Weekend Link Dump

It's been a pretty busy weekend (soccer games for the kids, a football game at the Unknown University, family visiting) and I'm a bit behind schedule due to my wisdom tooth extraction earlier this week. And it's been a pretty light couple of days news-wise. So I'm only posting a couple of items for the weekend edition of the Link Dump:

TheStreet.com does a good job of dissecting why some firms are willing to pay higher fees to do their IPOs in the U.S. capital markets.

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis discusses lenidng guidelines and the credit squeeze

Chuck Jaffe at Marketwatch gives us an idea of what we might expect from the Putnam/MFS merger.

Finally, the The Wall Street Journal has a couple of interesting articles. The first one (titled Your Portfolio on Autopilot) discusses automated trading systems for the small investor. Now anyone can set up a series of rules that will trigger buy/sell decisions. Be afraid - be very, very afraid.

And last but not least, another Wall Street Journal article "New 10-K Footnote Can Flag Woes" points out a new financial footnote that investors might want to look for. According to the article, the Securities and Exchange Commission recently required required most companies to include a footnote item in their financial statements called "unresolved staff comments." These are "any comments from an SEC review of their filings that were material, issued more than 180 days before the end of the fiscal year or remain unresolved by the date of the 10-K, the company's annual financial and business filing with the SEC." I wonder whether they'll be good predictors of future restatements or enforcement actions?

Enough blogging - time to get back to work.