Trader Mark submits:I wonder if this represents a "new attitude" towards debt OR the fact that so many Americans are now underwater they no longer can do cash out refinancing to support their spending habits. Gun to head, I think it's a little of both. Whatever the reason, this is a long term positive but a near term blow to consumeri

Hickey and Walters (Bespoke) submit: Yesterday we highlighted the percentage of companies that have beaten earnings estimates this reporting period. Below we break down the beat rate by sector. Four sectors have a higher beat rate than the entire market, while six have a lower beat rate. The Consumer Discretionary sector has the highest

Facebook today announced the launch of a new project called Questions. It's still in beta, and will only be available to about 1% of Facebook users at first. But it puts Facebook into yet another competitive arena against Google and other companies that are trying to cash-in on the Q&A.Google's total dominance over the keyword-based search mark

The closer marijuana comes to full legalization status in California, the more likely it is that the plant will be treated like any other crop--that is, as an industrial cash cow that often squeezes out small farmers. And the marijuana industrialization process is, in fact, already beginning. Oakland, California, became the first city this week to

Trader Mark submits:Stop me if you've heard this one before: an American company has booming revenue in Asia while domestic operations report yet another quarter of "meh" (aka the 17th month in a row of "green shoots"). Las Vegas Sands (LVS) is yet another one, as we saw in Wednesday morning's report (full report here). The sto

Lots of code excitement will spring from the Black Hat hacker conference this week, but already a huge controversy is erupting: Black Hat's founder thinks SSL--the security code making much of online commerce safe--is broken.SSL, Secure Sockets Layer (and its successor Transport Layer Security) is a Net-based security protocol that ensures communic

ChinaBio Today submits: Radient Pharmaceuticals Corporation (AMEX: RPC) announced a new plan to sell its China subsidiary, Jade Pharmaceuticals Inc. Jade has signed a letter of intent to merge with Shanxi BaoTai Pharmaceutical Co., a privately owned company located in Taiyuan China. When the transaction is closed, Jade plans to merge the combined