6 Free Financial Modeling Lessons...and More.

I haven’t watched a non-007 movie in almost a year, and over the weekend I finally broke that streak by watching “Dirty Harry” and “Magnum Force.”

Needless to say, the movies had an effect other than making me wish that I was a cop working in 1970s San Francisco. Dirty Harry extols the virtue of playing by your own rules, even if it means clashing with your superiors (granted, Detective Callahan’s boss was a crook too, so that makes it a bit easier). As Dirty Harry says many times, “a man’s got to know his limitations.”

But limitations are exactly what most of our educational backgrounds seem to be forcing on us, as James Altucher writes in this old blog post of his: http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/03/unschool-your...

It's been a rough couple of weeks for Stevie Cohen and his crew, and the situation is growing more "fluid" with each passing day. I kinda kept one eye on it all weekend after the somewhat cryptic announcement on Friday that SAC would no longer be "fully" cooperating with the government's investigation into insider trading at the fund.

Then came the announcement that Cohen himself had been subpoenaed, and the previous announcement was interpreted to mean that he planned to take the Fifth rather than testify before a grand jury.

Now the rumor is that Cohen may be cutting a deal with the feds that would close the fund to outside investors altogether. This deal would include an admission of guilt on the part of SAC in exchange for deferred prosecution (meaning no criminal liability unless the firm were to break the law again).

Stock Market Analysis

Conclusions: The Dow and the S&P 500 hit new record highs last week. The Dow surged 1.6% while the S&P jumped 2%. The excitement extended to small cap stocks as well. In spite of the big jump in the indexes, only 19 stocks advanced for every 13 stocks that fell, however, 914 stocks hit new highs and only 74 hit new lows. In the words of Phil Robertson, everybody (but the bears) was “Happy, happy, happy.”