The first week of the semester brought with it a paper deadline, preparing for some topics in the CFA program I'm teaching for the first time, teaching the new modules in a city I had to Amtrack to (twice - I teach for two nights a week), and prepping for and teaching my regular class load.
It wouldn't have been so bad, but of course my computer chose this time to crash Sunday afternoon. Ah well, in any event I'm back, reasonably well rested, and done teaching for the week. And since I did my class prep correctly last semester, I don't have too much to do to get ready for next week. So the rest of today is for catching up on research. Here are some links to keep you busy while I torture some data. Some of it's a bit stale, but I haven't been blogging as much lately and stuff has accumulated in my bloglines account:
The New York Times has a good piece on different approaches to "“fundamental indexing."”Enough bloggery - back to work.
The folks at Red Herring examine whether PE and the tech industry (where long-term perspectives and high R&D expenses abound) are a good fit.
TheStreet.com highlights some mutual funds that invest solely in ETFs.
The Capital Spectator is discussingng the odds of a recession.
The Wall Street Journal reports on some cases (maybe a trend) where companies are trying to extract more of the LBO premiums from PE firms. And in a second piece, they discuss "empty voting" - voting with borrowed shares (Larry Ribstein has some very insightful comments here).
Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture chimes in on The Infallibility of The Markets - as he says, they're not always completelyly right, but they are mostly right.
This week's Carnival of The Capitalists is up at David Maister's blog.
Geoff Considine writes at Seeking Alpha: Outperforming the S&P says nothing about efficient markets. All undergrads should read this - it says what we try to tell them that above benchmark returns could come from higher risk, so you have to correct for risk when measuring returns.
And now, for some non-business items:
Craig Newmark links to two pieces:"13 Things I Wished I Learned in College" and how to think like a genius.
According to CNN, caffeine makes you smarter. That's depressing - it means that without all the coffee I drink I'd be in even worse shape (HT: Mises Economics Blog)
And finally, the weird news of the day (compliments of Hedgefund Guy). This is information I probably didn't really need to know, but having read it, I'm stuck with (and now, so are you).