Verizon Wireless announced yesterday that they will be revising their policy on allowing free-market cell phones to be used on their network. The change will take affect by the mid part of next year.

In effect, it will allow you to buy just about any cell phone, from any vendor, and activate it on the Verizon network.

This is big!

Not just because it gives you more freedom to use whatever cell phone fits your needs, but it also signals that the free market does have an effect, even in the highly competitive wireless industry.

What’s next? Perhaps more flexibility in pricing and plans, and even better, …

Things aren’t looking half bad in the stock market these days. The volume of the NYSE listed shares that rose in price is more than 94% of the total volume on that exchange, which means the chances are good you made some money today.

Those in the “know” call these 9-to-1 up days. Days where there is a drastic imbalance of shares trading up over shares trading down.

Martin Zweig worte in his 1986 book, “Winning on Wall Street” that “Every bull market in history, and many good intermediate advances, have been launched with a buying stampede that included one or more 9-to-1 up days.”

A bull market? Seriously?

Existing-home sales fell …

The annual funding limit for a Roth IRA is $4,000 per individual account annually. The IRS provided an extension, in effect the cut off date was the date your taxes were due, so you were given an extra couple months.

My goal for last year was to fund by my wife and I’s Roth IRA by year end. Calendar year end, that is.

Typically I’d probably stretch that out in light of having some extra funds on hand for Christmas shopping. However, with the current state of the stock market as it is, it troubled me that we were …

A vote today inside the FCC could lead to tighter regulation of the cable industry. The five commissioners from the FCC are set to vote on a proposal to include several issues.

First, they are to consider whether or not it should cut rates charged by cable operators to lease channel access to programmers by as much as 75% in order to encourage more diverse programming. Cable operators are required to offer leased space, but it isn’t used widely — mostly carrying infomercials and programming from religious groups.

Secondly, they are to decide whether cable operators should have to settle disputes with programmers …

I’ve always been skeptical of the true value of running a vehicle on ethanol. I feel that the next great propulsive fuel must have a net energy content greater than gasoline. Scientifically, this means that the energy content of a given amount of future fuel must be greater than gasoline. Currently, I believe the prime candidate for this is hydrogen.

But I digress. Back to the ethanol farce.

I came across a Consumer Reports revelation from 2006 presenting the results of their gasoline vs. ethanol tests. They ran a battery of tests on a new (2007) flex-fuel …

A Sunday report from ComScore Inc revealed that retail spending on the Internet during the Thanksgiving weekend is up 29% to $272 million from from the same period last year.

For so-called Black Friday, e-commerce sales amounted to $531 million, a 22% gain from e-commerce spending in 2006. ComScore expects “Cyber Monday,” the first workday after the holiday weekend, to post sales exceeding $700 million.

I’m not sure how an increase in on-line spending will affect our economy, but one thing is for certain: On-line or off-line, it seems higher fuel costs, a staggering housing market, and credit problems  are not curtailing consumer spending just yet.

I don’t usually lounge around on weekends and watch TV, but the four-day weekend has me unusually lazy. Or maybe it’s the left over tryptophan from Thanksgiving…

Anyway, one topic of discussion this morning on Fox’s Bulls and Bears show was finding the bottom of the housing market. A few of the talking heads were quick to point out that home builder stocks had dropped as much as 90% over the last year to 18 months, and that qualified them as a good buy, regardless of whether we’re at the bottom or not.

I disagree.

The stock market has the advantage of being …

There are very few people out there that can seem to justify the near $100 price tag on crude oil. The fundamentals based on supply and demand support levels much lower than $100, leading one to believe that the additional premium on black tea is built on speculation, which tends to be the most volatile trait of a commodity.

So one has to wonder, is it time to short crude?

The next question you might ask, is if so, how? The traditional way to trade oil is through a futures account, which tends to be an expensive endeavor just to set up …

Happy Thanksgiving from the Corner Office Blog!

Be sure to devote some time to reflect on the past year, and as always, keep our troops in your thoughts as they continue to sacrifice for our freedom.

Iranian President Ahmadinejad came out Sunday at the end of a rare OPEC summit stating that OPEC’s members have expressed interest in converting their cash reserves into a currency other than the depreciating U.S. dollar, which he called a “worthless piece of paper.” (It later became clear that the “members” he is referring to is none other than Iran and Venezuela… go figure.)

He went on to blame President Bush’s policies for the decline of the dollar and its negative effect on other countries.

In an effort to tag-team the idea, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez jumped in from the sidelines saying “the empire …