Project Cleanup

I'm really too tired to write much. I was out late last night (part of my scheduled fun!), plus I've been working hard on my project. I've completed most of my project work on creating an Excel Worksheet that has all of the ticker symbols by industry. Mind numbing and butt numbing work. Because the tickers are ganged in 50 increment groupings, I still have to go through and check everything to make sure that I didn't omit a gang. I also want to format it a bit. When I'm done, I'll give you a link to it.

This project is from using the ticker symbols from Big Charts. It does contain preferred stock tickers, and that is good. I'm going to cross reference this against my Stock Charts (using Metastock's industry listing). I appreciate seeing that some of you are downloading the weekly sector spreadsheets. Please feel free to leave me feedback here or via e-mail (see profile) as to whether you are seeing them as being useful or not. I plan to be generating some reports from you from my Yahoo sector work (it's a shame that everyone doesn't have identical sector breakdowns). I'm looking forward to conflating my work. Interestingly, by looking at the differences among different data feeds is helpful in stimulating one's own thought process.

I did want to share this... I do think that the Buffet news is much ado about nothing. Nevertheless, having said that, municipal bond risk is increasing. Municipalities are rated based on fiscal health--recessionary times are not kind to municipalities: their taxable basis (income, property values) decreases. Raising tax rates is an option, but in general, one has to balance revenues (tax base x rates) and expenditures (services offered). To the extent that they cannot be balanced, a deficit arises. And strained finances affects bond ratings and ability to pay. So listen with a skeptical ear to those who say that there is no risk in muni bonds.

Regarding the image. It is water color. It looks like a photograph. Such talent.