I don’t get things right as much as I’d like when it comes to the market but my Latticework Linkfest back in late February was spot on:
In times of recession, when unemployment is high, the unemployed go back to school to add marketable skills and increase future earnings power. The leading companies in for-profit education include Strayer Education (STRA), DeVry (DV), ITT Educational Services (ESI), Career Education Corporation (CECO), Capella Education (CPLA), Corinthian Colleges (COCO), and industry giant Apollo Group (APOL). Apollo operates the ubiquitous University of Phoenix campuses. This …

Don’t start giving in to panic as the market works its way lower. Sure some once impressive financial institutions are going the way of dinosaurs. Perhaps your 401(k) looks like it might lose weight faster than you can. Whether you’re managing your own account or entrusting your nest egg to a professional mutual fund manager, the market and your investments have seldom felt more bleak. Whatever you do, don’t panic.
Don’t make a run to your bank and demand to close out your savings and checking accounts. …

In response to Microsoft’s (MSFT) letter with a three-week deadline to act on Microsoft’s buyout offer, Yahoo’s (YHOO) CEO, Jerry Yang, insisted that Ballmer & Company raise its offer. Yang states that his company is not against a marriage with Microsoft, but he wants a bigger dowry.
Mutual funds, the large shareholders that control swaths of Yahoo! stock are already beginning to vocalize their desire for Yahoo! to accept an offer. One such institutional shareholder, Larry Haverty of Mario Gabelli’s GAMCO Investors, who manages a fund that owns 1.2 …

 
Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft (MSFT) puts on his best poker face with this letter to the Yahoo! (YHOO) board of directors. Ballmer isn’t known all over the world as an innovator, but as a former lawyer and one of the architects of Microsoft’s monopolistic business tactics, I’m sure he can hold his own at the negotiation table. Of course, that hasn’t been the case lately with the outlandish premiums he paid for aQuantive and Facebook. So maybe he’ll back off of this hard stance:
Dear Members of the Board:
It has …

Life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Thomas Hobbes might say the same about life in the stock market for hedge fund managers. The mortality rate found in the hedge fund world is extremely high; it is an ecosystem that is filled with predators and would-be predators. By mid-2007, an estimated 9,700 hedge funds controlled approximately $1.7 trillion in assets. According to Hedge Fund Research, 1,518 launched in 2006 and nearly as many called it quits. The battle for investment survival mirrors Hobbes’ State of Nature found in his …