In Case You Missed Them - Some Links of Interest (7/24/09)

Below are some links of interest (at least to me), just in case you missed them. A few have already been posted to Twitter.

• Economic calendar for Friday, July 24th (Briefing.com Economic).
• Earnings calendar for Friday, July 24th (Briefing.com Earnings).

• Wake up, we are in a depression, whether we want to admit it or not. So says bears Eric Sprott and and David Franklin (Infectious Greed).
• A little moderation in emerging market indexes, or anything for that matter, might be in order (Random Roger).
• As a trader, sometimes you just need time to recover from a loss (TraderPsyches).
• Some questions and answers on using Bollinger Bands (VIX and More).
• Ten myths regarding the subprime crisis (Clusterstock).
  
• America runs on small business (Carpe Diem).
• 229 billion reasons to squeeze the market (Zero Hedge) - there is a big supply of Treasuries coming to market next week.
  
• No business pickup for UPS in July (Clusterstock). Profit fell 49% to $445 million (WSJ). The company then forecast Q3 earnings below analyst's views. It would seem that the transportation companies would have to show some real pickup in demand before the economy can finally begin recovering, but the recent UPS guidance was not too encouraging. More in the "lower declines" and "some stabilizing" camp as opposed to "new demand" camp. Of course, that did not stop the market rally on Thursday. The job of halting the market was left to Microsoft.
• Bill Miller's Leg Mason Value Trust fund (LMVTX) is up 20% this year through July 21, with 55% of the fund in technology and financial services, both of which he sees as leaders in the next bull market (WSJ). Impressed? Actually, some are getting tired of hearing about Miller's comeback (Clusterstock).
  
• Warren Buffett's option to buy shares of Goldman Sachs has earned Berkshire about $2 billion on paper, or about a 40% return (Bloomberg). Maybe Buffett is not washed up just yet.
  
• Even with the rally, the AAII weekly sentiment survey still has the bears outnumbering the bulls (42.4% to 37.6%) (Bespoke Investment Group).
• On Thursday, someone made an options transaction involving 720,000 options contracts on the SPDR Trust Series 1 (SPY). The options transaction is one of the largest, and represents half the volume traded on the SPDR fund on a daily basis. The investor appears to have entered a one-by-two put spread using December options with strikes of $95 (bought) and $82 (sold twice). Wow. See post, and original WSJ article.
• Did Matt Taibbi cost Goldman Shareholders $800 million by making it a PR nightmare if they were to cancel half of their warrants? (Clusterstock)
• Breadth at an extreme as the 10-day advance/decline lines for the S&P 500 is well into overbought territory (Bespoke Investment Group).
• New correlation index being offered - CBOE S&P 500 Implied Correlation Index (VIX and More, Daily Options Report). The index uses a tracking basket of the 50 largest components of the SPX as measured by market cap.
• Does the semiconductor leader / laggard strategy have a flaw in logic? (MarketSci Blog)
• The deflation story/case told in pictures (Traders Narrative).