My pal Peter Boockvar’s not a fan of endless ZIRP. His thoughts on this morning’s strong jobless claims report below (emphasis mine): Initial jobless claims for the week ended July 19th were 284k, well below expectations of 307k, down from 303k last week and the lowest print since February 2006. While the Labor Department said…

  Cartoon by Harley Schwadron

LOL, via Wall Street Journal: The officials overseeing pensions for Los Angeles’s fire and police employees decided last year to get out of hedge funds altogether after an investment of $500 million produced a return of less than 2% over seven years, according to Los Angeles Fire and Police Pensions General Manager Ray Ciranna. The…

Your morning financial links, expertly curated.

The flipside of the performance chase. “What have you done for me lately? How dare you miss a market trend? Why aren’t we on top right now? Is something wrong? Have you lost your edge?” The type of investor who is easily impressed by short-term performance is also really easily disappointed when a strategy struggles. It’s…

On the surface, this looks and sounds like some incredibly stupid investor behavior… via Business Insider: According to a new survey by Bankrate.com, millennials are uncomfortable with choosing the stock market as their preferred method of investing “money they don’t need for at least 10 years.” The survey reveals that today’s young Americans have a rather conservative…

A million years ago (okay, 2009), your favorite financial blogger was toiling away in obscurity on a WordPress blog in the middle of nowhere with only a handful of daily hardcore readers and virtually zero inbound links or recognition from anywhere else. There were big blogs like Barry Ritholtz’s The Big Picture. Yves Smith’s Naked…

via Nick Colas at ConvergEx: Has the CBOE VIX Index bottomed for the year?  Even with all its computational and theoretical flaws, plenty of market participants hope that it has. Brokers would like to see if higher volatility might drive better volumes. Hedge funds around the world root for the opportunities that spicier market action…