News Digest of October 17, 2006

There are 8 items… Chicago Merc to Buy Board of Trade for $8 Billion | Investors Shun Oil, Emerging Markets, Merrill Says | Pensions under spotlight on balance sheet | Stock options scandal spreads | Barefoot brokers are powerful in Malaysian market | Executive pay soars despite attempted restraints | Web Watch: Techno-speak baffles the customer | How to Spot Fake Blogs

Chicago Merc to Buy Board of Trade for $8 Billion
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange agreed to buy the Chicago Board of Trade for about $8 billion, creating the largest exchange for futures contracts on stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities.

Investors Shun Oil, Emerging Markets, Merrill Says
Fund managers this month turned negative on energy and emerging-market stocks for the first time in almost five years as oil prices plunged, according to a survey by Merrill Lynch & Co.

Stock options scandal spreads
As of Monday, the number of companies losing an executive or director in the scandal hit 23.

Barefoot brokers are powerful in Malaysian market
The men who keep the Malaysian stock market ticking don’t wear pin-stripe suits. Some of them don’t even wear shoes.

Executive pay soars despite attempted restraints
In recent years, CEOs have raced ahead of other Americans, including their own lieutenants. Murphy calculates that average CEO pay was 369 times as much as the average earned by a worker last year, compared with 131 times in 1993 and 36 times in 1976. Meanwhile, the average U.S. paycheck has barely kept ahead of inflation in recent years.

Web Watch: Techno-speak baffles the customer
A survey into people’s understanding of modern technical terms has told us something most of us probably already knew - that many of them are simply baffling for the average customer.

How to Spot Fake Blogs
Every so-called corporate blogging product I’ve seen has these capabilities—and, for many people, that’s sufficient. But if your blog has only these capabilities, it’s still not a blog. It’s just a Web site with comments and enabled feeds.

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