Weekly Recap

With the Friday's market selloff, we are technically in the bear territory, characterized by a slide of 20% from the market highs of October 2007. The Dow Jones now sits at 11,346.51, having dropped 4.2% for the week, and S&P500 is at 1,278.38, having skidded 3% for the week. Few notable events from the last week:

• Credit fears returned, hitting financials again; Citigroup has been downgraded by Goldman. The big financial houses jumped on each other's throat: in addition to Goldman's downgrade of Citigroup (from Attractive to Neutral), Moody's warned about cutting ratings on Morgan Stanley, and Lehman raised its write-down estimates for Merrill Lynch. Fitch Rating Agency noted that some credit-card company losses have exceeded five-year averages. Hmmm!
  
• The consumer debt is increasing, as people's habits change slowly, even in the light of $5 gallon of gasoline, and rising food prices.
  
• The University of Michigan Consumer Confidence Index fell to a 28-year low in June. Ouch!
  
• The Fed kept the rates constant for now, but they said the risk of inflation has risen. Anybody venture to say when they will start increasing the rates? Not that the market needs another blow.
  
• Oracle (ORCL) and Research In Motion (RIMM) have delivered disappointing earnings news.
  
• General Motors plunged to a 53-year low this past week. No, not 52-week low, but rather 53-year low!! Should they file for bankruptcy, as Cramer preaches, or they are going to bounce back, and their shares triple, how Barron's depicted it in an article few weeks back?
  
• Much of the blame for the selloff is on the surging oil prices. Transportation stocks and many big names from the manufacturing and retail sectors have suffered amid oil's doubling in the past year. The oil's happy rise has spooked everyone from consumers to the Fed.
  
• Metal stocks, especially steel, have fared well. Same thing goes for a handful of mining and agriculture stocks.
  
• The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell to 3.98%, down from 4.05% on Thursday.
  

News We Can Use

• Do you need an "extra" brain? Try Evernote at www.evernote.com . It acts as your digital file cabinet, recording everything from random thoughts – got a few of those! – to saved Web searches to scanned documents. It can find text in photos, so it comes in handy when you need to find that picture of the book you're trying to remember.
  
• Street Insider – www.streetinsider.com gives you updates on company events from a select group of ticker you've chosen. You get insider trades, mergers and acquisitions, new offerings and analyst upgrades/downgrades. You also get announcements of earnings, dividends, stock buybacks and splits, and C-level management changes.
  
• Green Signal stocks – www.greensignalstocks.com – delivers to the penny 12-, 24- and 48-day price forecasts for fast moving tickers. The site gives you recommendations, and identifies oversold or overbought issues susceptible to quick moves. For $10 per month, you get forecasts for up to 30 stocks. The system was created by Gideon Dor, a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Illinois.
  
• Gem Finder – www.gemfinder.com – finds the needle in the haystack that is SEC Edgar database. William Mitchell, a former hedge fund manager and founder of the site, has come up with this proprietary search engine which focuses on special situations – new rights offerings, spinoffs, patterns of net operating losses, exchange deregistrations and bankruptcy filings – that change the company structure and often prompt sharp short-term stock-price movements. You get these "special discoveries" for $29 per month, or you can use the same engine to search in the SEC's database yourself for $20 per month.
  
• Vestopia – www.vestopia.com – is a site where you can follow a portfolio manager who seems to know the ropes of the investment process. You can track about two dozens of Wall Street pros whose portfolios you can track and/or copy, if you'd like. You can get email notifications with alerts about what your selected investment manager is buying or selling.
  
• Hedge World – www.hedgeworld.com and www.hedgeworld.com/blog offers a plethora of information about the hedge funds world. If you're interested in hedge funds, this is the place to be. Of the website, you can connect to other blogs, such as Naked Capitalism (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/) , Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/ ) , WSJ's Deal Journal (http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/). From the latter, you can get lots of information about the deals of the day.
  
• Barron's has introduced a new, free, markets data center, very informative for the ones interested in numbers: www.barrons.com/data.