Tis The Holiday Season

Sorry for the lack of blogging lately, but it's the end of the semester, and that always means crunch time. I gave my last final Friday night (from 7-10, which means someone's very, very mad at me). Now all I have to do is grade them (but there's hope - see below).

The School of Business had it's holiday party from 5-7, just before the exam. I've discovered that exams go much better when I've had a couple of glasses of wine beforehand. Luckily, the students didn't have too many questions (gee, our professor must really like giving exams - he seems pretty happy).

Anyway, here are some of the tidbits that have been accumulating while I've been a slacker in the blogging world:

Michael Lewis at Bloomberg.com has a good piece contrasting the private and public equity worlds. Here's the money quote: "In effect, the smartest, best-connected money has separated itself from the rest of the stock market, and has gone into the business of trading against that market. It seeks to buy from the stock market cheap, and sell to the stock market dear, and if you need evidence that this is possible you need only look to the returns on private equity, which have been running three times the returns of the public stock market."

In a related vein, the Wall Street Journal reports on "loan to own" PE investors. Larry Ribstein has further comments here.

CXO Advisory group reviews a paper on a potential way to exploit the "small firm effect"(for the unitiated, small cap firms tend to outperform on a CAPM risk-adjusted basis). Given that my student managed fund may be moving to a small-cap value style (with a few tweaks), this could be one for them to read.

The almost-always-on-target Flexo at Consumerism Commentary says that Freecreditreport.com is a scam.

Concurring Opinions has no trouble grading exams. Maybe I can adapt it to my student's investment analysis projects.

Rob Sama is hosting this week's Carnival of the Capitalists. Unfortunately, I don't have time to highlight my picks of the week this time around. Maybe later.

Finally, how many of you know the differences between Shiite and Sunni Muslims? Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost does, and he has this great primer on the topic.

That';s enough for now. Blogging will pick up next week - I have about a day's worth of grading, and then I'm done with my first semester at the new school.

And then I'll have time to placate all my coauthors who've been hounding me...