I love when you get two contradictory headlines about the same piece of news. Case in point, here is my friend Barry on the latest housing starts data, following by a WSJ headline on the same nugget:

With housing starts apparently plunging up and down in the space of an hour -- the two stories were published 45 minutes apart -- you can see why this market is so tough to trade.

Marginally more seriously, Barry is talking about year-over-year comparisons, of course, while the WSJ is talking about a consecutive month improvement. I hate agreeing with Barry, but I am generally more interested in the y-o-y data. That said, last year there was no April housing starts bump, but this year there was one. Probably meaningless, but there you are.

One of the main reasons Yahoo is celebrated, to the extent that it is (and celebrated is way too strong a word here), is because it leads this part of the solar system in web traffic.

Or at least it did.

Because, according to April comScore (oh how I wish that company had coherent capitalization) Google now leads yahoo in total visitors. The painful figures follow. Remind me, again, why there are people supporting the current management team?

[via MarketingCharts]

Lots of people newly discovering the entertaining games that raiders, like Carl Icahn, can play in hiding, ahem, their stock holdings in target companies until the last minute. In the case of Yahoo, for example, Icahn is sharing notes/stock/etc. with hedge fund manager and kindred spirit Jim Paulson.

Here is a nice chart on the subject showing how Icahn, Nelson Peltz, and others have used Morgan Stanley to help them quietly build some  recent positions.

And why do they do this? It has a great deal to with antitrust rules and the FTC. As an activist investor -- someone doing anything other than buying and holding a stock -- you must disclose your position when you cross certain thresholds, and then ask permission from FTC to go further. That is slow, cumbersome, and noisy -- you can't exactly sneak up on those wascally wabbits -- so fund managers are very clever at playing hide the stock, at least temporarily.