market news and articles @ firstadopter.com

DealBook looks at the backgrounds of the 5 insider trading defendants. Link

Chanos says China’s real estate bubble keeps on going for now. Link

MEE ICO – Massey Energy considering buying International Coal. Link

Investor sentiment most bullish now since 2007. Link

V MA – Fed proposes fee cuts in debit card business to 12c per transaction. Link

David Einhorn sure doesn’t like the Euro. Link

ERTS – Early impressions of Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO. Link

JOE – David Einhorn says financing a buyout of St. Joe would be difficult because of the lack of cash flow. Link

CFTC news on position size limits for futures. Link

ECB increasing its capital to 10.76B euros from 5.76B euros.

Facebook valuation on SecondMarket is $55 billion now. Link

Jobless claims 420K vs. 420K est., prior revised to 423K vs. 421K

Housing starts 555K vs. 550K est.

ECB has already lost $5B euros on their sovereign bond purchases. Link

Twitter gets a $200 million investment at a $3.7 billion valuation. Link

Estimated outflows of $3.25 billion in U.S. mutual funds last week. Link

GOOG – Walt Mossberg reviews Google Chrome laptop. Link

Bloomberg reports that Facebook will hit $2 billion in revenue this year. Link

MSFT – Microsoft says Bing has 90 million users and has grown 50% in 18 months. Link

John Paulson starts UCITS share class hedge-fund. Link

BP – Obama administration will sue BP for the oil spill. Link

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is Time’s person of the year. Link

Senate passed $858B tax cut bill 81-19.

November industrial production 0.4% vs. 0.3% est.

November CPI 0.1% vs. 0.2% est. Ex-food energy 0.1% vs. 0.1% est.

December NY Empire State survey 10.57 vs. 5.0 est.

Moody’s puts Spain on downgrade watch. Link

China is looking to add more tariffs on 10 rare earth minerals. Link

U.S. Energy Department says economy at risk due to rare earth shortages. Link

AAPL – The U.S. Army is considering equipping all soldiers with an iPhone. Link

YHOO – Yahoo will cut 4% of its staff. Link

Court rules that email is protected by the 4th amendment. Link

BIDU NVDA – Baidu and Netflix are driving tech fund performance. Link

NVDA – Citigroup is bullish on Nvidia even though it might lose some Apple business. Link

INTC – JP Morgan says Intel is going to miss Q4 numbers. Link

PPI 0.8% vs. 0.7% est. Ex-food and energy 0.3% vs. 0.3%

Retail sales 0.8% vs. 0.6% est. Ex-auto 1.2% vs. 0.7%

ECB may ask for more capital to protect against bond purchase losses. Link

AMZN – Amazon has sold over 2 million Kindles in the first 73 days of the holiday quarter. Link

YHOO – Yahoo may fire 5% of its work-force. Link

HPQ AAPL DELL – According to NPD U.S. PC sales were down 6% in November. Apple +19%, Toshiba +22%, Dell +5%, and HP -15%. Link

INTC MSFT AAPL – Goldman Sachs says tables will take huge share from PCs. Link

RIMM – Post analyzing Research in Motion. Link

John Arnold is not up 100% this year. He’s down 2.7% YTD with $5B in assets. Link

Ton Hsieh on walking away from money at Microsoft. Link

Poor videogame sales hurt ToysRUs. Link

Lachman on the Euro. Link

DELL CML – Dell buys Compellent for $27.75/share in cash. Link

SNDK – Flash memory prices are up 3-4% after the Toshiba fab power outage. Link

NFLX – CEO of Time Warner bashes Netflix in the NYTimes. Link

Soros warns of dictatorial democracy. Link

Nobel Prizing winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says QE2 will lead to emerging market asset bubbles. Link

AAPL RSH – Radio Shack sells out of iPhones due to their $50 discount. Link

Impressive Charlie Rose interview of Andrew Mason, CEO of Groupon. Link

ATVI – Michael Pachter says Black Ops will out-sell Modern Warfare 2 by a large margin. Link

GAP – Bloomberg reporting Great Altantic & Pacific Tea Co. may file for bankruptcy this weekend according to their sources. Link

University of Michigan sentiment for December 74.2 vs. 72 estimate and 71.6 prior

October trade deficit fell more than expected. Link

China raises the bank reserve requirement ratio 50bps to 18.5%. Link

GOOG – Engadget previews Google’s Cr-48 Chrome laptop. Link

Pimco Total Return Fund having a tough time of late. Link

U.S. November console software sales were up 4% y/y. Link

NFLX FFIV NFX – Netflix, F5 Networks, and Newfield Exploration will be added to the SP500 on the close of trading December 17th. New York Times, Office Depot, and Eastman Kodak will be taken out. Link

NFLX – Netflix CFO explains why he is leaving. Link

Daytrading firms open offices in China to trade U.S. markets. Link

SNDK – Power outage causes big problems at Toshiba flash memory plant. Link

Commodore Amiga emulator demonstrated on iPhone and iPod Touches. Link

SIRI – Howard Stern will stay with Sirius for another 5 years. Link

DELL CML – Dell is in talks to buy Compellant Technologies for 27.50 a share. Link

Jobless claims 421K vs. 425K estimate, prior revised to 438K from 436K

NVDA AAPL INTC AMD – CNET reports Apple will switch from Nvidia graphics chips to Intel and AMD solutions in 2011 for its laptops. Link

Reuters video interview with Jim Rogers. Link

RIMM – Research in Motion co-CEO says Playbook on track for a Q1 launch. Link

CRM – Salesforce.com buys Heroku, a Ruby language developer, for $221M of stock. Link

ERTS – EA says they don’t need 1 million subscribers to make their Star Wars MMO profitable. Link

NFLX – Netflix Disney deal worth $200 million according to a source. Link

SNE – Reports that PSP2′s graphics will be as powerful as PS3. Link

NFLX DIS – Netflix and Disney sign new TV show streaming deal. Link

MBI – Einhorn bashes MBIA. Link

PFE – Einhorn thinks Pfizer is undervalued. Link

FO – Fortune Brands to split into 3 companies. Link

Jon Stewart catches Bernanke lying and contradicting himself on “printing money” 60 minutes comments. Link

Charlie Rose interview with David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital. Link

GOOG – Google reveals 12.11 laptop that runs Chrome OS. Link

NFLX – The CFO of Netflix has resigned. Link

The 2% payroll tax cut next year will provide $120B of new stimulus to the economy. Link

EU decides not to increase bailout fund at this juncture. Link

JPM – JP Morgan bought over $1B of copper. Link

C – The U.S. government was able to sell its remaining 2.4 billion shares of Citigroup at $4.35. Link

AAPL – Digitimes is reporting iPad 2 will ship at the end of February 2011. Link

AMZN – Amazon demonstrates a new Kindle for the Web. Link

MCP – Sumitomo is talking to Molycorp for a rare earth supply deal that may lead to a stake in the company. Link

Obama backs down and agrees to 2 year Bush tax cut extension. Link

Fed president Jeff Lacker says Fed policy is risky. Link

Department of Justice announces the results of their Operation Broken Trust probe against investment fraud. Link

Chinese Communist leader admits that GDP statistics are unreliable. He uses electricity consumption, rail cargo volumes, and loan amounts as better economic proxies. Link

RVBD RDWR – Globes says Riverbed is looking at Radware. Link

GOOG – Google is opening their e-book store today. Link

Carlyle plans to file for IPO in 2011. Link

More people are “cutting the cord” and going to rabbit ear TV antennas. Link

David Einhorn says as long as monetary policy is bad, he expects gold to trade higher from these levels.

John Kinnucan gets a subpoena for emails, financial and trading records, client contracts, credit card statements, phone bills, and other documents for the past 2 years. Link

Fed is creating an asset bubble says billionaire investor Wilbur Ross. Link

Angela Merkel threatened to leave the Euro. Link

Dot.com Bubble 2.0? Link

China’s leaders also say they plan on more prudent monetary policy in 2011. Link

Twitter is considering a funding round at a $3 billion valuation. Link

October factory orders -0.9% vs. -0.8% est.

ISM services 55.0 vs. 55.0 est. and 54.3 prior

THQI – THQ CEO says uDraw sell through is very good. Link

NFLX – According to the New York Post Netflix is offering studios $70-100K per episode to get access to current episodes of prime-time shows. Link

November unemployment rate 9.8% vs. 9.7% est.

November non farm payrolls 39K vs. 168K est.

November non farm private 50K vs. 140K est.

November hourly earnings 0.0% vs. 0.2% est.

November average work week 34.3 vs. 34.3 est.