BIL — SPDR Lehman 1-3 Month T-Bill ETF.

BND — Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF.

CUT — Claymore / Clear Global Timber ETF. You wanna CUT down a tree?

GLD — Gold ETF streetTRACKS Gold Shares.

KOL — Coal ETF.

LQD — iShares iBoxx Invest Grade Corp Bond ETF. Need LQUIDITY?

SLV — Silver Trust ETF.

And the best one for the end :

MOO — Agribusiness ETF. Got Milk?

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In the 4th century church officials decided to institute the birth of Jesus as a holiday. Since the date of His birth is not pinpointed in the Bible, Pope Julius I chose December 25th.

When Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan forces took over England in 1645, they owed to rid England of decadence and as part of their effort cancelled Christmas.

King Charles II was restored to the throne and with him came the return of the popular holiday.

The pilgrims – English separatists that came to America in 1620 – were even more orthodox in their Puritan beliefs than Cromwell. As a result, Christmas was not a holiday in early America. From 1659 to 1681, the celebration of Christmas was actually outlawed in Boston. Anyone exhibiting the Christmas spirit was fined five shillings.

By contrast in the Jamestown settlement, Captain John Smith reported that Christmas was enjoyed by all and passed without incident.

After the American Revolution, English customs including Christmas – fell out of favor. In fact on Dec. 25, 1789 – the first Christmas under America’s new constitution – Congress was in session.

Christmas was not declared a Federal Holiday until June 26, 1870.

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays to All.

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Can someone please help the state of California find Steve Jobs?

State Controller John Chiang is holding $443.81 in insurance payments and other funds that belong to the Apple chieftain – plus three shares of IBM and one share of Time Warner in his name.

The state has addresses for Jobs in Palo Alto and Woodside. Yet California still can’t manage to reunite him with his money.

It might help if the controller’s office could locate Apple, which is also owed money. It can’t. Maybe that Infinite Loop address in Cupertino throws the state computers into a tizzy.

Except California can’t find Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Cisco Systems or Seagate Technology, either. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Yahoo Chairman Terry Semel, former investment banker Frank Quattrone and Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison are also apparently untraceable. The state is holding money for all of them.

Apparently these entities / people are owed money by the state but the main reason ‘the owners stay “lost” is that until summer this year, a lot of California leaders didn’t really want to give the money back. As long as the rightful owners couldn’t be found, the state got to spend their money.’

However, in the state’s defense, the companies that were originally supposed to pay out this money did a pretty lousy job finding the owners, too.

Cisco couldn’t find its recently retired chairman, John Morgridge, to repay him $136.90. (Cisco said it will now help Morgridge file the paperwork with the state to get his money back.) FedEx, which owes Cisco money, couldn’t find the company’s North San Jose headquarters, which sort of makes you worry about any packages you send there. In all, Cisco headquarters is owed more than $160,000 by various vendors.

And remember that money the state owes Steve Jobs? $37.91 of it came from Apple, which somehow couldn’t deliver a simple check to its CEO. Maybe he was too busy inventing stuff to check his snail mail. (Apple had no comment.)

HERE’s the link to the article. And this LINK lets you check if the State of California owes you money.

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Consider the following promotion from Firstrade:

Here’s how the “faint” print (that appears on the same page) looks like:

The print is so faint that it actually is very straining to read. It is as if Firstrade is telling you not to bother reading.

The fine print on Wells Fargo’s checking account sign-up page is smaller but looks to me a bit easier to read since the print is darker:

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Macquarie Bank says parking lots and roadways are potentially as valuable as oil pipelines or electric companies. It views a private parking lot, for example, as operating much like a utility: throwing off lots of cash, increasing its rates as the economy grows and often chugging along with little direct competition.

…

Macquarie executives say infrastructure is a new asset class, deserving a place in investors’ portfolios alongside the usual stocks, bonds, cash and real estate. According to this line of thinking, the durability and stability of the assets protect against the zigzags of stocks and bonds. In other words, London Bridge may fall down, but only long after Enron has crashed. Infrastructure can help to hedge a portfolio against inflation, said Martin A. Jaugietis, a senior consultant in the asset consulting group at Towers Perrin. “When prices rise, infrastructure assets tend to be able to increase prices in concert,” he said. “The cash flows are similar to the rent you’d get from a building.”

Macquarie has two closed-end funds that invests in this area: Macquarie Global Infrastructure Total Return and Macquarie/First Trust Global Infrastructure / Utilities Dividend & Income.

PS. I wouldn’t bet my farm on these funds.

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• Kiplinger’s Personal Finance: Make your money last forever

• Money : How to make your money last a lifetime

• SmartMoney : How to make your money last forever

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It’s the PhD thesis that boldly goes where no thesis has gone before. Djoymi Baker watched 700 episodes – 624 hours without ads – of Star Trek and its spin-offs, dating from 1966 to 2005, in the name of research.

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The anonymous phone message, left with a staff lawyer for New York Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer, touched off an intense investigation of the mutual fund industry in the summer of 2003. Spitzer, the ambitious prosecutor who had just nailed Wall Street investment banks for sending out biased stock research to investors, was looking for a new target. The $7 trillion mutual fund industry, which had been largely scandal-free for decades, was ripe for exploration, especially given the fees they charge investors for handling their money.

A very interesting read in the Washington Post on how a tipster set the fund scandal snowballing: Tipster set fund scandal snowballing.

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The website www.coinflation.com gave some interesting information for this trend. According to the website, the quarter issued from 1932 to 1964 is now worth $2.63, more than 10 times its nominal value. More recently, the 1959-1982 one-cent coin is worth about two cents at today’s copper prices. I guess people might start to horde the more valuable coins if metal prices continue to rise.

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1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

2) If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half the lake?

Each question has an intuitive — but wrong — answer. See if you are ‘tricked’ by your intuition.

PS. The answers are given in the Comments.

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