Securities

Some angry investors -- both average Americans and giant pension funds -- are not taking their massive losses quietly. Holding portfolios that have imploded from a barrage of financial time bombs, they are turning to the courts for compensation. "Any time people lose money, expect litigation to pick up," said John Sandy Smith, a partner at law firm Morris, Manning & Martin in Atlanta.

Pounding hammers and whining saws at Magic Mountain in Valencia signal a new roller coaster dubbed Terminator Salvation and other changes in the works for the summer tourist season. But the noise and excitement about the park's plans can't completely muffle the bad news coming from New York-based parent company Six Flags Inc., which announced Thursday that its stock value had fallen so low that it was being delisted by the New York Stock Exchange. Trading was halted, with shares at 27 cents.

The chilling realization that some things in high finance will never change, notwithstanding the current crisis, came to me the other day when I discovered that the Federal Reserve would accept only AAA-rated securities as collateral for its new program to finance consumer loans. On the surface this seems only prudent -- after all, what could be more gilt-edged than paper given a top investment grade by two of the three most-recognized credit rating agencies, as the Fed demands?

Biotech giant Amgen Inc. saw its largest single-day stock-price jump in four years after announcing that its experimental bone-strengthening medicine worked better than a potential rival in a study comparing the two drugs in breast cancer patients. On Wednesday, the Thousand Oaks company's shares rose $7.27, a day-over-day increase of 13.9%, to close at $59.50 on the Nasdaq exchange.

The world's investors rethought the concept of risk in 2007, and the result was a vast divergence in performance among financial markets. Suddenly, to some people Indian stocks looked safer than the U.S. housing market, long considered a pillar of security. Speculators shied away from American junk bonds and small-company stocks but remained ravenous for commodities such as wheat, gold and cotton.

When New Year's Eve revelers popped the cork on a limited-edition $1,150 bottle of 1996 Krug Clos du Mesnil champagne to celebrate the arrival of 2008, investors were partying alongside. A looming shortage of the bubbly French wine, spurred by limits on grape production and rising demand in the U.S., Japan and Britain, will push shares of champagne producers higher.

The start of 2008 has brought a harsh reality to Wall Street: The U.S. may indeed be headed toward recession. So, after suffering punishing losses the first trading days of the year, the stock market will be seizing on any data or forecast in the coming weeks that can help investors determine whether their worst fears are coming to pass. And earnings are now part of the equation, with results from Alcoa Inc.

You were more likely than not to make money in U.S. stock mutual funds in 2007. But some investors may wonder if it was worth the risk. The average domestic stock fund scored a total return of 6.4% last year, according to investment research firm Morningstar Inc. That was the weakest calendar-year gain since the bull market began late in 2002, and was down from the 12.6% average return in 2006. By contrast, money market mutual funds generated an average yield of 4.

Shares of AT&T Inc. had their steepest drop in nearly five years after Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said Tuesday that slowing economic growth had led to "softness" in the company's home phone and Internet businesses. The shares fell 4.6%, helping to spark a broader decline in U.S. stocks, after Stephenson said AT&T was disconnecting more home-phone and high-speed Internet customers for failing to pay their bills.

Shares of Downey Financial Corp. tumbled 13% on Monday after a program that allows some homeowners to restructure debt boosted nonperforming loans to 7.8%. The year-end figure would have been about 4.7% if Downey, with $13.5 billion in assets, hadn't counted the modified loans as "troubled debt" on the advice of accountant KPMG, the lender said Monday.