This coming week will be an important one for the stock market.  With some analysts calling the recent month long up trend a bottom, investors will be closely watching earnings reports from US companies releasing this week.

Everyone knows that the Q1 2009 news will be bad and that companies probably continue to lose money even today, but the focus will be on what the companies say about the future. Company projections for the rest of the year will determine if Wall Street has been right in predicting an economic turn around and the end of the recession or if the latest rally was nothing more than bottom fishing followed by overly optimistic traders hoping to get in early on the next big up move.

Start your trading machines and keep an eye on the charts because the ride could get bumpy.

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I laughed so hard I ended up crying. The [tag]SEC[/tag] is concerned that the prospectuses that mutual fund companies send to their clients are too big and full of legal mumbo jumbo to be useful to the general public. How many of you think that mutual fund companies WILLINGLY CHOOSE to spend the money to develop, write, print, and mail a 38-page book to your house, not just once, but every single year you own the fund?

Mutual fund companies are jointly regulated by the SEC and the [tag]NASD[/tag] (now FINRA). Guess who writes and enforces the various rules that REQUIRE the [tag]mutual fund[/tag] companies to have those huge prospectuses? Guess who writes and enforces the rules that REQUIRE specific information to be included in every one of those prospectuses? Guess who is responsible for the the huge incomprehensible [tag]prospectus[/tag]?

This is like Britney Spears shaving her head, partying all night with Paris Hilton, quitting re-hab, and flashing her panties to the whole world, and then announcing that she doesn’t think young women in America have enough of the right kind of role models and she is going to do something about it!

If you can stop yourself from laughing long enough there is a place for you to comment on the matter buried on the SEC.gov web site. I’d link it, but can’t justify wasting the time when a matter like this will end up being written by the lobbyists and the Senators and Congressmen they own. By the time both sides negotiate out anything too controversial, whatever the new thing is will be equally worthless, though maybe shorter.

If you are serious about understanding your mutual funds, then reading the full prospectus is the only way to go. Yes, there is a lot of jargon and legalese in there but if you sat down and actually read it, you could figure it out.