One major legacy of Wall Street's four-year rally will be that it came while the economy and Main Street lagged.

For that reason, two market experts at this week's SkyBridge Alternatives conference in Las Vegas said, the bull run has to be viewed with somewhat jaded eyes.

"We're in a gap between financial markets and the real economy, between Wall Street and Main Street," Nouriel Roubini of Roubini Global Economics said at the hedge fund conference, also known as SALT. "Financial markets look happy about what's going on. Look at the real economy and what's going on there."

Evaluating hedge funds takes a little perspective: On one hand, the industry is likely to double its returns this year. On the other, that amounts to only one-third the stock market's performance.

The most popular hedging strategy—long-short equity— is on pace for its best year in more than a decade.

But the industry remains a laggard against much simpler strategies, including simply buying the Standard & Poor's 500 stock market index, and has been unable to shed its negative image.

(Read More: Foreign Holdings of US Securities Have Exploded

Such is life in the business, where defeating that negative perception has become job one.

"People want to focus on what's gone wrong in the industry," said Anthony Scaramucci, managing partner at SkyBridge Capital and one of the industry's most vocal supporters. He said Skybridge was up 21.9 percent in 2012, "we're up this year, and we're doing this with a third of the volatility of the S&P."

The idea of having a kill switch for major national exchanges sounds smart.

There should be ways to shut down trading by firms that seem to be suffering from giant trading errors, such as the flood of erroneous orders sent out by market maker Knight Capital Group last June.

(Read More: The Knight Fiasco: How Did It Lose $440 Million?)

The problem with kill switches is that someone needs to throw them. My own sources say that while the Knight incident was underway, people at Knight hesitated when it came to pulling the plug on the automated trading. They more or less had a kill switch or panic button but refused to press it.

What's needed, really, is a kill switch that doesn't sit at the broker-dealer but at the exchanges themselves. That's what's currently under consideration.

This is taking the concept of long-term value investing to a whole new place.

Apparently, one of the attendees at the Value Investing Congress in Las Vegas, which began Monday and concludes tonight, got married—Vegas style.

Everyone knows that the Federal Reserve's overnight interest rate targets will not rise before quantitative easing ends.

The exit strategy will be: QE first, rates later.

Edward Fitzpatrick, who heads up the U.S. rates unit at JPMorgan recently gave voice to this conventional wisdom when asked by Bloomberg about rising rates: "There are still hurdles, not the least of which is that they have to end the quantitative easing program before they would contemplate tightening," he said. "The Fed will have time to craft their message well."

When everyone in the market knows something, that's reason to be worried. Does the Fed really "have to" end QE before rates rise?

While this assumption seems well-grounded in both logic and in statements from several people inside the Fed (including Chairman Ben Bernanke himself), it's at least worth considering the possibility that that particular view of the future may not be as certain as Wall Street wise men think. We do not have a lot of history with the zero bound and QE, and so we should be wary of anyone who "knows" exactly what the exit strategy will entail.

One of the allegations in the government document leaked to The New York Times is that a JPMorgan Chase executive gave "false and misleading statements" under oath. So exactly what were the allegedly false statements?

It's actually quite interesting, if you consider stumbling over a bureaucratic morass and finding yourself publicly accused of being a liar "interesting."

The short version: JPMorgan wanted the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to run an inquiry into its California energy trading operation. Now the agency is preparing to accuse its executives of lying.

This part of the proposed case against JPMorgan arises from the bank's attempt to fend off inquiries by a California energy regulator called the California Independent System Operator (CAISO). The enforcement unit at FERC claims that JPMorgan attempted to mislead both it and CAISO about which agency had jurisdiction over alleged abusive bidding practices in the California electricity markets.

(Read More: Who Leaked the FERC Document to the Times?)

If you blinked anytime over the past month or so, you may have missed the stock market retreat that virtually everyone on Wall Street had anticipated.

That one-week drop back in mid-April that saw the S&P 500 shed more than 3 percent of its value may be as good as it gets for those looking for a cheaper entry point, at least if current trends hold up.

Rather than being simply a one-off event that Wall Street could dismiss as an aberration, the first Flash Crash now looks like it was just the opening warning shot.

In 20 breathtaking minutes that happened three years ago Monday, the stock market saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average lose nearly 1,000 points, only to rebound just as quickly.

The New York Times is still in exclusive possession of a confidential government document recommending that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission sue several individuals at JPMorgan Chase over alleged "manipulative schemes" in connection with energy trading in California and Michigan.

I can confirm that the document exists and recommends official actions against the JPMorgan executives. But the document itself remains elusive.

As does the question of who gave it to the Times.

Investors plowed through another benchmark Friday, taking out 15,000 on the Dow in a move that could set up for a short-term market lull.

Crossing psychological hurdles often has led to sideways trading amid some profit-taking and pulse-checking to see what's next.

It happened in December when the stock market passed 13,000 and traded in a volatile range over the next month.

It happened again in February when the Dow passed through 14,000.

(Read More: Stocks Soar on Jobs Data, But Economic Dangers Lurk)