The Big Picture

Books Bought By Big Picture Readers (December 2012)
Losing the War on Drugs: Breaking the Taboo
Barron’s Income Winners
U.S. Equity Sector ETF Performance – January 4 2012
10 Sunday Reads
Bloomberg Markets’ 100 Richest Hedge Funds (Video)
Ford GT
100 Richest Hedge Funds Ranking
Optimum Quantity of Money

Books Bought By Big Picture Readers (December 2012)

Posted: 06 Jan 2013 03:00 PM PST

Click to enlarge:

Once again, its time to peruse the data to see which books TBP readers bought last month. Amazon's embed code lets me track every click from these links — how many people look at the page, how many books get seen, and/or collectively purchased.

Its anonymous — I don't know who bought what — but there's lots of data on the various books generated.

These were the most popular TBP books for December:

Exploring Wine: Completely Revised 3rd Edition (Steven Kolpan & Brian H. Smith)
Underwater Dogs (Seth Casteel)

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (James Gleick)

How Music Works (David Byrne)

Paul Wilmott Introduces Quantitative Finance (Paul Wilmott)

Hugh Johnson’s Wine Companion: The Encyclopedia of Wines, Vineyards and Winemakers (Hugh Johnson)

Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)

Let’s Pray (Not Just Say) the Rosary: Classic Edition; Luminous Mysteries Added (Richard Rooney S.J.)

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay (Frank Partnoy)

Bailout Nation, with New Post-Crisis Update: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy (Barry Ritholtz)

The Rolling Stones 50 (The Rolling Stones)

Kindle and eBooks after the jump

Click to enlarge:

These were the most popular TBP Kindle eBooks for November:

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Charles Mackay)

How Music Works (David Byrne)

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay (Frank Partnoy)

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (James Gleick)

Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)

Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy (Barry Ritholtz)

How We Know What Isn’T So (Thomas Gilovich)

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (First Edition) (A Marketplace Book) (Marketplace Books)

Losing the War on Drugs: Breaking the Taboo

Posted: 06 Jan 2013 09:00 AM PST

Narrated by Oscar winning actor Morgan Freeman, “Breaking the Taboo” is produced by Sam Branson’s indie Sundog Pictures and Brazilian co-production partner Spray Filmes and was directed by Cosmo Feilding Mellen and Fernando Grostein Andrade. Featuring interviews with several current or former presidents from around the world, such as Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, the film follows The Global Commission on Drug Policy on a mission to break the political taboo over the United States led War on Drugs and expose what it calls the biggest failure of global policy in the last 40 years.

Barron’s Income Winners

Posted: 06 Jan 2013 08:30 AM PST

Barron’s cover article this week is by Andrew Bary, on Income Winners, focusing on blue-chip stocks, electric utilities, MLPs, and to a lesser extent, REITs.

Bary writes:

“It’s hard to make a case for two of the lowest-yielding parts of the bond market — Treasuries and mortgage securities — because yields are in the 1% to 3% area, and both sectors could be hit hard if rates rise. Perhaps the best that can be said for Treasuries is that they’re one of the few asset classes that are negatively correlated with stocks, meaning they tend to appreciate when stocks fall, and thus offer a hedge against a stock-market downdraft.”

The whole column is worth your time to read . . .

Full table of suggestions (some of which I actually like) is below:
click for larger graphic

Source:
Income Winners
ANDREW BARY
Barron’s JANUARY 5, 2013
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424052748704723404578207791554873144.html

U.S. Equity Sector ETF Performance – January 4 2012

Posted: 06 Jan 2013 05:30 AM PST

(click here if charts and table are not observable)

10 Sunday Reads

Posted: 06 Jan 2013 05:15 AM PST

Get your Sunday morning started off right with these 10 interesting reads:

• WTF is the “Platinum Coin Cliff” ? (Bloomberg) see also How American CEOs' push for a fiscal deal paid off: It's not about NASCAR or Hollywood (Quartz)
• Gold Heads for Longest Run of Weekly Losses Since 2004 (Bloomberg)
• Zweig: Huge Returns Mess With Investor’s Mind (WSJ)
• Taibbi: Secret and Lies of the Bailout (Rolling Stone) see also Surprise, Surprise: The Banks Win (NYT)
• There’s No Avoiding Google+ (WSJ)
• Cerebral circuitry (FT.com)
• Why You Won't Be the Person You Expect to Be (NYT)
• Bartlett: When the Deficit Will Be Fixed (Economix)
• Controversial Dark Money Groups Told IRS They Would Stay Out of Politics, Then Didn't (ProPublica)
• From NASCAR to rum, the 10 weirdest parts of the 'fiscal cliff' bill (Washington Post) see also GOP anti-tax policy goes over the cliff (Politico)