Links:
Watership Down
Monkey Business
Christie’s

Excerpt form Adam Bryant’s interview with Barbara Krumseik of the Calvert Group Ltd:

…I think the key is that people who work for me honestly believe that there is going to be a win-win here. I’ll bring it back to my obstacle-course analogy. I believe that the whole career ladder concept is a very disruptive concept because what does it suggest? You can’t get past the person ahead of you unless you push them off the ladder. It promotes aggressive behavior.

When you think of an obstacle course, there are a lot of people on the obstacle course at the same time, and my success doesn’t impede your success. And I may be able to take a minute and help you over that next obstacle and still get where I want to get to.

I also think you have to be a little humble. You have to be maybe a little bit overly confident to break into new things, but a little bit overly humble about what you don’t know, and admiring of the talents different people bring to the table.

Link:
Corner Office: It’s Not a Career Ladder, It’s an Obstacle Course, New York Times, 5/21/10.

Banks and governments in these five shaky economies owe each other many billions of euros — converted here to dollars — and have even larger debts to Britain, France and Germany. Arrow widths are proportional to debt amounts.

Links:
Europe’s Web of Debt, New York Times, 5/1/10.
What Happens if a Euro Area Government were to Default? by Wolfgang Munchau, Financial Times, 1/20/2009

NEW YORK (AP) – The stock market had one of its most turbulent days in history as the Dow Jones industrials fell to a loss of almost 1,000 points in less than half an hour on fears that Greece’s debt problems could halt the global economic recovery.

The market’s plunge came less than 90 minutes before the end of trading. The Dow’s drop was its largest loss ever during the course of a trading day, but it recovered to a loss of 347 at the close. All the major indexes lost more than 3 percent.

There were reports that the sudden drop was caused by a trader who mistyped an order to sell a large block of stock. The drop in that stock’s price was enough to trigger “sell” orders across the market.

For fun….

Accenture’s stock at one point traded down to a penny on this computer glitch. Volume was only about 27.5K. So say that one person bought the entire lot at for $275 and held on to them. In a minute, that person turned his or her $275 investment into $1.1 million!

Unfortunately for that person, NASDAQ announced that they would be cancelling orders that were 60% above and below market on consolidated trade price from 2:40 to 3:00. But ah, to dream!

….well, at least good enough for a trade..

Around 11:30am (Eastern time), the stock started to move up. I watched it for a good while to confirm upward price action. Eventually, I started a position at around 12:20pm (Eastern time) – blue arrow.

On this 15-minute chart, which shows the price activity for the past week, you can see a bullish hammer right before the point I bought the stock; that was another good sign that the stock was moving in the right direction.

This particular trade is going to be a swing play, where I’m looking to hold onto this stock for at least a few days or so. Ultimately, I’m looking for an island reversal (where price will jump back to the level prior to the sell-off)  or to slowly fill the gap (where the price covers the empty space). In any case, my plan is to start selling at the point of the red arrow. I may look to increase my position size if the stock hovers above the horizontal, solid white line for a bit.

Cheers!

With that said, I’m looking to restart another position in $RIG…. not right away, but soon..

Anyways, here’s a pretty cool graphic showing the current problem, and how BP plans to stop the oil leak.

Link: What’s Going on Beneath the Sea

It’s been quite a year since I’ve spoken here last — lots of ups, lots of downs — except for my approval ratings, which have just gone down. (Laughter.) But that’s politics. It doesn’t bother me. Beside I happen to know that my approval ratings are still very high in the country of my birth. (Laughter and applause.)

By the way, all of the jokes here tonight are brought to you by our friends at Goldman Sachs. (Laughter.) So you don’t have to worry — they make money whether you laugh or not. (Laughter.)

Link: Borowitz Report

Copy + Paste from Indiepulp:

He accepted the job because it would be like doing the 1929 issue of the magazine, and he filled the image with tons of satirical imagery, like the U.S. [Treasury] being raided by Wall Street, China dumping money into the ocean, homes being flooded, homes being foreclosed, and CEOs dancing a jig while society devolves into chaos.

It’s too bad that the folks at Fortune don’t have a sense of humor.

Links:
Indiepulp
Link to a giganormous jpeg of the cover for downloading pleasure