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  Monday, 17 Jun 2013 | 10:07 AM ET

Twitter Quitter: Kass Says He's Done With 'Haters'

Posted By:
Amanda Gordon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Douglas Kass at the Reach poker tournament in New York.

Doug Kass has had it with the haters and declared his intent Monday to leave Twitter and his 62,000 followers behind.

The head of hedge fund Seabreeze Partners emailed his clients this morning to inform them that he's had it with the popular social network site.

In his more than 12,000 tweets, Kass had been known as one not shy from debate about his numerous market-moving positions. His highlights include a prescient bearish call on Apple last year, and he was one of the few market experts to take a dim view on Warren Buffett's flagship company, Berkshire Hathaway.

In fact, Buffett invited Kass to the company's annual meeting this year to state his bearish position, an unprecedented measure.

(Read More: Doug Kass: Fear the Market's 'Aha' Moment)

He has been consistently bearish during the current market rally and has taken substantial heat for his position that stocks are overvalued and headed for a fall.

But he said he's grown tired of the constant procession of personal attacks and is packing it in.

"After all these years, especially since I have a contrarian streak, my skin is thick, but I have come to the conclusion that tweeting is simply not worth the time or effort," Kass said in the email.

»Read more
  Thursday, 13 Jun 2013 | 12:31 PM ET

What Japan Can Teach Fed About QE

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Getty Images

Take note, Ben Bernanke: Japan is what happens when a market demanding constant central bank stimulus doesn't get what it wants.

The Federal Reserve chairman no doubt is paying attention as the massive surge in the Japanese equity market has whipsawed lower after investors became concerned that Abenomics might come up short in goosing the economy.

Similar to the U.S. central bank, the Bank of Japan, at the urging of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, promised to pump liquidity into the economy at a pace even faster than the Fed.

But in recent weeks indications have been that the quantitative easing from Japan may not be as big as hoped. Consequently, there's been a huge sell-off that has taken the Nikkei into bear market territory.

(Read More: Nikkei Plunges 6.4%; Re-Enters Bear Market)

"Many would characterize it as an overreaction, but it's probably an overreaction to what central banks are doing," Zane Brown, fixed income strategist at Lord Abbett, said during a panel discussion Thursday that focused on the so-called Great Rotation of cash from bonds into stocks.

The panel, assembled by institutional equity firm Liquidnet Holdings, unanimously agreed that the move from fixed income shows signs of occurring but has not happened yet.

»Read more
  Thursday, 13 Jun 2013 | 11:48 AM ET

It's the Summer of Snapchat on Wall Street

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Snapchat

Wall Street has long been plagued by a very special type of communication problem: All too often over the last couple of decades, the words and images Wall Streeters have transmitted electronically have come back to bite then in the, umm, assets under management.

You know what I'm talking about. Henry Blodget calling a stock a P.O.S in an email. Libor traders slapping each other on the back for rigging the rates via instant messaging. S&P analysts rating cows. Goldman's Fabulous Fab trying to impress a girl by saying he would be the only potential survivor of the coming CDO collapse. The list goes on and on.

Those are the more famous instances. There are far more obscure—and arguably less important—instances of Wall Streeters blowing themselves up with help from the Internet. There was the Goldman associate who set up his own blog and was fired for lifting Bloomberg screenshots. Another Goldman associate was secretly a famous sportswriter at Deadspin. A trader at Fortress was fired for emailing a well-known Wall Street blog a picture of one of the firm's traders asleep at his desk.

Somehow Wall Street never seems to learn the lessons of these moments. Be careful whom you email. Stay off the work email account for social conversations. Watch what you say. Things that are jokes in context are the stuff of criminal indictments out of context. (Hint: Text messages from your personal phone are still somewhat safe).

Perhaps the pressures of Wall Street—as well as the loneliness of long hours—are such that it is inevitable that they'll turn to electronic communications to blow off steam.

Suddenly, this summer, many seem to have found that Snapchat is the best way to do this.

Read More
  Thursday, 13 Jun 2013 | 7:20 AM ET

How Elite Traders Jump the Gun on Wall Street

Posted By:
High-Speed Traders' Edge
CNBC has obtained a document showing that, for a fee, an elite group of traders access a closely watched piece of market-moving data before its release. CNBC's Eamon Javers and Steve Liesman discuss.

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.

Read More
  Tuesday, 11 Jun 2013 | 1:12 PM ET

SEC Spanks Naked Shorts

Posted By:
Getty Images
A trader signals an offer in the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index options pit at the Chicago Board Options Exchange.

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.

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  Tuesday, 11 Jun 2013 | 9:49 AM ET

Booz Allen and the Big Business of Big Government

Posted By:
Jeffrey MacMillan | Washington Post | Getty Images
Booz Allen Hamilton Cyber Solution Center.

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.

»Read more
  Monday, 10 Jun 2013 | 12:52 PM ET

Well, This Is Awkward

Posted By:

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

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  Saturday, 18 May 2013 | 12:35 AM ET

'Dirty Dozen': Singling Out 12 Worst Mutual Funds

Posted By:
Jay Brousseau| Stone | Getty Images

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.

»Read more
  Thursday, 16 May 2013 | 2:36 PM ET

Forget Facebook: Stocks, IPOs, Are Just Fine

Posted By:
Getty Images
Zuckerberg announced a new product for Android called Facebook Home.

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."

»Read more
  Friday, 7 Jun 2013 | 11:38 AM ET

How Home Ownership Causes Unemployment

Posted By:
Getty Images

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:

Read More

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