- AIG and Treasury reportedly discussing an accelerated sale of the government’s stake. WSJ reports Treasury’s likely to convert $49B in AIG preferred shares to common and gradually sell its stake.
- “In case you lost track of this sorry affair, AIG, the biggest ward of the state in human history, continues to get the kid glove treatment,” Yves Smith writes at naked capitalism. “Funny, isn’t it, how creative and accommodating the Treasury can be when dealing with large distressed firms, and its skill seems to evaporate when contending with underwater homeowners.”
- This is not a typical stock picker’s market. Far from it. Since the May 6 “flash crash,” correlation of S&P 500 stocks to the overall index has reached its highest level since the 1987 crash. “The stock market has turned into a schizophrenic herd of sheep,” the Pragmatic Capitalism blog says. “Currently, the herd is grazing happily with not a care in the world. But don’t be fooled — when something spooks them you’ll get trampled if you don’t run with them.”
- Retail sales rise for second straight month and the 0.4% rise in August is the highest percentage gain since March. “If we look at the monthly trend of late, there’s an upside bias,” James Picerno writes at The Capital Spectator. “It’s hardly definitive or strong enough to close the book on worries, but considering what might have been it’s okay and more than welcome.”
- Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing has overtaken Yahoo (YHOO) as the No. 2 search engine in the US, at least according to Nielsen’s August report. Firm says Bing had 13.9% search share last month, compared to Yahoo’s 13.1%. This will “will surely cause a firestorm of controversy in the search arena today,” Kara Swisher says at All Things D. Regardless, Google (GOOG) still dominates as it holds 65.8% of search, up 0.9% month-over-month and 0.5% from a year earlier.
- The outcome from Basel III has been critiqued left and right, but Reuters blogger Felix Salmon finds some positives, calling Basel III a “quiet victory” and saying the banking restraints are fairly constructive. “The Basel committees did a masterful job of depoliticizing the process as much as possible,” he says. “If politicians and the media had got involved, that might have made the process more democratic, but it would also have made it much more chaotic and quite possibly would have derailed any chance of an agreement at all.”
- Couch potatoes rejoice! Google TV, the new Internet television product Google (GOOG) is rolling out, will hit stores in the middle of October, possibly on Oct. 17, Engadget reports. Citing an internal memo from Best Buy (BBY), the blog says BBY had originally planned to begin selling Google TV on Oct. 3 but the launch has been pushed back by two weeks.
- Investors who try to time the market may be better off sticking with a buy-and-hold strategy. Barry Ritholtz posts a chart at The Big Picture looking at how investors would do if they bought the S&P 500 in 1993 and how their performance would be dictated if they missed the 10 best days or avoided the 10 worst days.
- Rimarkable blog wonders why the BlackBerry Curve 3G doesn’t run on BlackBerry 6 out of the box. Research In Motion (RIMM) says BlackBerry 6 will be available for the Curve 3G upon network certification in the coming months. And RIMM notes the device, which will sell initially through Verizon Wireless, is BlackBerry 6 ready. But for now, it will run on BlackBerry 5, prompting Rimarkable to wonder why RIM would release a device with an “old deprecated OS” a month after the debut of its next-generation operating system.
- Rafael Nadal finally solves New York. Congrats Rafa.
