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Winners & Sinners: Verigy, Mattel...
Stocks to Watch: Chesapeake Energy, Ford Motor, State Street
How to Learn From NutriSystem's Short Position
CEOs Gone Wild: Patrick Byrne
Bill Me Later Profits Now

Should We Anticipate a Long December?
Reviewing Four Tech Stock Pins
Four Stocks to Watch for Pins
What You Can Learn from Priceline's After-Hours Action
What Happened to VIX Futures?

• Not even Deadspin Hall of Fame inductee Kyle Orton could save them last night.
• Wait a second, wrong bears. Here are some opinions on perma-bearishness, and their arguments, from:
• Paul Kedrosky
• A Dash of Insight and
• Bill Rempel.
• Not perma-anything here, but just wondering whether it's Jessica or that pink-numbered jersey? And what's the deal with Joe Buck in this clip?

• Fred Wilson writes on why he's buying Amazon (AMZN).
• Overstock (OSTK) brags about customer service. Yes, both users are happy... Blogging Stocks wonders about the actual stock.
• And it's not too late to enter the MadStocks Contest 2008.

Deep Thoughts by (Not) Jack Handy

• Millionaire Now! has some "Issues to Consider" for the "Individual Investing in Commercial Real Estate."
• Dr. Brett breaks down buying and selling events as independent variables to gauge underlying market strength.
• When measuring a gap in an index use futures, not cash, as Trader Mike notes.
• Should volatility be thought of as an asset? Some opinions from the non-roid-injecting Roger and Yours Truly.

The Chemicals Between Us

• So help me, I've been meaning to get this point down in print forever. The motivations of all parties in baseball in regards to the steroids issue have been so misconstrued, misrepresented, mis-whatever-ed.
• What I mean is, it's the players that have the incentive to get rid of the roids. The owners? Do they really care how Player X is suddenly managing to hit balls 500 feet (and then parlaying it into a magazine empire?) and Player Y can wing it 100 MPH and then bounce back the next day and do it again?
• But now I don't have to. Wages of Wins gets it spot on here, in my humble opinion. (Hat Tip to the holiday-adorned Abnormal Returns).
• "In econ-speak, what we have here is a “positional externality” problem: every player wants to improve his position, relative to all other players, in order to capture the huge rewards that go to big-leaguers. But when a player resorts to illegal, chemical means to do so, it puts pressure on everyone else (those “external” to the initial decision to cheat) to do similarly unwise and destructive things.
• "At any point in time, there are 750 ballplayers in the big leagues. They stay in 4-star hotels, bask in the adulation of millions of fans, and earn salaries ranging from fabulous (the current minimum is $390,000) to incomprehensible (A-Rod, we’re looking at you). This means that the 751st best player in the world, who rides buses between Super 8 motels in places like Syracuse and Scranton, will be tempted to “do whatever it takes” to become 750th best. Which puts pressure on that guy, and so on up the chain. To preserve his relative position and the rewards that go with it, every player will be tempted to cheat."
• Similar points can be seen here from the Sabernomics blog, as well as a radical-sounding solution that makes perfect sense. Let the players, and only the players, handle the testing program.