Nothing like a stock market rally to alleviate concerns about a pension funding crisis.

The funded status for the typical US corporate pension plan climbed 4.4 percentage points to 80.3 percent, the best status since May 31, 2010, according to BNY Mellon Asset Management's monthly report.

I owe former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt a sincere apology as a result of last week's stock market glitch.

It seems increasingly clear that electronic trading systems are to blame for the mysterious 1,000 point intra-day dive. And as Floyd Norris thoroughly explains today, their dominance reflects a decision to replace human, market-making specialists with technology.

Covering daily stock market movements must be a lousy job. Today's news wire stories from Reuters on Goldman Sachs' earnings are a prime example of why.

All that attention you've put into cutting costs and conserving cash has really thrown a wrench into how some investors like to value stocks.

In short, cash flow is way, way up thanks to slimmed down expenses, but earnings are still recovering, politely speaking. What that's created is a stock market trading at historically high price-to-earnings multiples, but at lousy ones in terms of cash flow.

Bank stocks outperformed the S&P 500 last week for the first time in five years, but just how real is their recovery?

On its face, it seems that increased investor confidence in the expansion of the U.S. economy is helping bank stocks outperform, according to Gerard Cassidy, a bank analyst at RBC Capital Markets, who noted in a report Monday morning that the U.S. economy is expected to grow 2.6 to 3 percent in 2010.

Don't stop believin'.

Shouldn't that be  Alan Greenspan's theme song?  Or, at least, that's what recent comments by the former Federal Reserve chief/economic god suggest.

This isn't exactly the height of behaviorial finance, but research by two Fordham University accounting professors finds that the stock market reacts more favorably to corporate earnings reports on sunny days than on cloudy ones. (Technically, it confirms previous research along these lines but you get the picture.)

The research, by  John J. Shon and Ping Zhou, also finds that the results are more pronounced for firms followed by "naïve" investors and is reflected in bid and asked spreads (suggesting that market makers maybe a contributing factor).

Everyone loves a good bull market. That is unless you recently issued convertible bonds.

Bloomberg is reporting that convertible issuance has plummeted this year to its lowest level in a decade. That's because more than half of corporate issuers have seen their share prices rise above exchange prices, the news service found.

Such a reality is bad news for existing shareholders, whose stakes are diluted when the debt is converted to equity.

CFOs and treasurers have clearly been taken off guard by the run up in the stock market.