Investment & Finance Thread (week Aug. 10 - Aug. 16 edition)

No matter how you look at it this is truly an amazing world we live in if everyone has more information than any time in recorded history and the only thing that's for sure is (like Sam Goldwyn said): "nobody knows nothing!"

What we got is that 2014 started out great for gold and the blahs for stocks, then the other way around w/ stocks powering up, and now we're back w/ metals out-shining stocks again.    In fact, right now the Russell 2000 (favoring small stocks) even shows the infamous 'death cross' w/ the 50 day moving average punching down thru the 200 DMA.  Small caps aside though, there's lots going on here and our multiple hand economist can't stop saying "...on the other hand..."

So it sure seems that we're in an environment where a lot of careful picking and choosing is in order, and for that there's this super neat market heat map from WSJ Market Watch.

What looks like an aerial view of Chicago suburbia is really a graphic of the dominant publicly traded corps by sector and mouse-over's are richly rewarded w/ loads of more individual stock info.

btw, Goldwyn went from being a penniless Warsaw refugee to become the archtype fabulously wealthy Hollywood mogul.