Being Street Smart Sy Harding Is the Stock Market Saying the Economy Will Remain Strong? February 26, 2010. Last summer, worries that the serious global recession was going to wind up in a global depression were replaced with confidence the recession would soon end. Global stimulus efforts began to work. Plunging home sales reversed to monthly sales gains. Job losses that had been exceeding 500,000 a month improved to only 150,000 jobs being lost monthly. Home prices began to improve. Consumer confidence began to rise. The steep decline in corporate earnings slowed its pace significantly. You can usually depend on the stock market to provide advance notice regarding what’s going to happen in the economy. It usually tops out when everything is still looking great, and its corrections and bear markets usually end when everything is looking pretty terrible and scary. And sure enough, the oversold stock market had taken off on a tear…

The Oldest Market Here in the U.S. it began more than 150 years ago at the Chicago Board of Trade with the first agricultural futures contract. In 1982 options on futures was introduced, and in the 1990′s exchanges introduced electronic trading. Futures trading is now a 24 hour, seven days a week enterprise, and undoubtedly the main reason you are researching it.� Like all financial instruments, the futures market is highly regulated, but not by the SEC. From crops such as corn or wheat, to oil, gold, and currency, commodities get traded on the futures market. Rice was undoubtedly the very first commodity traded at the original market of the Chinese. The SEC administers and enforces the federal laws that govern the sale and trading of securities, such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, but they do not regulate futures trading. The federal agency that does regulate futures trading is the…

This week, after a long battle with the SEC, former American Stock Exchange chairman and chief executive Salvatore F. Sodano consented to SEC findings that he failed to supervise the exchange’s oversight of its order-handling and record-keeping rules from 1999 through June 2004. Mr. Sodano, 54, was not fined, nor did he admit to any wrongdoing. The Securities and Exchange Commission case, which dates from March 2007, revealed a surprising oddity in securities law: The only punishment the SEC can bring against an allegedly wayward officer or director of a self-regulatory organization is removal from office or a censure. What’s more, as became apparent in the Sodano case, the SEC apparently can’t take any action at all against a former SRO official. In August 2007, an SEC administrative law judge ruled that the SEC had authority only over current SRO officials. “By omitting reference to former officers or directors, in…

The Labor Department today released proposed regulations that prohibit financial advisers giving advice to 401(k) plans, or their employer or the employer’s affiliates, from receiving extra compensation because the plan sponsors bought a product recommended by the adviser. “They can’t take advantage of the exemption if anyone in that chain gets compensated from the advice provided,” Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis Borzi said today in a conference call discussing the proposed rules. The proposed regulations will make it more difficult for advisers affiliated with broker-dealers and insurance companies to provide advice to plan participants, industry observers said. The rules also may pose huge challenges for actively managed funds in the retirement space. Many advisers had hoped that affiliates of the adviser’s employer would be exempt from the rules. “We are disappointed the Department of Labor decided to move in this direction after…

New annualized premiums for individual-life-insurance policies were down in the fourth quarter and for the full year of 2009, with the most dramatic declines hitting variable universal life, according to LIMRA. Total new annualized premiums fell by 5% in the fourth quarter of last year from the 2008 period, helping drag full-year sales down by 16%, according to LIMRA. Though the results for the final quarter of the year are negative, they’re a marked improvement from the first half of the year, according to Ashley Durham, senior analyst for product research at LIMRA. Indeed, new premiums declined by 26% in the first quarter of 2009 and 21% in the second. In fact, variable universal life experienced a massive decline in annualized premiums during the fourth quarter, falling by more than a third. All told, variable universal life ended the year with premiums down by nearly half. Universal life experienced…