Today's looking like another meeting-fest, so a few quick links that others may find interesting:

• What is the probability of the Large Hadron Collider destroying the universe? (Overcoming Bias)
• Consumers report feeling worse now than in other deeper economic downturns. Why? (WashPost)
• Big consumer products companies like P&G still lag badly in online ad spending (WashPost)
• Oil industry ad spending is up a whopping 18% y-o-y. Gosh, I wonder why (WSJ)
• U.S. retail gasoline purchases fell 4.7% y-o-y last week (MasterCard)
• 2009 U.S. airline traffic looks like it be back to 1997 levels, post the current cuts (Rick Seaney)
• Current aircraft taxi times now exceed pre-9/11 (BTS)
• Strange story of ten-year-old boy with Tourette's/OCD who thought 9/11 is his fault for not walking on a white mark on road (Neurocase)
• Is LinkedIn worth $1-billion? I know that I'm thinking more like $1.117b (GigaOm)
• Price gouging as a rational response to gas hoarding (FT)
• Prices of rare metals -- many from Africa -- are soaring because of airlines hunting for lightweight super-alloys (FT)

I got into a discussion yesterday with a colleague about financial performance measures. We started off talking about hedge fund managers being selective about such things, and then got to mulling venture capitalists comparing fund performance to public market indices (which they only do, of course, when they're beating said indices soundly).

Nevertheless, said VCs' usual index of choice is the S&P 500. But why? As my colleague argued, the S&P 500, while a well-known index, and in many ways synonymous with U.S. capital markets, is decent for some performance measurements, mediocre for others, and downright wrong for still more.

In this case, it doesn't make much sense for VCs to compare themselves to the S&P 500 merely to give themselves capital markets comparability. After all, the sorts of companies in the S&P 500 are nothing like the sorts of companies in a venture portfolio. And at the same time, any fund manager making an allocation to venture is not likely reallocating from money earmarked for large-cap indexing, but more likely from small-cap growth.

With the preceding in mind, a better index might be the Russell 2500, or even the Russell 2000. Both of those skew to smaller companies, both in terms of sales and market capitalization, and are therefore more similar to the sorts of emerging companies you find in a typical VC's portfolio.

Here are the two indices compared over the last 5 years. As you can see, while the S&P 500 has done okay, the Russell 2000 has outperformed it handily, while being considerably more more volatile. Needless to say, perhaps, returns of both the Russell 2000 and the S&P 500 fairly handily stomped the 5-year returns of VCs, with the latter turning in an 8.5-percent annualized number (as of 12/31/2007).

Here, for comparison, are the 12/31/2007 venture numbers, as provided by the NVCA. As you can see, they include the usual S&P 500 comparison. (As an aside, some VCs like to fall back on the industry's good 1-, 3-, and 10-year numbers, and brush aside the 5-year numbers. Admittedly, that is a fun game, but the first two numbers are too short to be meaningful, while the 10-year number is badly skewed by the bubble.)

A few more thinks worth reading this morning as FedEx f***s the market:

• Is post-9/11 paranoia causing a decline in tall building occupancy rates? (Harvard)
• Correlation between time spent watching television and on computer is not significant among obese people (StatsCan)
• Under the hood on Microsoft's Navic acquisition (TBZ)

I don't know do much (any) sports here, but I have to say I'm in awe of Tiger Woods. He won the U.S. Open last weekend despite an ACL rupture and a rehab-related stress fracture of the tibia? That is, in a word, unbelievable. If you thought Tiger had been deified before, you ain't seen nothing yet.

In the interim, he's out until next season while he recuperates, etc. That means he's going to need things to do in his down time, ideally semi-sedentary but still highly competitive, as his knee recovers. I'm thinking "hedge fund manager". Go get those bastards, Tiger.

My friend Jeff has two new missives up about his preparations and playing at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. If you recall, Jeff is a highly successful trader, both on his own and for a large asset manager, and he is also a very good semi-pro poker player who is a regular at this annual Las Vegas event that is currently ongoing.

The latest in his "A Trader Does the WSOP" series are here and here. And they remain great reading. No idea why the FT/WSJ/etc., hasn't picked them up.

Interesting to look at the effect of today's Tiger Woods news -- he is taking the rest of the year off for surgery and rehab -- on Nike, his main sponsor. The story broke on Twitter around 11:30am EST, and then on the wires at 11:40am EST, and Nike stock responded accordingly, with an initial surge of trading, then a respite, and then a steady decline from noon onward.

Very nice interactive chart from Forbes showing crude oil prices in nominal and real terms from 1861 until today. Fascinating stuff. (Thanks to a reader for pointing it out to me.)

[via Forbes]

There is riveting reading in the just-decided case of CSX Corporation vs. Children's Investment Fund. Yes, it's a court filing, but nowhere else are you likely to get so detailed and lucid a discussion of how a major investor works to play disclosure tricks at the market's periphery.

Defendants seek to defend their secret accumulation of interests in CSX by invoking what they assert is the letter of the law. Much of their position in CSX was in the form of total return equity swaps (“TRSs”), a type of derivative that gave defendants substantially all of the indicia of stock ownership save the formal legal right to vote the shares. In consequence, they argue, they did not beneficially own the shares referenced by the swaps and thus were not obliged to disclose sooner or more fully than they did. In a like vein, they contend that they did not reach a formal agreement to act together, and therefore did not become a “group” required to disclose its collaborative activities, until December 2007 despite the fact that they began acting in concert with respect to CSX far earlier. But these contentions are not sufficient to justify defendants’ actions.

Read it all here, right down to the "Blue Horseshoe loves Anacot Steel"-style games Children's allegedly played in tipping off other hedge funds to its interest in CSX.