I was out of the office for the past few days attending to personal matters. Hope to be blogging again soon.

In the meantime, check out Christopher J. Neely’s work. He’s an assistant VP at the St. Louis Fed and has written many excellent papers. Traders might be interested in reading An Academic Perspective on Technical Analysis. Bond traders will like The Microstructure of the U.S. Treasury Market.

And the Winners Are…

The stock scan conducted after the close on Wednesday found 52 winners and 23 losers.

The winners are listed in alphabetical order below. Click on the column headers to sort the list. Our scan criteria incorporates price movement, range and liquidity (500,000 shares on the day, 20-day average of 1.5 million).

Media Digest

• Investing in Funds of Funds
  (Editor: And most of all, the benefits go to the fund manager.) CNBC’s Geoff Cutmore asks Frederick Lorenzini from Morningstar France about the benefits of exchange traded funds of funds.
• Churchill Mansion Schools Butlers for London’s New Rich
  Rick Fink runs a butler school in former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s weekend mansion outside Oxford, England. Fink, a butler for over 50 years, teaches an unabashedly old-fashioned style of buttling, where students pay 7,900 pounds ($15,600) for a four-week intensive course. Demand for the buttling arts is rising in London, where expatriate oligarchs and hedge-fund billionaires are employing servants in displays of status unrivaled since Victorian times.
• Harris of UBS Sees ‘Slow Recovery’ for U.S. Economy
  Maury Harris, chief U.S. economist at UBS Securities LLC, talks with Bloomberg’s Betty Liu from New York about the outlook for economic growth, consumer spending and Federal Reserve monetary policy. Economic growth in the U.S. will come to a halt in the first six months of 2008 as consumer spending cools, according to a Bloomberg News survey of economists. A majority now projects the U.S. is, or will soon be, in a recession.
• Greenspan Speaks
  Fmr. Fed chairman Alan Greenspan coming under fire for actions taken during his tenure, with CNBC’s Steve Liesman.

Egypt’s Rising Food Prices Swell Bread Lines, Deficit

• Atyat Musa Bakri, a Cairo mother of nine children, was waiting in line to buy subsidized bread for the third time in one day. . . . Bread is just about the only affordable food these days in Egypt, where rising commodity and energy prices have sent unsubsidized food prices up 20 percent or more in the past year. The rising cost of subsidies is damaging the government’s efforts to reduce its budget deficit. “We have seen riots around the world and there’s risk that these will spread because of rising prices in countries where 50-60 percent of incomes go to food,” Jacques Diouf, the director general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, said in India today.