Thanks for the comments and questions, all! Glad to see that some are paying attention.

Leigh, to answer your follow-up question, let me define apocalyptic by copying and pasting an exchange from an old movie:

This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you… Read full post »

OK, Gibson, you told me a week ago to start buying stocks, and the market has plummeted since then....what gives?

Well, loyal readers, we have now officially entered a full-scale panic, and there is very little that any of us can do about it. In a market like this,… Read full post »

There is an old saying on The Street that says that the war can only end when the last of the generals have been shot. After the market action of the last few weeks, it is safe to say that none of the generals have survived this latest battle.… Read full post »

This week, the CFTC (Commodities Futures Trading Commission) published their long awaited report, authorized by Congress, on the subject of speculation in energy prices, and specifically the price of oil.

It came as no surprise to any of the denizens of the Street that the CFTC concluded that over 5… Read full post »

A few weeks ago, much space was devoted on this blog to the price of oil, the effect "speculators" are having on it, and the question of whether the involvement of those "speculators" might not be signaling the end of the oil bubble.

This last week saw herculean efforts from our… Read full post »

What a difference a week makes!

One week ago, the stock markets here in the US, as well as overseas, appeared to be in freefall as the bad news from the credit crunch seemed to just keep getting worse. A column in this space documented the panic, and… Read full post »

It's official! After Wednesday's horrendous market action, the folks who decide such things, like E S Browning of the Wall Street Journal, have declared this a "Bear Market". They define such a condition as existing when "the Market" has declined by 20% or more from its previous… Read full post »

This is a leap year, loyal readers, so I will borrow a line from my friend Vince Farrell and warn you that the most dangerous place you can be these days is between a politician and a camera. Many of our elected officials are running to keep their… Read full post »

Q: Why did Milken fire Dennis Levine?

A: Anyone who needs 23 trades to make $1 million has got to go.

On The Shady Side of the Street, we mourn the death of the sick joke. One rarely comes across them anymore in this age… Read full post »

Just about two years ago, The Shady Side of the Street was born when it's author became so enraged at the egregious conduct of some of Wall Street's biggest players that he started writing about it. The title of the first installment, penned in the dark days before… Read full post »

Eliot Spitzer built his career, in part, by going after wealthy guys like former New York Stock Exchange president Richard Grasso and former American International Group (AIG) CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg. In the case of Greenberg, he played classic Spitzer hardball, pressuring AIG's board to ous… Read full post »

There are some risks that the players on Wall Street should be able to anticipate. Citigroup, the biggest of those players, has ignored an obvious one, and is now paying off investors who have lost billions in one of its hedge funds.

Sophisticated investors… Read full post »

What the heck, Gibson? You told us last week that commodities, especially oil, were in a bubble! Oil closed at $113/barrel that day, and is now at over $125! How can we believe anything else you write?

Aaahhhh, Dwight....I knew I would hear from you before… Read full post »

When you manage people's money, and are entrusted with making decisions about what stocks to buy and sell for them, you naturally become a target of those who are somehow compensated by their ability to influence such decision-makers. There is an entire industry built around stock promotion, the id… Read full post »

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Having celebrated the above holiday with gusto, downing several Anejos, and Margaritas to wash down his Camarones al Ajo and Quesadilla de Pato, your faithful blogger sits before his computer. He recalls that his consiglieri at salon has been adamant about the inadvisability o… Read full post »

The short answers are "probably", and "not as much as you might think."

The readers of this column will learn before long that there are some areas in which it is repetitive. One of those themes is the concept that what you read on the front page… Read full post »

Well, that didn't take long at all.

In one of his famous letters to shareholders in a Berkshire Hathaway annual report, Warren Buffett advised, in an analogy to investing, that if you sit down at a poker table and cannot identify the patsy within 30 minutes, the patsy is… Read full post »

My good friends at Salon extended the Shady Side an invitation to this "open" blog site, and that will surely mean a much more significant "value proposition" for Salon subscribers. Why? Because readers of the Shady Side will almost surely see a meaningful improvement in their investment performan… Read full post »