Planmark Capital Management

The Markets

Despite the volatility, August turned out to be a positive month in the stock market.

August certainly felt like a yo-yo month, as large daily swings seemed to happen with regularity. Even last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped a nerve-racking 280 points on Tuesday only to be followed by a 247-point rally the next day. However, for the month of August, the Dow rose 1.1%, according to Barron’s Magazine. Year-to-date, the Dow is up 7.2% so despite all the big swings, the stock market is still performing reasonably well.

The president pleased Wall Street investors last week as he acted in concert with the Federal Reserve and announced a series of initiatives aimed at helping troubled subprime borrowers keep their homes, according to CNN-Money. Interestingly, the Fed and the president went out of their way to make it clear that they had no intention of bailing out investors or lenders who made risky investments that were related to the subprime situation.

On a completely different note, Vickers Weekly Insider Report said corporate insiders are bullish about the stock market. Corporate insiders are the officers, directors and largest shareholders of publicly traded companies. They are required by law to report their stock transactions. According to Vickers, as reported by MarketWatch, insiders actually bought more stock than they sold for the week ending August 17. That may not sound like a big deal but it is. Usually, stock sales exceed stock purchases by a wide margin. MarketWatch said, “The last time that the insider sell-to-buy ratio for listed companies was as low as it was in mid-August occurred in October 2002, almost precisely when this bull market started.” This is one situation where we hope history will repeat itself.

Returns through 8/31/07	1-Week	Y-T-D	1-Year	3-Year	5-Year	10-Year
Dow Jones Industrials	-0.2	7.2	16.5	9.6	10.0	5.4
Nasdaq Composite	0.8	7.5	18.4	11.9	15.3	4.8
Standard & Poor's 500	-0.4	3.9	12.4	10.2	11.0	4.8

Source: Yahoo! Finance, Barrons Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Indices are unmanaged and cannot be invested into directly. Three-, 5-, and 10-year returns are annualized. Assumes dividends are not reinvested.

WITH MEMORIES OF LABOR DAY COOKOUTS FADING FAST, there’s good news to report about the job satisfaction of the American workforce. A recent University of Chicago study found that 86% of the people interviewed between 1972 and 2006 were satisfied at their 9 to 5s, with 48% saying they were “very satisfied” with their jobs. Only 4% of respondents reported being “very dissatisfied” at work. According to the study, job satisfaction increases with age. Workers over 65 are among the most satisfied, with 71% saying they were very satisfied at their job. Workers under age 29 reported the lowest amount of happiness on the job; only 42% said they were very satisfied.

Additionally, workers with more education and those earning more money were the most satisfied. “Job Satisfaction in America: Trends and Socio-Demographic Correlates” by Tom W. Smith, Director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Center at the University of Chicago, also found that professions that focus on serving other people, especially those involving caring for, teaching, and protecting others and creative pursuits, provide people with the most satisfaction.

A NEW FACTS FROM EBRI PUBLICATION announces that the “gender gap” in retirement plan coverage has been steadily shrinking since the late 1980s. The coverage difference between men and women, which was about 11 percentage points in the late 1980s, narrowed to just over 2 percentage points in 2004. EBRI suggests this is due to a higher percentage of women working full time, as well as women’s propensity to choose work in the public sector where retirement plans generally are offered to employees.

Additionally, the November 2006 EBRI Issue Brief noted that while among all workers, men had a higher participation level than women in employer retirement savings plans, among full-time workers, women had a higher percentage participating than men (56.4% for women, compared with 53.7% for men).

Employers seem to be doing a better job in stressing to all workers that saving for retirement is an important responsibility.

According to NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope web site, astronomers at the University of Rochester have discovered that five Earth-oceans’ worth of water has recently fallen into the planet-forming region around an extremely young, developing star called NGC 1333-IRAS 4B.

According to the web site, the “star system is growing inside a cool cocoon of gas and dust. Within this cocoon, circling around the embryonic star, is a burgeoning, warm disk of planet-forming materials. The new Spitzer data indicate that ice from the stellar embryo’s outer cocoon is falling toward the forming star and vaporizing as it hits the disk.”

What does all that mean? The astronomers say these observations provide them with the first direct look at how water begins to make its way into planets and, most importantly, that observing this brief watery phase of a star’s life could provide them with valuable details of how planets form.

* The Standard & Poor's 500 (S&P 500) is an unmanaged group of securities considered to be representative of the stock market in general.

* The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a price-weighted index of 30 actively traded blue-chip stocks.

* The Nasdaq Composite Index is an unmanaged, market-weighted index of all over-the-counter common stocks traded on the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation System.

* Yahoo! Finance is the source for any reference to the performance of an index between two specific periods.

Brain Teaser Answer: It contains the numbers one to nine, in alphabetical order.