Linkstock: Take Tomorrow Afternoon Off!; Unshackling Short Sellers; 2008 Lookback; Corporate Blogs and Credibility

By: Ray Pellecchia

File Under: NYSE

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First and foremost, a reminder: NYSE has a 1 p.m. close tomorrow, 24 Dec. ; is closed on 25 Dec., of course; and is open for regular hours on Friday, 26 Dec. and Wednesday, Dec. 31. If, over the course of the holidays, you hit the egg nog a little too hard and lose track of all this stuff, here's the calendar for all NYSE Euronext markets. And happy holidays to you and yours, my friends.

A few links on this tepid Tuesday; first, for those who have been looking for research on the impact of uptick rule's repeal, here you go:

Unshackling Short Sellers: The Repeal of the Uptick Rule; Excerpt from the abstract of this new paper by Ekkehart Boehmer of Texas A&M, Charles Jones of Columbia Business School and Xiaoyan Zhang of Cornell:
...Repeal [of the "uptick rule"] causes market liquidity to worsen slightly, and short sellers on average become less contrarian. Compared to the pilot program, complete repeal makes index arbitrage and other program (multiple-stock) shorting strategies easier to implement, and this could explain the post-repeal changes in seemingly unaffected pilot stocks. We find no evidence that repeal of the uptick rule destabilized prices or otherwise contributed to the bout of volatility experienced by U.S. stocks in late July and early August 2007.

2008 Lookback: Where to Start? (MarketBeat) Excerpt:
MarketBeat will be looking back on the year in a series of posts over the next several days, but in the ords of Inigo Montoya, "Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up." A year like this needs a summary, and so we begin with our list of the overaching themes of the year:
1. Getting Punched in the Gut on a Daily Basis...

I think that No. 1 kind of sums up the year pretty nicely all by itself, don't you?
Also, props on the "Princess Bride" reference.

No News Here: Forrester Says Consumers Don’t Trust Corporate Blogs (DebbieWeil.com) Excerpt:
Forrester's new report, Time to Rethink Your Corporate Blogging Ideas, says that only 16% of consumers trust company blogs and that they rank dead last in terms of marketing channels...
Yep. That's below consumers' trust level in promotional emails, direct mail (!), and online classifieds. Why? Well, the answer is obvious.
Many corporate blogs are A. boring and B. not credible. They're written in corporate speak...

Boring? Not credible? Corporate speak? Surely they're not lumping Exchanges into that, right?

I said, right? Hello?

[Sound of crickets chirping]

So much for my comment a few weeks ago that "blogging probably has a higher credibility factor than other types of corporate communication (though that probably isn't a high bar to clear)." Looks like we have a lot of work to do.