Earnings season gets underway shortly as companies begin to report their first quarter numbers. Much will be made about the distinction between weather-impacted reports and genuine signs that the recovery has stalled. Savita Subramanian of Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Equity and Quant Strategy group is saying to watch for management commentary and guidance related…

We have an old saying on Wall Street – “When the ducks are quacking, feed them.”   No one knows exactly who coined this phrase, its first known published usage came from a May 1991 article in which the head of First Boston’s equities desk was quoted as saying it. Keep in mind that 1991…

Cartoon by Abstruse Goose

Twenty years ago today, my generation’s biggest and most important rock star was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Kurt Cobain was 27. Here’s Cobain at his most intense, doing the closer for the Unplugged session in New York City. Something absolutely guttural comes out of his lungs at the 4:30 mark and when…

Wilco fans had something to smile about this week when Jeff Tweedy popped up on IFC’s Portlandia and had his chops broken by Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen as record execs questioning the authenticity of his folk music credentials. Here’s the clip: It just occurred to me that we talk a lot about Portlandia here…

“Success in investing is not a function of what you buy. It’s a function of what you pay.” – Howard Marks Oh man. Rough week. All the momentum faves have been hammered, good companies thrown out with bad ones. The Social Media ETF (SOCL) is down 15% from its March 6th high, names like Facebook,…

William “Bill” O’Brien, the CEO of BATS (right), goes at it for 30 minutes with Brad Katsuyama, the CEO and president of IEX, and the hero of Michael Lewis’ new book, ‘Flash Boys.’ As O’Brien heaped scorn on Lewis and Katsuyama for their anti-HFT Sherman’s March through the media this week, Katsuyama accepted the challenge to…

Arguably the least important jobs report of our lifetimes. The Fed is bent on ending stimulus by the end of this year and it’s hard to picture a jobs number that would have curtailed (or sped up) the pace of tapering. Anyway, here are the numbers: Headline unemployment rate unchanged at 6.7%. 192,000 jobs added…