–We’re now into December. Portfolio managers whose accounting year ends this month will be getting the first polite nudges from their bosses to get ready to shut down trading activity, so that accountants can get a jump on preparing the annual statements. Mutual funds, an apparently dying breed, will have gotten the same message in October. Except when they are just below, but still flirting with, performance goals that determine their bonuses, the pms I’ve known have been perfectly willing to close down aggressive bets, look more like their target index, enjoy the holidays, and prepare for the grind to start again on January 1st.

Because of this, typically December is a quiet month. On the other hand, October has historically been the time for a US stock market selloff …which may have happened in November this year instead. So who knows.

–I was reading an article this morning that pointed out it was using insights from Henry Blodget to buttress the case being made. Odd, I thought. The piece did mention that Mr. Blodget has been banned from the securities business, but didn’t elaborate. During the Y2K +early internet boom of 1999, as I recall, Mary Meeker, then of Morgan Stanley, and Henry Blodget of Merrill Lynch were the two superstar, most influential brokerage house analysts. Both made an exceptionally bullish case for internet-related stocks. Steep declines in many of these names in 2000, however, led the authorities to take a second look at the research they’d written. Yes, both were flat out, face plantingly wrong. But, luckily for any participant in financial markets, that’s a fact of life and not in itself a crime. In the case of Mr. Blodget, however, SEC investigators concluded that he had issued fraudulent research, as well as research that was inconsistent with his privately expressed negative views. To settle charges, he agreed to be censured, barred from the securities business for life, and pay a $4 million fine.

I imagine Blodget has insights no one else has, though.