Bottom line: The current rout in financial sector shares might smell awful to the simple onlooker. But smart investors should know that it smells like the beginning of the end of their collapse, too.

“Two-hundred dollar oil would break the back of the global economy,” Adam Sieminski, chief energy economist at Deutsche Bank AG (DB), told Bloomberg News in an interview yesterday (Wednesday) in Tokyo. “Next step after $200 would be global recession and bad news for everybody.”

Morgan Stanley's earnings dropped 57 percent in the second quarter as revenue from asset management and investment banking declined while equities and fixed-income traders generated less profit.

Oil prices have resumed their northward climb. And inflation has returned to the American lexicon for the first time in decades. For U.S. consumers, there’s no way to dodge the financial fallout of that economic one-two punch.

HERE IS A LIST OF STOCKS THAT TYPICALLY HAVE THE BIGGEST REACTIONS AFTER EARNINGS. THESE STOCKS TYPICALLY HAVE AN ABSOLUTE PRICE CHANGE OF 11%-19%.

ISRG
BCSI
AVCI
TZOO
NTGR
AV
CECO
SKX
NILE
SWIR
AMKR
ACF
MSTR
SYNA
HLIT
ARBA
ADBL
MDR
SNDK
AMZN
ALGN
AXCA
INSP
NTRI
ASF
NFLX
ITWO
PCLN.

I thought I would share a report I found on Infectious Greed. These are the top ten stocks by dollars traded in 2007. It will be interesting to see how these compare in 2008. Will they still be heavily traded?

Symbol Company Rank Last Year Change
AAPL Apple Inc. 1 2 1