Free Republic

The Supreme Court’s stunning rejuvenation of the Obamacare mandate into a new tax didn’t leak to Washington D.C. insiders — but it appears that it may have leaked to yet-unknown Wall Street investors. In a brief 10-minute period starting at 9:32 a.m., the stock value of the nation’s largest hospital chain, HCA Holdings Inc., jumped from $26.81 per share to $27.53 as bidders bought several hundred thousand shares before the court made its announcement just after 10 a.m. The bidders who snatched up shares before the announcement made a gain of roughly $2 a share once the price rose again...

Wealth implosion: It's not just housing By Tami Luhby @CNNMoney June 19, 2012: 2:32 PM ET NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Americans' net worth collapsed in recent years, but don't blame the housing market for it all. A CNNMoney analysis of new Census Bureau data shows that if you strip out the effects of the housing collapse, median household net worth still fell by 25% between 2005 and 2010. The decline was driven largely by the plummeting stock market, which devastated Americans' portfolios and retirement accounts. Overall, median household net worth declined 35% to $66,740 in 2010. The median worth of...

The new General Motors will be turning three years old in early July. GM's rocky childhood has given evidence to what disadvantage small investors are at when it comes to making educated equity investment choices. Let's look at some of the lessons to be learned from one of history's largest busted IPOs (along with the recent Facebook debacle) and consider the current underreported risk factors. Let's start by realizing that the single best indicator of how "successful" and healthy a publicly traded company is would be the company's stock performance. Professional money managers and those that control the majority...

Are Stocks About to Repeat Their Summer Horror Show? Published: Sunday, 3 Jun 2012 | 7:19 PM ET By: Patti Domm CNBC Executive News Editor Like the third sequel to a summer horror movie, stocks are set up for another summer selloff amid fears that the U.S. economy will slide back into recession. “In the last two summers, the final nail in the equities coffin, the thing that pushed it was a double dip scare. We do think the market is going to increase expectations of that in the coming week,” said Barry Knapp, head of U.S. equity portfolio strategy...

A Senate panel is reviewing Facebook's high-profile stock offering last week amid allegations that the bank handling the IPO may have provided select clients with a negative assessment of the company. A Democratic aide to the Senate Banking Committee says the panel wants to learn more about the initial public offering. The committee seeks briefings with representatives of Facebook, regulatory agencies and others. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because the committee's planned inquiry hasn't been publicly announced. Regulators are examining whether Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter for the IPO, selectively informed clients of an analyst's negative view of...

Short sellers desperate to bet against Facebook shortly after its debut on public markets are now getting their chance. Shares of the much-anticipated IPO have fallen sharply since they opened at $42.05 on Friday amid an initial flurry of trading problems at the Nasdaq and after news that top underwriters cut their revenue estimates just days before the offering. Yet, short sellers are still eager to bet against the stock given its lofty valuation.

And now comes some news about the Facebook IPO that buyers deserve to be outraged about. Reuters Alistair Barr is reporting that Facebook's lead underwriters Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, all cut their earnings forecasts for the company in the middle of the IPO roadshow. This by itself is highly unusual (I've never seen it during 20 years in and around the tech IPO business). But, just as important, news of the estimate cut was passed on only to a handful of big investor clients, not everyone else who was considering an investment in Facebook. This is a...

Stock futures hit after European electionsReuters – 1 hr 29 mins ago NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stock index futures fell after Greek voters trounced ruling parties in elections on Sunday, a result that put the country's future in the euro zone at risk, and as Socialist candidate Francois Hollande won the French presidency. S&P 500 futures were down 12.3 points at 1,350.20 at 7:35 p.m. EDT (2335 GMT), suggesting a fall of about 1 percent when the U.S. stock market opens on Monday.

Take a look at what happens with BofA stock starting with April 19th. The power of the Internet!

Eastman Kodak Co., a vanguard name in photography, finally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Thursday following falling sales and rising speculation about its ability to stay afloat. The long-anticipated announcement came after weeks of early eulogies about the faded glory of the former trailblazer, once an American mainstay with products such Kodachrome photographic film and Instamatic cameras. But printed photos seem well on their way to becoming a hipster curiosity as digital technologies -- which originated at Kodak decades ago -- now dominate on smartphones and, to a shrinking degree, cameras. The company, which was also exposed to heavy foreign...

Notre Dame football legend "Rudy" charged in alleged pump-and-dump stock schemeUpdated: Friday, December 16, 2011, 4:36 PM Daniel Ruettiger, the former walk-on football player at the University of Notre Dame who inspired the 1993 film “Rudy,” agreed to pay $382,000 to resolve U.S. regulatory claims he defrauded investors in his sports-drink company by touting fake taste tests and sales. Ruettiger and 12 others generated more than $11 million in illicit profits by artificially pumping up the stock of Rudy Nutrition, the firm Ruettiger founded, the SEC said in a complaint filed today at U.S. District Court in Las Vegas. The...

(CBS News) Washington, D.C. is a town that runs on inside information - but should our elected officials be able to use that information to pad their own pockets? As Steve Kroft reports, members of Congress and their aides have regular access to powerful political intelligence, and many have made well-timed stock market trades in the very industries they regulate. For now, the practice is perfectly legal, but some say it's time for the law to change.

Stocks head for big losses NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- U.S. stocks headed for a big drop at Wednesday's open after Italy's key bond rate rose above a critical 7% level -- a sign that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's pledge to step down failed to calm world markets. The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU), S&P 500 (SPX) and Nasdaq (COMP) futures fell more than 2%. Stock futures indicate the possible direction of the markets when they open at 9:30 a.m. ET. Berlusconi's departure could come as late as the first week of December, after a final vote on the budget. And...

FTSE, DAX, CAC to Open Sharply Lower Published: Tuesday, 4 Oct 2011 | 1:35 AM ET By: Antonya Allen Assistant Editor, CNBC.com European stocks were expected to open lower on Tuesday after falling to their lowest close in a week on Monday with banking stocks among the biggest losers following an admission by Greece that it will miss its deficit targets for the year. The FTSE [.FTSE 4910.32 -165.18 (-3.25%) ] is called 100 points lower, while Germany's DAX [.GDAXI 5181.08 -195.62 (-3.64%) ] is expected to open 114 lower and the CAC 40 [CAC40 2839.20 -87.63 (-2.99%) ]in France...

DJI 10,808.87 Down -315.97 -2.84%

I am 26 and recently graduated from school. For the past almost 2 years I have been running a 401k with the tiny percentage of money I can afford to put into it with the full expectation that Social Security won't be around when I'm eligible for it, regardless of the fact I've had to pay into it. I find it really scary how many people I know around my age that aren't saving at all. At first my work only offered a regular 401 so I put in slightly above the % for employer matching. Then they offerred a...

Sept. 6, 2011, 9:37 a.m. EDT U.S. stocks open sharply lower; Rule 48 invoked By Kate Gibson NEW YORK (MarketWatch) - U.S. stocks fell sharply Tuesday as worries about European debt and the U.S. economy intensified. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA -2.31% fell 275.26 points to 10,965.00. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index SPX -2.51% shed 29.60 points to 1,144.37. The Nasdaq Composite Index COMP -2.18% declined 56.61 points to 2,423.72. /snip Markets invoked Rule 48 for the open, lifting a requirement calling for price indications that help determine the floor price at the start to smooth trade.

Tuesday's Market Preview Is Not Pretty: El-Erian Published: Monday, 5 Sep 2011 | 1:51 PM ET By: Mohamed El-Erian, CEO and Co-CIO, Pimco To state the obvious, it is shaping up to be a difficult return for U.S. markets after the Labor Day break as European stock plunge and the European Central Bank (ECB) loses some of the control it has been exercising on the Euro-zone's sovereign bond market. The best way to understand what is going on is through the following simplified sequence: banks-sovereigns-policies. Specifically: · Banks stocks led the debacle on European bourses Monday, with drops of some...

Asian markets slammed in global selloff By Yoshikazu Tsuno | AFP – 1 hour 17 minutes ago. Asian stock markets early Friday caught a global selling fever after new warnings of world recession coupled with fears that rapid-fire growth in China is set to slow down. Investors in Tokyo, Seoul and Sydney picked up on the mounting anxiety evident in the United States and Europe, where fresh carnage ripped across the markets on Thursday. "The bears returned aggressively overnight as very disappointing US economic data and fears over the stability of European banks had traders reaching for the sell button,"...

Stop the presses. Barely did we have time to report that European regulators failed to impose a coordinated short selling ban, that Bloomberg reports that the countries most impact by the market plunge are about to impose standalone short-selling bans. These are Belgium, Italy, Spain and France. In other words, it really is on and the 2008 Lehman PTSD flashbacks may now resume. Until we get a headline that says it isn't. The rescue of the Borsa Italian is now more schizophrenic than that of Greece. As a reminder, in the previous post the FT quoted Abraham Lioui, a professor...