Zero Hedge says: Remember Citi? The bank that once did stuff like investment banking and research, sales and trading, and some other things, and was a little more than just a zombifying and rapidly decaying ward of the state? Neither do we. For a vivid example of how things have changed, Citi today’s added BAC stock to its “top picks live”...

Zero Hedge Pretty simple intraday action: crank the dollar, spook everything else. The key correlation charts have been linked at the hip, with the only notable recent outlier being the 10 Year which has been drifting slowly lower, presumably ahead of the $100 billion+ in upcoming coupon issuance. On the commodity side, same story: dollar leading every...

A whopping 74% of companies have been beating their earnings estimates this quarter, which is the highest beat-rate in over ten years according to Bespoke Investment Group. This is even more surprising given that analysts had been substantially raising their estimates ahead of the latest releases. Bespoke’s main point is that while some might...

Greg Michaels of Deal Breaker Given the nearly daily lawsuits filed against Bank of America, Ken Lewis must be chomping at the bit to disassociate himself from his current employer. Having already invoked the outrage of a diverse group of people- from Andrew Cuomo to a disgruntled credit card customer to the handicapped to members of the military-...

Vince Veneziani of Business Insider After a decent opening and respectable gains on the the major markets have reversed course sharply, in part coinciding with a reversal in the dollar. Each of the indices are off about 1%. The real carnage is in the banking sector, as JPMorgan (JPM), Bank of America (BAC) (down 5%), Wells Fargo (WFC), and Citigroup...

AP) — Shares of Arena Pharmaceuticals Inc. traded higher Monday after the company reported new clinical trial data for its experimental obesity drug lorcaserin. Arena said patients who took lorcaserin lost 31 percent of their excess body weight in the first year of a two-year study. Patients who took a placebo lost 12 percent of their excess weight,...

Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider The New York Post highlights an apparent contradiction at Goldman Sachs, with respect to its Lehman exposure. Goldman, in last month’s claim, said it was initially owed $4.2 billion, but reduced that figure to $1.5 billion after it replaced some Lehman positions. A second Goldman entity claims it’s owed...

Courtesy of Mish Timothy R. Homan, writing for Bloomberg says GDP Probably Grew as Stimulus Took Hold The economy in the U.S. probably grew in the third quarter at the fastest pace in two years as government stimulus helped bring an end to the worst recession since the 1930s, economists said before reports this week. The world’s largest economy...

Courtesy of Phil’s Stock World We’re still trying to get bullish, really we are… Yes we are reluctantly bullish and only technically bullish at that.  All we are asking of the markets is for them to take out our very simple levels and hold them for more than a day or two.    Those levels are (and have been since early September):  Dow...

Calculated Risk Tuesday: Case-Shiller Home Price Index for August (expect another increase). Wednesday: Durable goods orders and New Home Sales. Thursday: Q3 GDP (Consensus is 3.0%). *************************************** A few articles and graphs from last week: A comment: Existing Home Sales: More Activity, Little Achievement From Dave Altig...

New York Times Calculations performed for Sunday Business by Morningstar, using data from its Ibbotson Associates subsidiary, show that the stock market underperformed important bond categories over the 10 years through September — with an annualized loss of 0.2 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, versus annualized gains of 8.1...

Posted by John Winston When you get right down to it, no matter what techniques one might rely on for his investment decisions there is one thing that they all have in common.  In order to be successful an investor has to be on the right side of the longer term trends. We are all bombarded with daily charts and sometimes weekly, but looking at the...

The past week in gold, silver, oil, natural gas and the broad market wasn’t anything to write home about. We are seeing controlled profit taking which is making the market choppy. Many traders are getting very bearish on the market which is a good thing in my opinion. According to my market internals, sentiment and volume analysis we should get a...

In case your name happens to be “Gilligan” (first mate of the marooned S.S. Minnow), allow me to break the news to you: According to the mainstream financial experts, the U.S. banking sector has officially been rescued from worst credit crisis since the Great Depression. See Recent News Items Below: “Whatever you think of the...

CalculatedRisk The FDIC closed seven more banks on Friday, and that brings the total FDIC bank failures to 106 in 2009. The following graph shows bank failures by week in 2009. Click on graph for larger image in new window. Note: Week 1 on graph ends Jan 9th. After a busy summer, the FDIC slowed down in late September and early October with only...