Me Again

Analysts' Oil Forecasts Wildly Off Base

Thomas Gold doesn't agree with anything. He is deceased.

A Gigantic Buy - Cramer's Stop Trading! (9/23/08)

Gamestop enables people to buy with trade-ins, which makes them the low-price leader. Cramer must be short Gamestop.

5 Stocks to Buy if Obama Wins

GE is chiefly a financial conglomerate now. Anything else won't move the needle.

ACN is NOT where corporate America would turn for cost savings, and it most definitely does not qualify as temporary labor. Inconveniently for your thesis, the great boom in temporary labor decades ago began under Nixon and accelerated under Reagan and Bush I. It happened as manufacturers sought flexibility in dealing with the seasonality of business. Manufacturing is done mostly outside the US now. Corporate America won't be driven to temps by tax rates. Corporate America's chief problem will remain focused on how to improve product and service innovation, and sustain intellectual advantage over increasingly competitive rivals.

ACN does sell IT expertise, but it's pretty generic expertise. It's oxymoronic for a large consulting firm to try to sell highly specialized business solutions. They need large markets. Give one company a proprietary advantage, and you can't exactly resell it. ACN's stuck selling vanilla.

How Sectors Are - Or Aren't - Holding Up

Financials went up, energy down in the S&P 600 in part because of rebalancing. The absolute number of small cap energy names plummeted, as so many names grew out of the cap range. Meanwhile, lots of ex-large and midcap financials are now small and micro. The S&P indices are not passive, but they can't escape the absolute sizes of the opportunity sets.