Dr. Paul invests according to his principles, and he has outperformed the stock market. From 2001 to 2011, his holdings in gold, silver, mining companies and other bets on an economic collapse more than doubled in value!

Medical doctor and a helluva commodities trader too!

About 25 high-frequency trading firms have discussed forming a lobbying group within the Futures Industry Association as they move to deal with growing scrutiny in Washington, the association told Reuters.

Please read more here.

Lots of depressing statistics in this article.

However, the bright side of this article can be summed up by one of its commenters: Thanks for listing the companies NOT to buy stock in!

The collapse of MF Global shows that the customers of Chicago's exchanges and their clearinghouses do not necessarily enjoy the financial protection they thought they did. The failure to make customers whole would undermine a cornerstone of how the city's traders have done business for generations.

Please read more here.

And the bad market news is the gift that keeps on giving ..............

Money managers have been taking steps to gain back their lost advantage, and profits, underlying the deep tensions created by the increased role of high-frequency traders. Big investors now race to trade covertly, commonly slicing up their orders into smaller blocks using algorithms and routing them through "dark pools," the secretive electronic-trading networks that anonymously match buyers and sellers, usually on a first-come, first-served basis.

Please read more here.

I saw this article on Seeking Alpha. I love the name of the website - BubbleBustInvesting.com.. It's interesting to read that some are preparing for another downgrade of the U.S. debt - something you don't hear about in the American mainstream media.

Regulators dragged a "dark pool" trading platform into the light, settling charges that the firm was running a secret affiliate that sought to trade ahead of customers' orders before filling "a vast majority" of them on the private market.

Please read more here.

Here is a movie trailer for the new Wall Street drama Margin Call.

The New York Times’s A.O. Scott writes that this film “is a tale of greed, vanity, myopia and expediency that is all the more damning for its refusal to moralize.”

I am traveling to Asia in a bit.

Here is an interesting story about my upcoming trip!

Ciao - for the next couple of weeks!