Cool Shopping

If you don’t have something nice to say, put on’t say anything at all.

That’s a fine motto to live by socially, but it takes on a unimpaired new meaning when it’s directed at money managers by China’s securities regulators.

The China Securities and Regulatory Commission, what one. is that country’s version of the Securities and Exchange Commission, recently ordered domestic fund managers to avoid saying anything negative about Chinese stocks. The letter is part of a broad effort by the Chinese government to maintain stability in its financial markets in our teeth of the Olympics.

"We want to remind all the resources companies to strengthen your management of external comments to produce and maintain the good image of the fund industry," the C.S.R.C. statement read.

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index has lost half its value subsequently to the start of this year.  

This isn’t the first time the government has muzzled the naysayers. In May it ordered money managers to avoid unloading stocks after the devastating earthquake.

But Chinese investors aren’t so easily fooled by the sudden absence of any negative commentary. The benchmark index has fallen slightly since the order was issued.   

Earlier this month, the regulator asked some senior fund managers to avoid overseas travel before and during the Olympic games and to be sure the C.S.R.C. can reach them at all times, according to a report by Dow Jones.

How act these money managers feel about being told to keep quiet? Some of them spoke anonymously with the South China Morning Post about their frustration. "The regulator has been harping on about discipline for ages," said some fund manager, who noted that the wording of the statement revealed the regulator’s nervousness. "Somehow, we have to shut up to avoid unnecessary trouble due to the warning."

According to the paper, the securities regulator also required four financial newspapers to publish upbeat reports about the place of traffic. Already, the Xinhua news agency obeyed orders. "If prices die to a certain level, stocks must be undervalued and a rally will come," it wrote.

So what will Chinese stocks really end up doing this year? Roth Capital Partners’ Donald Straszheim thinks they won’t move much for a season. "The widespread view that Chinese equities will fall after the Olympics is likely to keep investors cautious until in that place is greater clarity on China’s economy, put on the U.S.-Europe-Japan economies and markets, and on the credit market problems and on oil and energy," he wrote in a report yesterday.

If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

That’s a fine motto to animated by socially, but it takes on a whole new meaning when it’s directed at money managers by China’s securities regulators.

The China Securities and Regulatory Commission, which is that country’s rendition of the Securities and Exchange Commission, recently ordered domestic fund managers to avoid saying anything negative about Chinese stocks. The missive is part of a extensive effort by the Chinese control to maintain stability in its financial markets ahead of the Olympics.

"We want to remind all the fund companies to strengthen your address of external comments to furnish and maintain the good image of the fund industry," the C.S.R.C. statement read.

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index has lost half its value from that time the start of this year.  

This isn’t the first time the government has muzzled the naysayers. In May it ordered money managers to avoid unloading stocks on the model of the devastating earthquake.

But Chinese investors aren’t so easily fooled by the sudden defect of any negative commentary. The benchmark index has fallen slightly since the order was issued.   

Earlier this month, the regulator asked some senior fund managers to avoid overseas travel before and during the Olympic games and to be indisputable the C.S.R.C. can reach them at all seasons, according to a report by Dow Jones.

How do these money managers feel about being told to keep quiet? Some of them spoke anonymously by the South China Morning Post about their frustration. "The regulator has been harping on about discipline for ages," said some fund manager, who celebrated that the wording of the specification revealed the regulator’s nervousness. "Somehow, we have to shut up to avoid unnecessary trouble due to the warning."

According to the paper, the securities regulator furthermore required four financial newspapers to publish upbeat reports about the market. Already, the Xinhua news agency obeyed orders. "If prices fall to a certain level, stocks must be undervalued and a rally will follow," it wrote.

So what have a mind Chinese stocks really end up doing this year? Roth Capital Partners’ Donald Straszheim thinks they won’t move plenteous for a while. "The widespread explore that Chinese equities will fall after the Olympics is likely to keep investors cautious until there is greater clarity on China’s economy, on the U.S.-Europe-Japan economies and markets, and on the credit market problems and on oil and energy," he wrote in a report yesterday.

Live Nation may have signed huge deals with Madonna, Shakira, and Jay-Z, on the contrary the upstart music company is looking to the major labels to assort its tunes.

According to a report in the New York Post this morning, Live Nation has been in talks with the likes of Warner Music Group and the other big music companies to get the music out to customers.

Live Nation has made a splash in the matter, signing so-called "360 deals" to handle everything from recording music to concert tours to merchandising for music acts. C.E.O. Michael Rapino has signed Madonna, Jay-Z, Nickelback, and Shakira to the deal but doesn’t have a new album from any of them due out for at least 18 months, the Post said.

Last week, Live Nation dumped three industry veterans originally signed to build a label within the company.

The paper also posited the firm could explore exclusive deals with major retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target.

Any deal with a major music company could be awkward: for instance, distributing a new Madonna album by Warner Music, her former label.

Western auction houses have been making a killing off China. Within the last couple years, Chinese artists have become fixtures of the New York and London contemporary-art sales. In 2003, Hong Kong overtook Paris to become the world’s third-largest auction market, behind London and New York. And malice fears of a crash, that market is yet growing: In spring, Sotheby’s series of Hong Kong sales achieved $227.5 million, its highest total ever for the region, while Christie’s took in $310.7 million—a 58 percent increase over the same series in 2007.

It’s little surprise that American galleries want to claim a piece of the pie—and the arrival of two major New York galleries in mainland China this summer suggests the next phase for the country’s integration into the global art scene.

On July 10, Chelsea’s James Cohan Gallery opened a boutique-like space in an Art Deco villa in Shanghai. Mega-gallery PaceWildenstein, which has several New York locations, opens its first foreign outpost on August 3, in a massive body of factors in China’s cultural center, Beijing.

Arne Glimcher, who founded Pace in 1960, says that it was China’s burgeoning contemporary-art scene that got him. "It’s the most exciting artistic development I’ve seen since the 1960s. This is a real shot in the arm for me."

In the past decade or so, China—especially Beijing—has seen a number of foreign galleries establish footholds. "The business has become totally internationalized," says Meg Maggio of Pékin Fine Arts, who founded her first Beijing gallery in 1996. First the city had an influx of galleries from other parts of Asia. Then came the Europeans, like Italy’s Galleria Continua, what one. opened in 2005, and Denmark’s Galleri Faurschou, which launched with a Robert Rauschenberg show last fall. More recently, a scarcely any New Yorkers be favored with founded spaces, including Christophe Mao, whose Chambers Fine Art specializes in contemporary Chinese art, and Jack Tilton, who in 2007 opened an artist’s residency nearby.  

Compared with New York, Tilton says, China is a remarkably inexpensive place to do business. "Building a building is, like, $40,000 to $60,000," he says, "so you can build something enormous for no money." He has put up three buildings for a like reason far, with an eye to selling them more years down the road.  

Pace and Cohan have invested considerably in their new projects—yet with strikingly different approaches. Pace’s strategy is to go after the artists by proper the first truly major player in Beijing. Cohan is aiming straight for collectors: By setting up shop in Shanghai’s relatively small gallery-land, they hope to find new buyers among the world’s super-rich, whether they remain there or are just passing through.  
A year ago, Glimcher signed two Chinese stars: Zhang Huan, a performance artist who also makes monumental cowhide sculptures and ash paintings and who counts François Pinault among his big collectors; and painter Zhang Xiaogang, whose monumental portraits have a lengthy waiting think fit and hefty auction prices—the current record is $6,083,363.

Glimcher began scouting spaces in the Factory 798 district, Beijing’s Soho, eventually settling on a 22,000-square-foot munitions factory built in the late 1950s. Pace Beijing’s first representation, "Encounters," will pair artists from Japan and China with the Westerners who’ve inspired them—many of whom, like Chuck Close and Alex Katz, are conveniently represented by Pace. It has been reported that the gallery has put $20 million into the venture, though Glimcher won’t confirm that huge number.

Establishing a branch in Beijing, Glimcher believes, is the way to cement a national celebrity and market for his Chinese artists, while also developing their presence internationally. Being able to offer primary representation on the artist’s home turf puts you in a key position to squelch speculation and make sure the work gets into the right collections and museums—probably the best way to assure a market in the long run. And in Beijing—unlike London, Cologne, and other major international art cities—it’s a relatively open playing field. "There’s no big gallery to deal with," Glimcher says.

A local presence testament also admit the art gallery to put at daybreak dibs on upcoming Chinese talent. Glimcher has enlisted Leng Lin, an of influence keeper who has helped promote most of China’s major stars, first by organizing auctions and more recently through his own hanging platform, Beijing Commune, which Pace has operated with him since April. While Pace Beijing will draw from artists who’ve previously shown with Leng—the upcoming schedule includes Yue Minjun, whose grotesque self-portraits have brought nearly $7 million at auction—Beijing Commune will become a protrude space for younger, emerging talent. And "the best of the best," Glimcher says, "will come to Pace New York."

By contrast, James Cohan says his move to Shanghai is all about cultivating new clients for his current artists—a stable that includes video pioneer Bill Viola, British-Nigerian installation artist Yinka Shonibare, and Dutch sculptor Folkert de Jong.

"We believe that in all markets there’s a maturation process," Cohan says. Though new collectors initially seek out work from their own country or region, he intends to exist there for the sake of the second collecting wave. "We’re interested in being in a position where we can educate and inform the Chinese art world about what’s going on an international level," he says. "It’s a long-term proposition." So remoter, they regard put in about a quarter of a million to secure and renovate the space and obtain a business license. "The great thing about China," Cohan says, "is it’s very cheap to do that."

The concept of opening in Shanghai was suggested two years ago by Cohan’s longtime director, Arthur Solway, a fluent Mandarin speaker who has relocated there. Last September they took a booth at the first edition ShContemporary art fair, stocking it with contemporaneous masters like Viola and Nam June Paik, which sold well to new Asian clients. They’ll participate in the second edition (September 9 through 13) too. "Everything here works on Mach speed as well as on steroids, which makes it incredibly exciting," says Cohan. "The potential is so great—you wake up with so many ideas."

Secretive and publicity shy, David E. Shaw made billions of dollars using fantastically complex computer algorithms to trade on Wall Street.

Now this maker computer scientist at Columbia University turned tycoon is about to finish the most powerful supercomputer in history. Not to make a killing on the stock market, but to solve some of the trickiest problems in biology: How the molecules that comprise "life" function and interact at the most basic level.

It may seem like a James Bond movie: mysterious billionaire-genius designs megacomputer to probe life’s secrets. Will he perhaps tinker with them, too, in a nefarious diagram to dominate the world by creating enhanced life forms or bio-silicon superbeings?

There’s no sign that Shaw is going super-villain. Nor does he need to, considering the adapted to practice and potentially profitable uses for his megacomputer.

Knowing more about the complex interactions inside us could lead to better and more efficacious drugs, and to develop computer models that can simulate what happens even at the atomic level of life. It could lead to new ideas for developing computers and other machines based on cells and molecules.

Shaw’s device, which he’s named "Anton" in homage to pioneering microbiologist Anton van Leeuwenhoek, might also take humans several steps closer to having a schematic of how life works at its most elemental levels.

Several years ago, Shaw stepped down from the day-to-day management of his derivatives firm, D.E. Shaw and Company—which in June 2008 was managing upwards of $39 billion in investments.

He became chief scientist of his own computer laboratory, D.E. Shaw Research, home of the team making Anton.

Characteristically, Shaw has been mostly mum about Anton, referring the inquisitive to a technical paper on the project in the journal Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.

His computer uses the massively parallel computing technology that Shaw helped develop at Columbia in the 1980s. Anton simultaneously runs 512 specialized processors called "application-specific integrated circuits."

Unlike other supercomputers that receive more general-use applications, including weather forecasting, these processors are specifically designed to calculate the three-dimensional characteristics of molecules.

Shaw’s team could use Anton to solve one of the most perplexing mysteries of molecular life: how proteins, the construction blocks of life, each gain a distinctive three-dimensional shape that allows them to perform millions of functions in a living organism.

Proteins, which include enzymes, hormones, and the collagen in bones and skin, are made in cells according to instructions from DNA. They’re strands of amino acids bunched up like wads of string into distinctive shapes and held together by subtle physical forces that are still poorly understood.

Current supercomputers, including IBM’s BlueGene/L and Stanford University’s Folding@home (which uses legions of idle laptops to be augmented computing power), can take thousands of hours to simulate the folding of a single protein. Even then, these computers can create simulations of functions in molecules that last only a billionth or a millionth of a second. Scientists new wine in consequence validate the findings.

Anton could run simulations going up to 1,000 times longer, allowing scientists to get much closer to what really happens when, say, a protein folds. "If you can do 1,000 times longer, actual proteins come into play," Shaw reportedly said in a lecture at Stanford in 2006.

The more that scientists know about proteins and other critical molecules in the human body, the more precise they can be when developing drugs.

"He’s making a big step forward with this," Benoit Roux, a biophysicist at the University of Chicago, told the New York Times.

Roger Brent, superintendent of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, suggested in the Times article that scientists may not know what such a powerful computer is capable of until they use it.

He pointed out that the original Anton—Van Leeuwenhoek, who perfected the microscope in Holland in the 17th century—didn’t know that protozoa and other single-cell organisms existed in pond water until he trained his newfangled lenses on a sample.

Shaw in addition is a major investor in Schrödinger, a chemical and bio-physical simulation software business that could benefit from Anton’s new technology.

Sunday night’s season premiere of Mad Men, AMC’s breakout show about a buttoned-down 1960s-era advertising firm, scored a record number of viewers—over 2 million—for the series.

That total was more than 400,000 higher than Mad Men’s season one premiere, which generated 1.6 million viewers last July, and more than double the first season’s average number of viewers per episode, just 925,000.

Despite that impressive growth, Mad Men was kind of slapped around by Lifetime’s Army Wives and USA’s In Plain Sight—both of which easily more than doubled Mad Men’s viewers.

Still, the teach is providing an important edge for AMC, a cable channel whose programming includes 12-hour Chuck Norris marathons anchored by the Missing In Action trilogy. It gives the Rainbow Media-owned station the kind of strong foothold in original programming that The Closer gave TNT and is now table stakes in the cable dealing.

Compared to last season, Sunday’s numbers lay a strong foundation. extreme summer, only four episodes out of 13 aired with over 1 million viewers.
 
Call it the Emmy effect.

"I’m not surprised at all," says Brad Adgate, senior vice president at media planning and buying agency Horizon Media. "I think getting 16 Emmy nominations right before the premiere of a show is going to give anybody a shot in the arm."

What’s more, Adgate doesn’t expect the Emmy pop to be a one-time boost to Mad Men’s viewership. Instead, he predicts that the numbers could prove sustainable for the network now that the show has achieved mainstream recognition via its multiple Emmy nominations and heaps of critical acclaim.

There’s potential upside. The Closer averages 5 million to 7 million viewers through episode, numbers that are propelling cable’s most popular scripted series into territory formerly the sole province of the network channels.

For instance, Sunday stalwart Army Wives recruited 3.6 million and In Plain Sight snagged 4.2 million pairs of eyeballs, material it the most-watched scripted cable show in Sunday’s 10 p.m. time slot for which Nielsen has numbers (Showtime, whose Weeds and Secret Diary of a Call Girl had reruns during this time slot, has an agreement with Nielsen not to release ratings).

Winning the ratings root in Sunday’s 10 p.m. time slot overall was Dateline’s second hour on NBC, by 7.6 million viewers and a household rating of 5.2 percent, compared to Mad Men’s 1.4 percent. On ABC, a rerun of Desperate Housewives ensnared 3 million viewers, and a new episode of CBS’s Flashpoint scored almost 4 million.

Still, that’s old-school network TV. In the world of cable comers, we’re betting there won’t be anything "mad" this week about the men and women working in AMC’s New York headquarters.

Will John Thain have a original in his step today? The Merrill Lynch C.E.O. must be feeling like he just completed a weeklong cleansing diet—lighter, healthier, happier. It was a painful process, but lientery is at a past period the only way to start over.

And what other bloated, overweight bank C.E.O.’s will follow the trend? Deutsche Bank’s equity analyst Mike Mayo thinks Citigroup be pleased be next, and he’s probably right. Mayo predicts that Citi will take another $8 billion hit on its big, messy pile of stinking collateralized debt accountableness rot.

The time has come to completely start over. Sell the crap for whatever you can get and fright to move on with business. Penning a would-be letter to banks from the Federal Reserve’s Tim Geithner, BreakingViews Hugo Dixon implores other banking chiefs to join Thain in his feast adhering humble pie: "When Bear Stearns meanly went under, I had to absorb its $30 billion ‘defective bank’ onto my balance sheet to persuade J.P. Morgan to buy the rest. I don’t want to end up with another bad bank myself. Much better that you swarm off your bad banks yourself while you can."

Thain rightfully deserves the criticism he’s getting this morning for the countless broken promises he’s made, the way he misled investors, and the senseless overpricing of these assets less than one month ago.

But he deserves some credit according to being the first to throw it all out for practically nothing and start over. (But, as Felix Salmon reminds us, just because this latest write-down was large, doesn’t mean it’s the be unexhausted.)

What changed his mind? Even during the quarterly call last month, he seemed averse to the idea when Oppenheimer analyst Meredith Whitney suggested purging C.D.O. assets even then there wasn’t a market for them:

Whitney: Could you set a market by hitting anything cash bid there is out there and just get it over with?

Thain: No. I don’t think we want to do dumb things, and so we’ve been, I think, pretty balanced in terms of what we sold and at what prices we sold them. And so we have not simply liquidated stuff at any price we could get. At some point, some of the return profiles that people want, you probably wouldn’t want us to sell the assets. So I think we will tarry to sell assets, but in a way that makes sense from generating returns to our shareholders.

What looked dumb in June somehow seemed smart to Thain in July. It’s amazing what a nutriment can do to a person.

Michael Eisner, the longtime boss at Disney, always said he was a creative guy. It was just hard to tell in the midst of the constant state of battle in which he seemed to be, especially for the period of his final years running the House of Mouse.
 
But now, Eisner’s second act is in full bloom. His Tornante Company today said it has sold its first animated series, Glenn Martin D.D.S., to Viacom’s Nickelodeon.
 
Maybe much like his new have the lead of character—a dentist who leaves his practice behind and takes his family on a cross-country road trip in a van with a toothbrush upon top—Eisner was truly looking for something different.
 
The program is expected to debut nearest summer, and Nickelodeon has ordered 20 episodes.
 
Now, other than worrying whether Sumner Redstone will keep his nose out of Glenn Martin’s character unfolding, it seems clear that Eisner is content by his new career. He doesn’t seem to have being itching to run a major media company and relishes the smaller, it may be more interesting, spotlight he’s now in.
 
He’s bought baseball-card giant Topps, produced some webcast video series, and now he has a buddy, Glenn Martin, D.D.S., to keep exploring what’s next.

The Summer Olympics open in Beijing on the auspicious date of 8-8-08—which won’t be particularly lucky for the city’s hoteliers. There won’t be nearly enough visiting heads on hotel beds during Beijing’s big event.

allied so many Olympics before it, the 2008 Summer Games aren’t turning out to be much of a tourist magnet by reason of the host city. About 420,000 humbler classes visited Beijing last August; Chinese officials are expecting only about 10 percent more next month. But 13,000 new rooms have already been built in the Chinese capital, and the new inventory is expected to reach 30,000 by the end of the year. The glut is particularly noticeable in Beijing’s luxury tier, where there are about 50 five-star properties, up from fewer than 20 five years ago. The result: Occupancy rates and room prices have been falling; Chinese tourism officials admitted earlier this month that almost half of the city’s four-star inventory was still available for the Olympics period.

Beijing’s Olympian oversupply is making headlines, but the same basic tale is being spun in many places around the globe. Especially in the United States and the Caribbean, there suddenly aren’t enough travelers to fill existing properties. More hotels are opening as they emerge from the three- to five-year property-development pipeline. As airlines hack away at autumn flight schedules and uplift fares, there’s likely to have existence even fewer people traveling.

The U.S. hotel industry posted a record $139 billion in revenue last year and profits surged 5.3 percent to $28 billion. But the company that produced those rosy statistics, Smith Travel Research, says 2008 will be "tougher." Frits van Paasschen, chief executive of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, whose brands include Sheraton, Westin, St. Regis, and W, is blunter. Domestic "lodging demand dropped significantly in May," he admitted last week.

The declines in some markets are startling. In Hawaii, hotel use plummeted by dint of. more than 11 percent in early July. Almost half of the rooms on the Big Island were empty, and one in three rooms on Maui were dark. Things weren’t any more fit in suburban Boston, where occupancy this year is running at about 63 percent. And PKF Hospitality, the much-consulted experts, suggests a direct relationship between declining airline capacity and hotel occupancy: For each one percent drop in the number of airline seats, hotels will see a 0.39 percent decline in demand. That would translate to a 3.9 percent fall in lodging demand as carriers trim 10 percent of their capacity this fall, PKF says.
Hard hotel state of things aren’t likely to elicit a lot of sympathy from those of us who pay the bills. Nightly rates at the nation’s 4.4 million rooms have been rising at about twice the rate of inflation for years as hotels made the greatest number of rising demand. Or as the travel manager of a corporation with thousands of business travelers told me graphically last week: "Hotels made it clear who had the hammer when we negotiated rates the last couple of years. But when we start doing contracts for 2009 after Labor Day, I’ll have the hammer. And I’ll be whacking some knees to get my prices down."

To shore up sagging bookings, hundreds of hotels around the country are wooing travelers with free gasoline cards that slice as much as $50 off the effective nightly room rate. Other hotels are dabbling in more traditional value-added inducements: free breakfasts or dining credits in the hotel restaurants; complimentary massages or a free round of golf; gift cards at nearby department stores; and a blizzard of swag such as logo shirts, hats, and sunglasses. (See a slide show of hotel deals in the present state. [LINK TO SS])

In the Caribbean and Hawaii, where flight cuts have made it much harder for guests to visit, concessions have been even more dramatic. Sandals, which operates a dozen couples-only all-inclusive resorts in Jamaica, Antigua, St. Lucia, and the Bahamas, has been advertising discounts of as much as $1,100 a couple. The savings is offered as an "air credit" against your bill to offset the high price and inconvenience of flying. More than a dozen hotels in the Turks and Caicos have banded together to offer guests a fourth ignorance free. A travel packager has been promoting summer vacations upon the lush (if rainy) Hawaiian island of Kauai, with free car rentals, meals, wine, and, of course, free nights.

There is single in kind thing hoteliers aren’t yet offering in great supply: lower room rates. "Luxury properties especially hate lowering their room rate" because they think it hurts their image, explains Michael Matthews, whose résumé includes notable marketing and managerial stints at Rosewood, St. Regis, Ritz-Carlton, and Regent hotels. "If he can avoid cutting the rate in the downtimes, a general conductor will give you substantially anything else you ask for: room upgrades, free cabanas at the lake, a suite, limo service, spa treatments, free meals."

To make sure you get the best perks, "call the commander-in-chief manager before you arrive and introduce yourself," Matthews says. "Don’t be pushy, but let him know you’d like more for your rate."

What happens if value-added perks don’t put our heads forward their beds this fall and winter? "We’ll make the offers even richer," the top marketing executive of a major mid-priced brand told me last week. "being of the class who a last resort, we’ll look at rate cuts. But I hope we don’t get to that."

The Fine Print…
Hotels in New York, Philadelphia, and Miami continue to do well, primarily due to an influx of European travelers who are taking advantage of the weak dollar. Bargains will be scarce in those cities. But Las Vegas is even now suffering from a massive decline in visitors and prices. Nevada gaming officials say the take at the city’s casinos was down in May for the fifth consecutive month. And a website devoted to Vegas says nightly sweep rates have plunged after five years of escalating prices.

Hedge funds can’t seem to catch a break these days.

They are being targeted by a broad S.E.C. sweep for information tracing back to the origin of rumors that swirled surrounding trading in Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers stocks. They now can’t short some financial stocks in the way they used to, and the short-selling restrictions could become even tighter.

And now, rising financial stocks and falling oil are helping to make July one of the worst months in years for some hedge fund returns. Hedge Fund Research’s global hedge fund index is down 3.16 percent so far this month. July could cessation up being the worst month since the integral part was created five years agone, according to Bloomberg.

Plenty of hedge funds with short positions in financial stocks took a hit when the government stepped in to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the S.E.C. made it harder to short stocks in that sector.

The restrictions appeared to have helped orally transmitted shareholders — shares in Fannie and Freddie have surged in the past two weeks. but furthermore shares of Lehman Brothers, which continues to be plagued by intellectual examination about its future, remain well above their lows reached before the restrictions went into place.

The price of oil also fell dramatically in the last two weeks, down more than $20 by barrel from peaking earlier this month at $145.

But there’s no evidence this rally will last.

"Everything that went up was the most shorted,” Christopher Watling, head of the research firm Longview Economics, told Bloomberg. "It was a classic short squeeze, a race to cover shorts, not buying because fundamentals had changed. It was a true sucker’s rally.”

Indeed, it’s hard to muster the sympathy for some want funds, since public securities on the rise and oil on the decline are heading in precisely the right direction for the larger investing population.

It’s also perhaps to early to conclude that this plain July will be a sign of things to come for the rest of the year. After all, the Dow is down nearly 200 points today, led by a decline in financials. And oil? It’s up 33 cents.