“Sagging fortunes.” Can’t get away from that catch-phrase these days. It’s a favorite of both sports and finance writers alike as in…The sagging fortunes of the Seattle Mariners (in baseball) and Roger Federer (in tennis). Or as in…

With the market the way it is today, you can’t help but look for an investment, any investment, that might react differently than everything else. These kind of investments are “non-correlated” because they move independently of the overall market. But they can be tricky to locate, and even harder to trust.

I’ve been bearish on oil refiners for nine months…

Home prices in Manhattan have remained largely immune from the housing crisis gripping the US… until now.

According to Reuters, the New York real-estate market is showing a significant reduction in new deals as Wall Street sheds staff to reduce costs.

“For the most part, the subprime crisis is past its inflection point,” says Eric Roseman in the Offshore A-Letter. “What matters now is how and when other credit indicators normalize.”

Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has rattled Wall Street by downgrading investment banks Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley.

S&P’s said the “outlooks on the large financial institutions sector in the U.S. are now predominantly negative” and that “the pace and extent of earnings improvement could be considerably more muted than we previously anticipated.”