USA Today - Technically, a bear market is when stocks fall 20% or more from their highs. But there’s a saying that a bear’s true signature is making a fool out of everyone. Based on that, we’re all laughingstocks, because there has been virtually no way to avoid this bear market’s claws.
Following a 445-point slide […]

Bloomberg - Gold fell for the fourth straight session after the U.S. agreed to spend $250 billion to rescue ailing banks. Silver climbed.
Stocks in Europe and Asia rose for a second day after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced plans to buy stakes in financial firms to ease the lending crisis. Gold fell 1.9 percent yesterday […]

The Times of Trenton - Stocks prices fell sharply again yesterday, ending the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index below 1,000 for the first time since 2003 on speculation banks and real-estate companies are running short of money as the credit crisis worsens.
Bank of America tumbled 26 percent after cutting its dividend in half […]

BusinessWeek - What did investors do when the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 777.68 points, or 7%, on Sept. 29, to 10,365.45? Head for the nearest bar for a double? Or rush to double up, or down, on their stocks?
Either way, the Dow’s sharp response to the unexpected rejection by the House of […]

KTAK - U.S. lawmakers and President George W. Bush eased pressure on financial markets on Tuesday by starting work to revive a $700 billion bailout plan to stem a credit crisis that has spread beyond Wall Street to claim more European banks.
U.S. stocks roared back — a day after their worst sell-off in 21 years […]

New York (HedgeCo.Net) - Fortress Investment Group, who oversees more than $18 billion in assets, is starting a new hedge fund that will invest in markets throughout the Middle East and North Africa. 
The new fund, Fortress MENA, is set to launch near the end of September and seeks returns of 20 percent annually, according […]

Hedge funds reduced their bets in the past year that U.S. stocks would gain as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index declined and credit conditions tightened, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said.
Such wagers accounted for 32 percent of funds’ equity investments as of June 30, compared with 45 percent a year earlier, analysts led by David […]

Bloomberg - Hedge funds turned in their worst first-half performance in almost two decades as the collapse of subprime-mortgage bonds and rising commodity prices pushed stocks to the brink of a bear market.
Hedge funds declined by an average 0.7 percent in June, bringing the year-to-date loss to 0.75 percent, data compiled by Hedge Fund Research […]

Los Angeles Times - The hedge fund industry can only exist because investors believe their fund managers will deliver above-average returns over time, despite the portfolios’ hefty fees.
Master investor Warren Buffett, who has long derided those fees, now has made an interesting bet with a firm that runs so-called funds-of-hedge-funds: He’ll beat their net returns […]

Chicago Tribune- Maybe plain-vanilla stock and bond mutual funds will do the job after all.
Long-short funds — the newfangled mutual funds designed to give common investors a hedge fund experience and protection during downturns — recently went through one of their first major tests. And they flopped.
In July and August, with investors concerned over subprime […]