Here are the (lightly edited) bits I found interesting in this week’s issue.

“Gold futures hit a 25-year high of $576.80 an ounce.” – Robin Blumenthal

“The CME and Nymex have a noncompete agreement expiring in June …. Nymex is laying out plans for an initial public offering later this year …. NYBOT sugar prices rose to 25-year highs with the March contract settling at 19.3 cents a pound Friday.” – Leah Goodman

“Toshiba is Japan’s largest manufacturer of flash memory chips …. China has suggested it wants to spend $50 billion on 30-plus nuclear reactors by 2020 …. So far this year, Asia’s best market is Chinese ‘H’ shares traded in Hong Kong, which are up 16.4%.” – Leslie Norton

“On April 1, the Investment Quality Trends newsletter turns 40 years old. Founded by Geraldine Weiss, I.Q. Trends focuses on dividends and dividend yield. For the past 15 years, Mark Hulbert, watchdog of the investment-newsletter industry, has named I.Q. Trends the No. 1 performing newsletter on a risk-adjusted basis out of some 165 he surveys.” – Shirley Lazo

“Since April 1999, small caps, as measured by the Russell 2000, have gained 70% and, as tracked by the S&P Smallcap 600, a robust 121%. Over the same stretch, the S&P 500 declined 4% …. From the time small caps peaked in 1983, through 1998, big caps beat small caps in 11 out of 15 years …. in the 18-year stretch preceding 1983, small caps outperformed big caps in no fewer than 14 years.” – Rhonda Brammer

“Federal-funds futures placed a 90% probability on another 25-basis-point increase by and a 35% chance of yet another by May …. For January, the unemployment rate fell from 4.9% to 4.7%, the lowest level since July 2001 …. Friday, the two-year Treasury note, at 4.57%, yielded more than the benchmark 10-year note, at 4.53% …. $14 billion in 30-year Treasury bonds will be auctioned this week for the first time since August 2001.” – Jennifer Ablan

“Profit margins are provably the most mean-reverting series in finance, and if profit margins do not mean-revert, then something has gone badly wrong with capitalism. If high profits do not attract competition, there is something wrong with the system and it is not functioning properly …. For around 100 years, the mean price was $16 a barrel in today’s dollars. Now we’re seeing a paradigm shift, the first of my career …. Oil has clearly broken out of its old 100-year range, and it is going to stay broken out and probably trade on average higher.” – Jeremy Grantham, interviewed by Sandra Ward

“About 60% of the raw materials in a tire are tied to petroleum products …. independent dealers drive nearly three-quarter of retail tire sales …. Goodyear has 17% of the global tire market, just behind Michelin, with 20%, and Bridgestone, with 18% …. The Goodyear brand has snagged 17% of the ‘high performance’ and ‘ultra-high performance’ niche — ahead of No. 2-ranked Michelin’s 13% and Bridgestone’s 8.5%. (Dunlop and Kelly, other brands made by Goodyear, account for another 5.5% of this category) …. Goodyear is the only major tire maker still based in the U.S. …. the average age of cars in use has increased from about 5.6 years in 1970 to about nine years by the early part of this decade.” – Kopin Tan

“Commercial mortgages turned in a strong performance in 2005, generating a total return of 3.35%. This was well shy of the 5.13% registered in 2004. But while the absolute return wasn’t striking, it shellacked investment-grade CMBS (commercial-mortgage-backed securities), which garnered a 1.83% return and, in turn, outpaced duration-adjusted triple-B corporates, which recorded a minuscule 0.50% …. Credit losses were a minuscule nine basis points of the total dollar volume of commercial-property loans outstanding in 2005, a bit lower than 2004’s 11 basis points. At present, the insurance industry has some 32,000 commercial mortgages on its books, only 36 of which are delinquent.” – John Levy

Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.