Thursday Link Dump

It's been a good day - I spent several hours poring over the first draft of a paper by my Ph.D. student (actually, a student whose dissertation I'll be co-chairing). The paper will eventually be the first essay of his dissertation -- he should be ready to defend his proposal in March or April. He's gathered a lot of data he's about 75% done), and this is his first attempt to put stuff down on paper. It's not overly terrible, but it'll need a lot of work before it's ready.

Now that I'm on this side of the table, I have a lot more respect for what I put my own professors through. Forgive me, for I knew not what I was doing...

Having done that, it's time to blog. There were some interesting pieces in the news (or in the blogosphere) lately. Here they are:

There's a must-read piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal on the history of executive stock options. If you want to understand some of the issues related to back-dating, reloading, and so on, this is the piece for you.

Ticker Sense has a list of analysts' price forecasts for the S&P 500.

Business Week lists The Big Private Equity winners of 2006.

This week's Carnival of The Capitalists is up at Worker Bees Blog. My picks of the week are Dan Melson's piece Choosing Buyer's Agents By Commission Rebate: Penny Wise, Pound Foolish and Free Money Finance's how to make our children into millionaires

Finally, from Seeking Alpha, we have two conflicting indicators as to what will happen in the market: Yaser Anwer tells us that Short interest declined (that's a bullish indicator), while John Hussman tells us that insider selling is up and money managers are overwhelmingly bullish (both are bearish indicators). So take your pick - it reminds me of the need for "one-handed" economists".

Enjoy.