Stock Trading Investing Information

Something strange happened this week in Amazon.com's apparel section.

For a day or two, a black T-shirt featuring an image of three wolves baying at a full moon claimed the top slot at the online

store's clothing bestseller list,, beating out the usual, unremarkable mix of Levi's 505 regular-fit jeans, Crocs clogs and Adidas running shoes.

Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, Available in Various Sizes

And really, why wouldn't you buy the shirt, which is priced from $7.65 to $17.93, depending on your size? Just read the long and growing list of customer testimonials promising earth-shattering experiences or psychedelic vision quests upon purchase.

"I bought this shirt and instantly old girlfriends started calling me again," wrote one reviewer."My doctor says the cancer has gone into remission," wrote another. "

Thanks for changing my life!"The shirt's page at Amazon.com had quietly existed for years without much comment, but after a snarky link from CollegeHumor.com, the "Three Wolf Moon" shirt suddenly sprouted hundreds of five-star ratings.

Reviewers have dreamed up epics about its powers, weaving fantasies involving everything from the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland to the pop group Duran Duran.

As the joke caught on and got passed around the Web, Photoshopped spoofs of the shirt started appearing online -- featuring corgi puppies, spiders or haddock instead of the now-famous wolves.

CollegeHumor.com, a comedy site started in 1999 by a couple of high school friends who grew up together in Timonium, Md., also claimed victory this week for rigging an online poll run by the state of Nebraska to select a new license-plate design.

The site urged its readers to vote for what it deemed the most boring design available to Nebraska drivers. That gray-and-white plate won.Officials in Nebraska said they monitored Web traffic to screen out visitors coming directly from the humor site, but CollegeHumor.com was still, credibly, claiming the joke a success this week.

"Together we pranked the entire automobile-owning population of Nebraska," wrote a CollegeHumor.com editor, in a Wednesday posting. "Congratulations."

This type of online rabble-rousing appears to be catching on more than ever over the past year, said Tim Hwang, the organizer of ROFLCon, a convention dedicated to celebrating Internet memes.

After all, another Web-based prank crossed over into the real world just last month when a 21-year-old college student, known by the online moniker "m00t," sailed to the top of Time's "most influential person" list in an online poll, beating out the likes of President Obama and Oprah Winfrey.

Gathering nearly 17 million votes, the world's "most influential" person is the founder of another jokey Web culture site, 4chan.org, whose proprietor is known offline by the name Christopher Poole. If you don't get why the shirt, and its reviews, are so funny, don't worry.

CollegeHumor.com co-founder Josh Abramson said it's a case where the shirt is so uncool that it's cool."A lot of things that become popular on the Web are based around just being ironic and being an inside joke," Abramson said.

"This resonates with a geeky, hip crowd that is very Web-savvy. When something resonates with that circle, crazy things can happen."Abramson said his team had considered licensing the wolf shirt for sale.

CollegeHumor.com, which had 7 million unique Web visitors last month, also has an online store that sells T-shirts with ironic catchphrases and designs, called BustedTees.com. But it appears that the site may have been a bit slow to catch on to its own meme.

"We're kicking ourselves that we didn't," he said.The New Hampshire company that makes the "Three Wolf Moon" shirt said that it doesn't generally mind being the butt of this joke."You have to be able to laugh at yourself," said Michael McGloin, a partner and art director at the Mountain, who added that he finds some of the reviews to be "freaking hilarious."

The company certainly doesn't mind the shirt's recent uptick in sales: "Three Wolf Moon" is sold out, and the Mountain has started printing up a fresh batch.

It seems that the wolf theme was growing in popularity even before the Internet hipsters descended, McGloin said."Wolf shirts are super hot right now," he said. "It's the year of the wolf, I guess."

Click now to Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, Available in Various Sizes

By Mike Musgrove, Washington Post Staff Writer

Labels: ironic tshirt, stock trading investing, the mountain, three wolf moon, tshirt, wolf moon, wolf shirt, wolf t-shirt

NEW YORK - The Standard & Poor's 500 index is up for the year. And for once, it was the housing market that sent stocks soaring. The S&P 500, considered Wall Street's most important indicator, bounded up 3.4 percent Monday and erased the last of its losses for 2009. And the Dow Jones industrials shot up more than 200 points and had their first finish above 8,400 since Jan. 13.

Two months ago, an S&P 500 in positive ground would have seemed impossible, with the stock market having fallen to 12-year lows on fears of a worsening recession. Monday's rally was led by the same financial and housing stocks that were decimated by the credit crisis and the sinking economy, and it added more momentum to a stunning rally that began March 10.

A double dose of good housing news ignited the advance: Pending U.S. home sales rose more than forecast and had their second straight monthly gain, while construction spending rose unexpectedly in March after five straight declines.

With Monday's gain, the S&P has soared 34.1 percent in the 39 trading days since the rally began, its steepest gain over that many days since 1933. The Dow, meanwhile, is up 28.7 percent.

Investors are betting that a stream of slowly improving data since early March mean that the economy, and Wall Street itself, have found a bottom. As they've kept buying, they've also overlooked reports, including millions of lost jobs, that point to continuing economic weakness.

Still, as dramatic as the rally has been, no one is describing the market as euphoric, and analysts are warning that Wall Street might not be able to sustain its advance. Monday's gain came on moderate trading volume, a sign that some investors are still cautious.

"The bear market may not be over," said David Kotok, chairman and chief investment officer of Cumberland Advisors. He pointed out that the real estate market is still weakening and banks are still taking losses on loans.

"We have the makings of a 'V' or the first half of a 'W,' " Kotok said, referring to the shape of the stock market's path. "The upward leg looks the same ... Only time will tell."

The S&P 500, the market barometer preferred by professional investors, is now up 0.4 percent for 2009. That matters not only for market watchers - many investments including mutual funds either mirror or are measured against the index. The Dow is still down 4 percent for the year.

The S&P 500 index rose 29.72 Monday to 907.24, its first close above 900 since Jan. 8. It had shown a gain for the year only during the first five trading days of January, before the market began a huge drop that carried the S&P 500 and the Dow to their lowest levels since 1997.

The Dow rose 214.33, or 2.6 percent, to 8,426.74.

The Nasdaq composite index rose 44.36, or 2.6 percent, to 1,753.56. The Nasdaq, with a big representation of high-tech and smaller company stocks, has run ahead of the other indexes, and is up 11.8 percent in 2009.

The rally came after the National Association of Realtors said its index of pending sales for previously occupied homes rose 3.2 percent to 84.6. That was well ahead of the 82.1 economists had been expecting and the second month of gains after the index hit a record low in January.

Separately, the Commerce Department said construction spending rose 0.3 percent, the best showing since a similar increase last September. Economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected spending to drop 1.5 percent.

Jerry Webman, chief economist at Oppenheimer Funds Inc., said stocks are rallying because investors aren't fearful as they were months ago that the economy is headed for the abyss.

"There's been this fear that every six months another shoe drops and maybe there isn't a shoe in mid-air right now," he said.

The pending home sales data touched off a rally in home builder stocks. KBR Inc. rose $1.25, or 7.9 percent, to $17.15, while Lennar Corp. rose 88 cents, or 9.3 percent, to $10.34.

The market's enthusiasm will be put to several tests this week including the April employment report, one of the most closely watched economic indicators, which comes out on Friday.

Another concern for the market is the release Thursday of the results of the government's "stress tests" on the 19 largest U.S. financial companies. Some analysts have worried in recent weeks that renewed anxiety about the state of the financial system could upend the market's powerful two-month advance.

But investors set aside some worries about financial companies even as analysts predict that the tests - designed to determine which banks would need more cash if the recession worsens - will show that several banks need more capital.

The Financial Times reported Sunday that Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. are working on plans to raise more than $10 billion each as they negotiate with regulators over the findings of the stress tests.

Citigroup declined to comment, and a Bank of America spokesman called the report "completely inaccurate." Citi rose 23 cents, or 7.7 percent, to $3.20, while Bank of America jumped $1.68, or 19.3 percent, to $10.38.

Investors shrugged off word that regulators told Wells Fargo & Co. to shore up its finances after the "stress tests" showed the bank would have trouble surviving a deeper recession.

Wells Fargo is one of several banks regulators will force to have larger capital buffers to protect them against possible future losses, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the process. The company declined to comment.

Wells Fargo rose $4.64, or 23.7 percent, to $24.25.

In other trading, the Russell 2000 index of smaller companies rose 19.84, or 4.1 percent, to 506.82.

About five stocks rose for every one that fell on the New York Stock Exchange, where consolidated volume came to 6.9 billion shares compared with 5.2 billion shares traded Friday.

The economic reports and a big purchase of government debt by the Federal Reserve left bonds little changed. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note slipped to 3.16 percent from 3.17 percent late Friday.

The dollar was mixed against other major currencies, while gold prices rose.

Light, sweet crude rose $1.27 to settle at $54.47 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Overseas, Germany's DAX rose 2.8 percent and France's CAC-40 gained 2.5 percent. Markets in Japan and London were closed for holidays.

By TIM PARADIS and SARA LEPRO, AP Business Writers

Labels: SandP 500, Standard and Poor 500 index, stock trading investing, wall street

Here are some highlights of Warren Buffett's and Charles Munger's remarks at the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholder meeting this past weekend.

Mr. Buffett on Newspapers

Mr. Buffett has long held himself out as a newspaper man. As a child, one of his first jobs was delivering newspapers. An Omaha newspaper Berkshire owned, Sun Newspapers, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 based in part on a tip Mr. Buffett provided. One of Berkshire's biggest investments in the 1970s was the Buffalo News, which it still owns.

But his view on the future of the newspaper industry is dismal. "For most newspapers in the United States, we would not buy them at any price," he said. "They have the possibility of going to just unending losses."

As long as newspapers were essential to readers, they were essential to advertisers, he said. But news is now available in many other venues, he said.

Berkshire has a substantial investment in Washington Post Co. He said the company has a solid cable business, a good reason to hold on to it, but its newspaper business is in trouble.

Mr. Munger called newspapers' woes "a national tragedy....These monopoly daily newspapers have been an important sinew to our civilization, they kept government more honest than they would otherwise be."

A Washington Post Co. representative couldn't be reached for comment.

Mr. Buffett on Insurance

In response to a question about the worst possible development for Berkshire Hathaway's vast insurance operations, Mr. Buffett responded: nationalization.

If inflation jumped and insurance policies became extremely expensive, pressure could rise on the government to nationalize the insurance industry, he said. "When people get outraged, politicians respond," Mr. Buffett said. It's highly unlikely that such a development would happen, he added. But he did note the example of Social Security, which is a form of a nationalized annuity.

Mr. Buffett on Housing

"In the last few months you've seen a real pickup in activity although at much lower prices," Mr. Buffett said, citing data from Berkshire's real-estate brokerage business, HomeServices of America Inc., which is one of the largest in the U.S.

In California, medium and lower-price homes -- under $750,000 -- have been selling more, though there hasn't been a bounce back in sale prices, Mr. Buffett said. "We see something close to stability at these much-reduced prices in the medium to lower part of the market."

Mr. Buffett on Moody's

Mr. Buffett was asked about Moody's Investors Service, which gave a triple-A rating to billions of dollars of mortgage securities that subsequently lost value. Berkshire has a 20.4% stake in the company.

"Basically, four or five years ago, virtually everybody in the country had this model in their heads, formal or otherwise, that house prices could not fall significantly," Mr. Buffett said. He later added that "it was stupidity and the fact that everyone else was doing it."

He said that if Moody's had started to take a negative view on residential real estate, the ratings provider would have been hauled before Congress to testify about why it was hurting the U.S. economy with its bearish ratings. "They made a huge mistake, and the American people made a huge mistake," he said.

A Moody's representative couldn't be reached for comment.

Mr. Buffett on Treasurys

Berkshire Hathaway had only one slide at this year's annual meeting. It displayed a Dec. 19 trade ticket showing a Berkshire sale of $5 million of Treasury bills. They were coming due on April 29 this year, roughly four months after Berkshire sold them. Berkshire sold the bills for $5,000,090.70. If that buyer had instead put their money in a mattress, by April 29 they would have been $90.70 better off, he said. Negative yields on Treasury bills show how tumultuous last year was, Mr. Buffett added. "We may never see that again in our lifetimes," he noted.

Messrs. Buffett and Munger on Math and Theories

Messrs. Buffett and Munger made clear their complete disdain for the use of higher-order mathematics in finance.

"There is so much that's false and nutty in modern investing practice and modern investment banking, that if you just reduced the nonsense, that's a goal you should reasonably hope for," Mr. Buffett said. Regarding complex calculations used to value purchases, he said: "If you need to use a computer or a calculator to make the calculation, you shouldn't buy it."

Said Mr. Munger: "Some of the worst business decisions I've ever seen are those with future projections and discounts back. It seems like the higher mathematics with more false precision should help you, but it doesn't. They teach that in business schools because, well, they've got to do something."

Mr. Buffett said: "If you stand up in front of a business class and say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, you won't get tenure....Higher mathematics my be dangerous and lead you down pathways that are better left untrod."

Mr. Munger on the Future

"As I move close to the edge of death, I find myself getting more cheerful about the economic future," Mr. Munger said.

Mr. Munger sees "a final breakthrough that solves the main technical problem of man," he continued.

By harnessing the power of the sun, electrical power will become more available around the world. That will help humans turn sea water into fresh water and eliminate environmental problems, Mr. Munger explained. "If you have enough energy you can solve a lot of other problems."

Wall Street Journal

Write to Scott Patterson at scott.patterson@wsj.com and Alistair Barr at alistair.barr@marketwatch.com

Labels: berkshire hathaway, charles munger, stock trading investing, warren buffett

Owning a very good stock trading software can be a very handy tool for faster and easier transactions in the stock exchange. After all, it is a great way to analyze the market with the use of an online software that is capable of calculating important indexes as well as giving you a preview on which shares you should consider trading.

A stock trading software is basically a computer program that allows you a certain degree of access to the stock market of any part of the world. This program has the ability to analyze movements within international markets.

Traders often use this kind of software to perform both buying and selling in the stock exchange. It also offers investors various benefits that can help them in successfully engaging in the stock market. Here are some of the ways that the software becomes helpful to you:

Time Saving

One of the major benefits in using stock trading software is that it saves you a lot of time. After all, time is a very essential factor in stock trading for you to be able to make the best deals.

Through the use of this program, you can forego with having to spend so long in trying to interpret data on your stocks through newspaper reports or online stock pages. Through a single click of the mouse, the software can download the necessary information and will process all the data for you so you can make your decisions faster.

Objective Guidance

Another great benefit for using this software is that it can give you great trading advice, especially if you are a beginner. Because the program is not biased upon emotions in presenting its opinions to you, a more objective and truthful judgment on which stocks will be best to invest on can be delivered. And so, there is a better chance that you will be guided to making a better and unbiased decision.

More Control

Using a stock trading software also gives you more access and control to your own accounts. Instead of relying too much on brokers to negotiate deals for you, you are now empowered to handle a lot of the work yourself, and you can even constantly check on how your investments are doing in the market. This way, you can monitor your stocks more effectively.

Broadening Of Your Portfolio

Finally, the use of trading software can also allow you to make international trades easier and this may broaden your portfolio. Because the program is based on information technology and a vast online network, it would be easier for you to make global transactions without having to leave your own home. This can pave way to broaden your stock portfolio and even make it more secure.

Indeed, the use of trading software is a great way to maximize what modern technology has to offer and incorporate it in making profit. By saving you a lot of time, giving you more objective advice, empowering you to have more control and broadening your portfolio, this program has proven its usefulness for anyone interested in engaging into stock exchange.

And so, if you are interested on making your stock transactions faster and easier, or if you are merely new to the market and would want very good assistance in your decisions, then you can never go wrong by investing on a good stock trading software.

Browse Stock Trading Investing

Labels: software, stock trading, stock trading investing