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.

Stimulus checks helped send retail sales up 1% in May, the Commerce Department said yesterday (Thursday), bolstering the dollar and lifted the mood on Wall Street.

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

As recently as a month ago, Erin Callan was on top of the world. The WSJ did a glowing piece on her rise through the ranks. Condé Nast’s Portfolio magazine dubbed her the most powerful woman on Wall Street.

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.”

It’s only the fifth day in June, but already investors are getting nervous about end of quarter earnings reports. There’s still almost a month to go before most public companies close out their books for the second-quarter, ending June 30.

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.”

The trouble with getting older…Big Ben expresses himself…Globalization is no longer a force for good – but a force for evil…the Bear Stearns domino effect…End of the road for Hilary…a new hotline service – made just for central bankers…and more!

“When I use a word” said Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass,” “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” It has always been the ambition of Wall Street to bring its financial statements under a similar type of discipline.

A surprise to few, luxury homebuilder Toll Brothers Inc. (TOL) posted its second consecutive quarterly net loss today (Tuesday), though the results were better than Wall Street expected.