am not sure that even members of my own profession have learned anything from this.

The Links…..

• The best laid plans… (MarketWatch)
• Study: Lower-Risk Can Mean Higher Reward (The Guru Investor)
• Eight Lessons from Neuroeconomics for Money Managers (CFA Institute pdf)
• Why Americans Can’t Save Money (NYT)
• Obama Sets Options For Fixing Mortgage Market (NPR) Full Report to Congress here, pdf.
• Ranking Economic Data (Calculated Risk)
• A Need for Innovative Fiscal Policy (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas)
• CASH FLOW VS. INCOME – WHY IT MATTERS TO INVESTORS (Magic Diligence)
• Has the Nearly 2-Yr-Old Bull Market Topped Out? (Barron’s)
• New Twist Is Added to an Age-Old Saga (Jason Zweig)
• The Paradox of Habit Part III: Discovering the New Shore of Authenticity (The Financial Philosopher)
• Deindividuation (You Are Not So Smart)
• Down in the Data Dumps: Researchers Inventory a World of Information (Scientific American)