Bullish Blog

Financial stocks move higher as investors realize changes in U.S. financial regulation are years away. Merck and Schering-Plough are crushed as a new study slams Vytorin, their anticholesterol drug. Stocks break even in March; the first quarter is a bummer.

Investor's Business Daily - 1 Treasury Sec'y Henry Paulson revealed the biggest financial rules overhaul since the Depression. But any changes may be far off as Dems and banking groups raised objections. The Fed would get new powers to stabilize markets, including the right to order broad disclosures from financial firms. The plan would revamp agencies, including an SEC-CFTC merger.

Reuters - The White House on Monday said it had sent nominations to the U.S. Senate to fill two empty Democrat seats at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Reuters - Shares of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc dropped more than 5 percent to $35.26 after the bell on Monday as the Wall Street bank announced a plan to raise as much as $3 billion via the issuance of convertible preferred stock to bolster its balance sheet.

The Treasury secretary's proposal to revamp the nation's financial regulation would expand the Fed's influence but would likely foretell the SEC's demise.

Reuters - Toronto's main stock market index was little changed by midmorning on Monday, after trading on both sides of the break-even mark as investors looked ahead to the start of a new quarter.

AP - Wall Street managed a moderate gain in the final session of a dismal first quarter Monday, but stock prices and the major indexes still ended the first three months of 2008 with massive losses, the casualties of the still continuing credit crisis. The Standard & Poor's 500 index, the benchmark for many widely held investments such as mutual funds, suffered a loss for the quarter of nearly 10 percent.

BusinessWeek Online - That's because the proprietary screen we use to rank the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index by their performance -- and then use to anoint the top 50 companies in that ranking as the BusinessWeek 50 -- rewards companies that are growing the fastest. During bull markets, growth stocks do well -- and that was the case with the BusinessWeek 50 companies during the Roaring '90s when they regularly outperformed the major indexes the year after they were named to the list.

AFP - Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said the government would promote a stable and healthy development of the country's stock markets, state media reported Monday.