Recently, my colleague Marc Lichtenfeld and I took a collective pop at some lazy journalists and other media cheerleaders. Their crime? Whipping the investment community into false optimism through misleading headlines regarding earnings announcements.

Break out the tissues, folks… Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner can’t sell his house.

Beware of dodgy headlines. Beware of soft estimates.  As earnings season forges onward, nervous investors are latching onto any morsel of good news they can find – even if it’s artificial.

There has been an incredible amount of interest from Lee Lowell’s put option strategy article from the last two weeks – and his unbroken winning streak in his Instant Money Trader premium service. But we’ve also seen a few questions pop up as well. So today we turn to Contributing Editor, Martin Denholm, to break down Lee’s strategy on selling put options a little more.

Keep an eye on the Chinese and Brazilian stock markets on Monday.

I never thought an 18.6% decline could actually represent good news. But in an example of how desperate we’ve become for it – particularly concerning the U.S. housing market – many have jumped on the fact that it was the first time in 16 months that U.S. home prices didn’t drop by a new record. Wow… where’s that champagne? 

Tuesday afternoon’s closing bell on Wall Street didn’t just signal the end of the trading day. It also rang in the start of first-quarter earnings season.

We’ve received some questions recently, asking for more details on one of the most effective and profitable investment strategies that you can use in a market like this. It’s called put option selling.

If only China had someone like St. Patrick.  As I scanned the post-Paddy’s Day headlines, it occurred to me that China needs its own saint to drive some snakes out of its economy.