Welcome to the working week: Here are the 10 most intriguing things I happened across this morning:
• The Mistakes We Make—and Why We Make Them (WSJ) How investors think often gets in the way of their investment success. While we know that we made investment mistakes, and vow not to repeat them, most people have only the vaguest sense of what those mistakes were, or, more important, why they made them. Only by understanding the answer to these questions can we begin to improve our financial future.
• The Man Who Sells America’s I.O.U.’s (NYT) In a city full of pompous politicians and bombastic bureaucrats, Mr. Zeck quietly runs one of the government’s truly indispensable operations. He is not a policy maker. He does not decide how much to borrow. He just makes sure the money is borrowed, in a regular and predictable way, at the lowest possible cost to the government over time.
• A front page, Goldman Sachs, 2-fer:
–Goldman’s Trading Tips Reward Its Biggest Clients (WSJ)
–Arrest Over Software Illuminates Wall St. Secret (NYT)• China’s 2% Inflation Estimate Puzzles Economists as Prices Fall A Chinese government estimate that inflation may be 2 percent for 2009 is puzzling economists after prices fell for six of the past seven months. The Ministry of Commerce made the estimate in a statement on its Web site yesterday, citing rising demand and gains in commodity prices. (Bloomberg)
• Five Financial Stocks Dominating Market Volume (Zero Hedge)
• Gold bugs, rev your engines: Fed official: rates to be kept low past upturn (Reuters) Financial markets have not fully understood that the U.S. Federal Reserve’s pledge to keep interest rates exceptionally low for an extended period means they will stay low beyond when officials normally would raise them, a top Fed official said on Friday. see also Bundesbank confirms Germany’s gold is in play (GATA)
• Employment Change by Industry (visual economics)
• Apple Highest Grossing Retailer on Fifth Avenue as iPhone Defies Recession (Bloomberg) Apple’s Fifth Avenue emporium probably has annual sales of more than $350 million, topping any of the chain’s other outlets, said Jeffrey Roseman, executive vice president of real- estate broker Newmark Knight Frank Retail in New York. The location is 10,000 square feet, putting its sales per square foot at a minimum of $35,000, based on Roseman’s estimate.
• SENTIMENT ANALYSIS: Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts (NYT) An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.
• Time’s 50 Best Websites 2009
Anything else worth reading this week ?
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