15 Companies That Might Not Survive 2009 - Yahoo! Finance
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/15-Companies-That-Might-Not-usnews-14279875.html

Yahoo! Finance looks at some big companies who are on the razor's edge.

Loehmann's Capital Corp. (Privately owned; about 1,500 employees). This clothing chain has the right formula for lean times, offering women's clothing at discount prices. But the consumer pullback is hitting just about every retailer, and Loehmann's has a lot less cash to ride out a drought than competitors like Nordstrom Rack and TJ Maxx. If Loehmann's doesn't get additional financing in 2009 - a dicey proposition, given skyrocketing unemployment and plunging spending - the chain could run out of cash.

blistering

Fake stockmarket to learn how it works

stockmarketfortherestofus weseed.com

virtual stocks

One is that the financial press isn’t in the business of supplying useful information; it’s in the business of feeding people’s lust for predictions. “You keep buying the magazine regardless of how the forecasts turn out,” Wellington says, “and they’ll keep supplying the forecasts.”

Blaine Lourd got rich picking stocks. But then he realized that everything he thought he knew about the markets was wrong. And he's not alone.

As a group, professional money managers control more than 90 percent of the U.S. stock market. By definition, the money they invest yields returns equal to those of the market as a whole, minus whatever fees investors pay them for their services. This simple math, you might think, would lead investors to pay professional money managers less and less. Instead, they pay them more and more

Like a lot of people who end up on Wall Street, Blaine Lourd just sort of stumbled in. He'd grown up happy in New Iberia, Louisiana. His father had made a pile of money in the oil patch, and Blaine assumed that he too would one day eat four-hour lunches at the Petroleum Club, hunt ducks on the weekends, and get rich. His older brother, Bryan, had left Louisiana to make what seemed like a quixotic bid to become a Hollywood agent, but Bryan was gay, even if he pretended not to be. (He's now a partner at Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency.) Blaine was distinctly not gay and felt right at home in Louisiana—right up to the moment when, during his third year at Louisiana State University, the price of oil collapsed and took the family business with it. That was when he realized he had no idea what he would do with his life.

The markets are roiling, money managers & banks are posting disappointing returns, and people are beginning to wonder if they chose the wrong guy in Greenwich to take 2% of their assets and 20% of profits. But what if the problem isn’t the guy but the idea that makes him possible: the belief that the best way to invest capital is to hand it to an expert? As a group, professional money managers control more than 90% of the US stock market. By definition, the money they invest yields returns equal to those of the market as a whole less the fees investors pay them for their services. This simple math, you might think, would lead investors to pay professional money managers less and less. Instead, they pay them more and more. "If you put a thousand people in barrels and push them over Niagara Falls, some of them will survive. If you take those guys and push them over again, some of them will survive. And they’ll write books about how to survive being pushed over Niagara Falls in a barrel."

FTA: 'Blaine Lourd got rich picking stocks. But then he realized that everything he thought he knew about the markets was wrong. And he's not alone.' (note: Dec. 2007 issue!)

Online Data

The data collection effort about investor attitudes that I have been conducting since 1989 has now resulted in a group of Stock Market Confidence Indexes produced by the Yale School of Management. These data are collected in collaboration with Fumiko Kon-Ya and Yoshiro Tsutsui of Japan. Some of our earlier results are also noteworthy.

Robert Shiller's database

from twitter, chart sharing

Service to share charts on Twitter

Cool tool to practice what day trading is like before you actually do it and bankrupt yourself!

The Worlds First Web Based Day Trading Simulator. Practice trading US equities with our stock trading simulator tool. Become a master day trader before you committ your capital

Comprehensive list!

Business & Tech

Nb Might follow up

"Currently, Apple's stock is at an all time high. A share today is worth over 40 times its value seven years ago. So, how much would you have today if you purchased stock instead of an Apple product?"

If I'd bought stock instead of a iBook 3G in 2003 I'd have $60k. http://www.kyleconroy.com/apple-stock.php Wowza.

RT @zeldman: Read it and shoot yourself. http://j.mp/8Xz1mc – David (dpan) http://twitter.com/dpan/statuses/12947252610

Apple product vs how much Apple stock would be worth instead. Silly but interesting.

List of apple products, the cost of those products at the time of release and what Apple stock would be worth today had you bought stock intstead of the product.

What if I had bought Apple stock instead?

RT @zeldman: Read it and shoot yourself. http://j.mp/8Xz1mc

"In the first year of the current bear market, the market has fallen more steeply than it did during the first years of Great Depression's bear markets. After adjusting for inflation, stocks are more than 40 percent lower than they were at their 2007 high (and more than 50 percent lower than their 2000 high)."

Buy American. I Am.

People are starting to think more about saving–and investing–than spending, which is perhaps the sole upside to the market turmoil. Being an investing geek has become much more socially acceptable, and companies are taking notice. In the last few weeks, several start-ups and familiar names have added, changed or completely revamped their online investing offerings. There are so many nest-egg incubators out there that we haven’t even had a chance to dive fully into them all. Here’s what’s new: - Investment research firm Morningstar has relaunched its home page with more analytic content upfront. Fund fanatics will relish the new reports (still in beta) that allow you to research past fund performance and what their stakes are. It’s charts all over the place, but much more engaging than a prospectus. Besides monitoring your own investments, you can also share your portfolio with other users and get a star rating.

social-networking sites for investing

Just in time for the recession, some new tools for monitoring your portfolio online. Here's a quick guide.

People are starting to think more about savingand investingthan spending, which is perhaps the sole upside to the market turmoil. Being an investing geek has become much more socially acceptable, and companies are taking notice.

From MIT. Information on Emerging Technologies & impact on business & society

academic study claims to use text in news to automate trading and beat Wall Street. Tested on 5 weeks + bizarre informative features --> sounds fishy

The ability to predict the stock market is, as any Wall Street quantitative trader (or quant) will tell you, a license to print money. So it should be of no small interest to anyone who likes money that a new system that works in a radically different way than previous automated trading schemes appears to be able to beat Wall Street's best quantitative mutual funds at their own game.

It's called the Arizona Financial Text system, or AZFinText, and it works by ingesting large quantities of financial news stories (in initial tests, from Yahoo Finance) along with minute-by-minute stock price data, and then using the former to figure out how to predict the latter. Then it buys, or shorts, every stock it believes will move more than 1% of its current price in the next 20 minutes - and it never holds a stock for longer.

notes for marketing internet

This is a great site about penny stocks. It is obvious the creator of this website knows what he is talking about, best of all this information is absolutely free!