Bail-out got you down? Are you worried about the death of the free market? I’ve got something that will restore some confidence in deregulated private markets. A private US company called SpaceX just made it to orbit with a fully reusable launch vehicle that they built.

Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, has used his dot com fortune to found SpaceX, one of a few private companies who have been trying various methods to achieve orbit. I’ve been watching this segment for a few years now and even drove down to watch Spaceship One make the first privately funded manned flight to space in 2004.

Read the rest of this entry »

After our sixth straight week of down markets, our worst run since 2001, we’ve had the craziest weekend I can remember. It’s getting hard to keep track of the disasters.

Regional bank IndyMac fails and the FDIC takes over. This is the second-largest bank failure in our generation and larger than the combined assets all the small banks the FDIC has taken over in the past 15 years. IndyMac may be the first of many. The Feds have a list of 93 banks they’re watching and the really scary thing? IndyMac wasn’t even on the list. In fact, analysts say that up to 125 banks could fail over the next 12 to 18 months.

Read the rest of this entry »

I created a meta-page for tracking all the players in the “wealth management blogosphere”. You can see it here, or click on the link in the sidebar. Please let me know if I’m missing anything.

Ever had aspirations to be a technical trader? Do you have clients who day trade on the side? Check out Inspectd.com, which is a little investor quiz that shows you a historical stock chart, and lets you guess whether the stock rose or fell. You start with $100,000 and it tracks your gains and proceeds as you time different stocks, without letting you know what the stocks are.

Granted, this is just a toy and it is missing many pieces of information that a trader would have access to, like technical indicators, knowledge of how the stock has historically correlated to indexes, etc. But it’s really fun. After about 25 trades, I managed to turn my $100,000 into $155,016:

Ok. Back to work.

Continuing my post from Friday on The Journal of Financial Planning’s article about building web sites… Ed McCarthy talks about outsourcing, but also spends some time discussing methods for advisors to build sites themselves, focusing mainly on Microsoft Expression Web, the replacement to Microsoft FrontPage. This is where I think he missed something–content management systems.

Microsoft Expression is a *great* product, but few people build web sites from scratch now. It’s much too complicated and there are better ways of doing it. A content management system is a framework for building web sites that allows you to “plug in” different modules. There are modules for blogging, for newsgroups, for a wiki, for document hosting, etc. It lets a tech-savvy person create a site with amazing functionality with little or no effort.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re not seeing it here in the US, but a big chunk of the Internet in the middle-east is down now:

A submarine cable in the Middle East has been snapped, adding to global net problems caused by breaks in two lines under the Mediterranean on Wednesday. The Falcon cable, owned by a firm that operates one of the previously damaged cables, was snapped on Friday morning.

The cause of the latest break has not been confirmed but a repair ship has been deployed, said owner Flag Telecom. Following the earlier break internet services were severely disrupted in Egypt, the Middle East and India. There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide internet network in Egypt on Wednesday, while India suffered up to 60% disruption.

The Wall Street & Technology blog notes that this is testing the fail-over and backup capabilities of numerous large Wall Street firms:

Read the rest of this entry »

Joel Bruckenstein throws out several predictions for 2008 in a series of articles on Morningstar Advisor called Technology for 2008: Part One, and Part Two. Joel tracks the wealth management industry and reports mainly on technology.

Article highlights include:

• Document Management (yawn)
• Document Authentication (yawn)
• Online Statements (interesting)
• Integration (interesting)
• Rebalancing Software (interesting)
• Retirement Income Planning Software (yawn)
• Vista Takes Off (inevitable)
• Office 2007 Will Become The Industry Standard (inevitable)
• Smaller Advisors Will Embrace Apple (interesting)
• Technology Vendors Will Emphasize ROI (zzz…)

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week was our week for updates. We moved the blog to a new server, updated to the latest version of WordPress and were down for at least a day. In fact, this post serves as our final test that everything’s up and running again.

You can watch the action today:

My no compete agreement just expired. This should be a fun year.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I hope everybody had a nice break and is looking forward to the New Year.