Stocks and Dollars

Stocks rose on Friday on strength from Caterpillar and other industrials, lifting the Dow and Nasdaq to their best monthly performance since December.

Mercenary Trader submits:

By Jack Sparrow

In a zero interest rate environment, we can think about market participants in two groups:

• Those who are taking risk because they can.

• Those who are taking risk because they have to.

These are not the traditional buckets. Normally the dividing lines run retail versus institutional … investor versus trader … value versus growth or what have you.

Market participants can also be sorted by investment mandate.

Traditional money managers have “career risk” — they live and die on beating their benchmarks, or at least not lagging them too much.

Hedge fund managers, meanwhile, have their performance objectives and high water marks. They want to do well so they can get paid.

But neither of those groups have do-or-die performance requirements, in the sense of “make X percent or you are dead.”

It doesn’t look so good lagging the S&P, of course. But if the S&P is

Complete Story »

Shares of several large U.S. insurance companies turn higher Friday, fighting off earlier losses that had come as insurers tally up the likely costs to cover claims from recent bad tornados.

April Is a Kindly Month for Stocks Stocks had their best month of the year in April, as strong corporate earnings and the promise of continued low interest rates persuaded investors to make riskier bets.The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 490.81 points in April, nearly 4%, to 12810.54.

April Is a Kindly Month for Stocks Stocks had their best month of the year in April, as strong corporate earnings and the promise of continued low interest rates persuaded investors to make riskier bets.The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 490.81 points in April, nearly 4%, to 12810.54.

This was a busy week on the economic calendar, but two items in particular captured headlines. First was the advanced Q1 GDP report. As we anticipated, the headline growth figure of 1.8% was disappointing. Behind this unfriendly number, however, the details of the report were fairly encouraging. Upward revisions meant

The Fed consigned the greenback to another bout of weakness, signalling that easy policy would remain in place for the foreseeable future, and markets were only too happy to oblige, sending the USD index to lows last seen in 2008. We see little on the fundamental horizon that could alter

After much anticipation, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke at last held his press conference with select journalists this week. As expected, the mostly prepared remarks contained no new information. Some of the more telling aspects of the conference, however, helped provide greater insight into the Fed’s economic outlook, inflation and inflation