Ho hum, another day of progress in the bank bailout

Seriously, the big bank bailout has finally reached the stage where real, dramatic, hard-core progress is being made on a daily basis, and the process is now getting a bit tedious and boring. It was quite exciting and challenging to sort through the mess when it was a real storm, but now that the "patient" is being treated, even dramatic progress has an anti-climactic feel to it.

I am enjoying the elevated money market fund yields that are caused by dislocations in the commerical paper, variable rate demand note, and repo markets. This may continue for a couple more weeks until the new Federal Reserve commercial paper program kicks in. The repo market should also settle down as the bank recapitalization program kicks in.

I did pick up a little more Microsoft stock today as part of my automated monthly dollar-cost averaging investment program with Sharebuilder that buys a fixed dollar amount on the second Tuesday of each month. I was really looking forward to it on Friday when the market was down so much and really bummed-out when the market soared on Monday. Luckily, tech stocks dipped today and my automatic order executed at ony 1.20% above the closing level which was -5.49% below the Monday close. Intel reported semi-decent querterly results after the close, so tech stocks may see a bump, at least at the open or in the pre-market.

Otherwise, my finances are mostly on auto-pilot.

Incidentally, Microsoft is currently yielding 2.16%, which is competitive with the average money market fund yield.

-- Jack Krupansky