The folks behind the new documentary Stock Shock: The Short Selling of the American Dream asked me to share the trailer with our readers. This would be an interesting movie for any of you who at some point owned shares in Sirius (SIRI) or XM (XMSR) Satalite Radio.

(trailer and more after the fold)

This is a paid review…
I haven’t been doing many paid reviews lately, but have a couple extra minutes and could use the $15 (or so?) for InvestorGeeks and this site looks pretty cool anway.

Wall Street Survivor is a free fantasy stock market game. You’ve probably seen many of these around. CNBC does a pretty popular one. Like the CNBC one, this game comes along with prizes you can win. Currently there is a contest to win $100k.
Now, these contests I imagine are extremely hard to win. And you basically …

That clever dude Ugly is at it again. With the Zimbabwean dollar reaching a record exchange rate of around $20 Million Zimbabwe Dollars per $1 US Dollar, Ugly has decided to repurpose a web classic by launching the Million Zimbabwean Dollar Homepage. I used it to launch an ad for my newly created MoneyShui.

Here’s my latest post about AMD.
Here’s an excerpt from a Frobes article:

“Intel’s latest desktop processors have faster clocks speeds and use
smaller transistors–45 nanometers as opposed to 65 nanometers–that
allow them to do more work with less power, _all else being equal_.
“We think that Intel is consolidating its performance lead in
desktops,” Wachovia analyst David Wong wrote in a note to investors
Monday.”
!! “All else being equalt.” All else is not equal. Sure, Intel can
brute force faster speeds with the working capital that they have, but
AMD is going to finesse it’s way …

Question: are we in a bull market or bear market? What if there was a third option? In Active Value Investing, Vitaliy Katsenelson makes a case that the current market is actual a "range-bound market" and then gives you the tools to take full advantage of the fact.

What is a Range Bound Market?
Range-bound markets are characterized by their roller-coaster-like volatility and the fact that despite this volatility, money invested in the beginning of the cycle will have close to 0% gains by the end of the cycle. In fact, range-bound markets are more common than bear markets. Katsenelson says:

"…if you look at the U.S. stock market during the entire twentieth century, most of the prolonged (greater than five years) markets were actually bull or range-bound markets. Prolonged bear (declining) markets happened in the past only when high market valuation was coupled with significant economic deterioration, similar to what was going on in Japan from the late 1980s through 2003 or so."

This chart from the book shows the past 107 years bull, bear, and range-bound markets as labeled by Kevin A. Turtle.

Kristin Friedersdorf, from WallSt.net, has posted her interview with me. Goto her Financial Blog Watch page over there to hear me talk about the history of InvestorGeeks and my lessons learned in trying to start a blog network.
I had a great (if brief) time on the phone with Kristin. Her other podcasts are worth a listen, so be sure to check them out too.

Sorry folks for not blogging sooner. I have some insights to the market, but right now I am recovering from a vicious bout of food poisoning. In the past six years I have had four food poisoning’s and three times it was from sandwiches that I bought while driving. You would think it is a problem specific to a store or country. Nope, not at all, I bought bad sandwich’s in Canada, Austria, and Germany. What was common between them all? It was the meat that went bad. (Go vegans …

The following is a paid review…

Finance Markets is a blog written by some folks across the pond. Despite an understandable bias towards European news and posting prices in British pounds, the blog is applicable to investors everywhere.

The Finance Markets blog is updated a lot. There are about 3-6 posts every day, most of which come from one Elaine Frei. The posts cover a familiar range of finance topics from “Economy” to “Investments” to “Property“. There are also some “personal finance topics” like “Insurance“, “Loans“, and “Banking“.

The writing is generally good and much more professional than your typical blog. In fact, I might say that the posts are a bit too professional. There is a bit of a lack of character to the entries. The lack of a way for users to comment on a post don’t help this.

Still I’d say the site is worth a look. Browse around for topics that interest you and you might learn a thing or too. This blog would be especially useful if you are interested in getting a European view of the market. There are daily recaps of the action in the US markets, with citations from some sources that might not be on your reading list.

I am going to review the two books; Profit From Uranium and Profit from China. I want to structure my review in three parts, initial, reading it, and digested the information.

Initial: When I first received the books I looked at them and thought, huh that’s it! Fifty pages and about a third are “don’t do this or that.” Let me say that I was a bit disappointed and had some very low expectations. But I guess one should never judge a book by its cover, or page count.

The following is a paid review. See the notes at the bottom for more information.

Looking for a place to store your hard earned (or not so hard earned) money? Savings-Accounts.com is site that shows the interest rates available at the most popular US banks.

According to the list, HSBC is the best bet with a 6% rate on “new money”. But hurry, you only have until April 30th to get the “promotional rate”. Bank of America and E*Trade are also decent with 5.1% and 5.05% repspectively. Your corner banks like Wachovia and Wells Fargo are offering just 0.25% and 0.50% respectively. The worst offer on the list is Key Bank, with a pitiful 0.15%.