A sprinter who jumps the gun gets disqualified from the race. But selling gun-jumping technology to Wall Street is big business for suppliers of economic data.

Wall Street banks are paying Thomson Reuters to receive important data earlier and faster than the rest of the market. The early-released numbers include the results of the University of Michigan Consumer Confidence Index, according to my CNBC colleague Eamon Javers.

(Read More: Thomson Reuters Gives Elite Traders Early Advantage)

Meanwhile, Thomson Reuters offers reports from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) on extremely fast connections known as "ultralow latency releases."

Thomson Reuters has contracts with the University of Michigan that allow it to release the consumer sentiment data early to elite customers. It's long been known that although the general public doesn't get to see the information until 10 a.m. on release day, the data is distributed five minutes earlier on a conference call for Thomson Reuters' paying clients, who are given certain headline numbers.

Less well-known is that the highest-level subscribers get the information two seconds earlier, at 9:54:58 a.m.

Information is one of the Street's most valuable currencies—all the more valuable when it is not in wide circulation. Wall Street banks equipped with ultrafast computers can exploit even small timing advantages to trade before the market moves on economic data.

The Securities and Exchange Commission widened its crackdown on a controversial practice known as "naked shorting" by charging the Chicago Board Options Exchange with "systemic breakdowns" in the exchange's regulatory and compliance functions.

The CBOE agreed to pay a $6 million fine and implement major reforms to settle the SEC's charges. This is the first time an exchange has been assessed a fine for violations related to its regulatory oversight role, according to the SEC. (You can read the SEC's press release here.)

The settlement follows a decision Monday by an SEC judge to fine a former Maryland banker accused by the SEC of engaging in billions of dollars in naked short trades. The Charles Schwab owned brokerage optionsXpress and its former chief financial officer were also penalized for violating laws aimed at banning naked shorting.

The revelations by Edward J. Snowden, the guy who leaked the existence of Prism and other government monitoring operations to The Guardian, is drawing attention to another important issue: the vast amount of money private contractors make from selling goods and services to the government.

Snowden was employed by Booz Allen Hamilton for three months, according to the company. Booz Allen, which went public in 2010 and is largely owned by the famously connected Carlyle Group, is ostensibly part of the private sector. But it is hugely dependent on government spending for its profits.

I'm not sure that Verizon Wireless really wants to be advertising on searches on Twitter for "PRISM."

High fees plus poor performance: The formula is pretty easy to determine what makes a bad mutual fund.

Some, though, are worse than others—and some are so bad that they've made it into one publication's unofficial hall of shame for charging big fees but delivering small results.

Funds that depend on bad market performance—"bear funds"—for their growth have done particularly poorly, as have those in precious metals.

Investors had every reason not to trust the market after last year's Facebook fiasco—a high-profile initial public offering gone bad on multiple levels.

Yet a year later, the stock market continues to rocket higher and the IPO climate is on balance better as well.

Facebook itself? Well, that's another matter.

But of all the negativity surrounding the company, it's highly publicized market flop seems to be exhibiting few contagion effects.

(Watch: What's Next For Apple and Facebook?)

"It definitely made some investors shy away from the market," said Dave Rovelli, managing director of U.S. trading at Canaccord Genuity. "But they have no place else to put their money, and that's why they're trickling back in now."

Before the housing market in the United States went into convulsions, you heard a lot of talk about the positive "externalities" of home ownership. The Bush administration made something of a fetish of the idea, saying its goal was to create an ownership society.

The best-known dissenter was the British economist Andrew Oswald. As early as 1996, Oswald was producing papers that forcefully argued that home ownership causes unemployment. The effect Oswald claimed to have discovered was strong: Every 5 percent rise in home ownership resulted in a 1 percent rise in unemployment. Oswald's original paper set off a cascade of others that largely confirmed his results.

Oswald is out with a new study, co-authored with David Blanchflower, that sheds more light on the link between unemployment and home ownership rates:

Journalist John Judis points out that the immigration reform proposal making the rounds on Capitol Hill may mix with Obamacare to hurt the employment prospects of American citizens.

The zero down mortgage is back—in Martha's Vineyard.

Ira Stoll at the Future of Capitalism blog has come across an article on "Home Buying 101" in the spring of 2013 "Real Estate & Homes" supplement to the Vineyard Gazette. A local mortgage broker by the name of Polly K. Bassett is quoted as touting how.

Bassett, the "co-owner and a broker of Martha's Vineyard Mortgage Company, L.L.C., said: "We have access to a wide range of programs such as USDA, which is a program where you can put no money down, 100 percent financing, and we also do a 97 percent financing with three percent down....There are a lot of programs out there for people buying their first home."

Buy your first home on Martha's Vineyard with zero percent or three percent down? This might be a good idea for a borrower if prices go up, but it's not a good idea for a lender if the price goes down. "USDA" isn't explained in the article, but it might be a U.S. Department of Agriculture program for farm property, which means the lender is us, the taxpayers. And the Federal Housing Administration has a three-percent down program, which means, again, the taxpayers are on the hook.

I put in a call to the Martha's Vineyard Mortgage Company, where the phone was answered by Carol Borselle, Bassett's business partner.

Borselle told me that the USDA mentioned in the article is, in fact, the Department of Agriculture. It turns out that the entire island is designated as a rural area eligible for a USDA loan.

According to Zillow, the cheapest home in Martha's Vineyard is a two-bedroom condo listed at $260,000.

_By CNBC's John Carney. Follow him on Twitter at @carney.

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."

Those were the words that Fredrick Douglas Scott attached to most of the emails sent to the clients of his boutique investment banking and financial advisory firm, ACI Capital. What the clients didn't realize was that the joke was on them, according to federal prosecutors.

In addition to being one of Ebony magazine's "Top 30 under 30" and claiming to be the youngest African-American to found a hedge fund, Fredrick Douglas Scott was a fraudster, according to the criminal complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The complaint was unsealed Tuesday after Scott was arrested.

In its most recent regulatory filing, ACI claimed to manage $3.7 billion in assets. The FBI said Scott used ACI to execute two related fraudulent schemes in which money wired to the firm by clients was stolen for Scott's personal use.