Until now, the country?s power grid has been divided into three unconnected chunks, making transnational transmission impossible, leading to huge regional mispricing. While California and New York suffered from brown outs and sky high prices, electricity was given away virtually for free in Texas.

A group of power companies is now proposing to build the $1 billion Tres Amigas superstation in Clovis, New Mexico that would connect all three grids. The plant would use advanced superconducting technology that will send five gigawatts of power down cables cooled at 300 degrees below zero. Construction is expected to begin this year and reach completion in 2014.

The facility would solve a major headache of alternative energy planners, and will no doubt accelerate development. It would allow the enormous wind farms on the drawing board in the Midwest to ship energy to the power hungry coasts. Ditto for the mega solar projects proposed in the Southwest deserts, and the big geothermal plants being built in Nevada.

With the Department of Energy having already sent tidal waves of government cash towards the sector, the timing couldn?t be better. With gasoline prices rapidly approaching $5 a gallon, some of these projects might now actually make some sense.

?I suspect the analysts who follow Apple are great people and are nice to their mothers. But as a group those people missed the last quarter by 40%, so I?m not listening to them. The stock is a trading sardine for a while. It?s a high beta stock which is leveraged to the market which is over extended. So I don?t see a hell of a lot of alpha until we get the next significant data point, which might be squishy,? said Dug Kass of hedge fund Seabreeze Partners.

I received an email from the MF Global bankruptcy trustee this morning indicating that they would be returning another $685 million to customers. Of this amount, $600 million will go to customers who traded on US exchanges, $50 million to those who traded on foreign exchanges, and $35 million who were holders of physical metals. That would enable them to increase their payout on cash funds owned by the former US customers of MF Global to 80%.

I was suspecting that something like this would come along soon, as I recently was solicited by a couple of East coast hedge funds offering to buy out my existing claim at a discount. Now I hear that a private exchange it setting up in Connecticut which will buy and sell such claims, of which there are thought to be more than 10,000.

When MF Global filed for bankruptcy last year, it was the eighth largest in US history with debts of $40 billion. It is believed that the company lost $6.3 billion on ill-timed long positions in European sovereign debt. As is so often the case in these situations, it was the distressed liquidation of the MF portfolio that made the final bottom in that market. If MF had only been able to hold on a few more weeks, they would have made a fortune. For example, Italian ten year bond yields have fallen from over 8% to under 5% since then, creating massive capital gains.

The bankruptcy triggered a mini financial crisis just in the midst of a global selloff. It cast a pall over the agricultural markets from which they have yet to recover as thousands of farmers saw capital tied up. That left them unable to come out of existing hedges or roll into new ones. Even those who stored physical metals with MF, like gold and silver, were only given partial payouts.

Initially, the finger pointed at CEO John Corzine, once a Goldman Sachs co-chairman, US senator, and governor of New Jersey. I never believed it for a second. It now looks like a mid-level manager accidently sent $150 million to JP Morgan, which refused to return the funds before the bankruptcy was filed. A further complication is the conflict between US and UK bankruptcy law which assign different rights to creditors. The matter will no doubt be tied up in the courts for years.

I believe that that beleaguered MF customers will eventually get 100% of their funds returned. There are still substantial assets to be liquidated at far better prices than prevailed in the fall and paid out to customers. This was not a negative net worth bankruptcy, and customers are at the very top of seniority of claims. But it could be a long wait. However, their confidence on the US financial system is almost certainly gone for good.

Many hedge fund traders are unhappy about the current near monopoly enjoyed by the top three ETF issuers, Black Rock, State Street, and Vanguard, which control 83% of the market. At last count more than 1,100 ETF's were capitalized at more than $1 trillion. The result has been grasping management fees, exorbitant expense ratios, and poor structural designs which create massive tracking error.

The good news is that new entrants are flooding into the ETF space, and the heightened competition they are bringing will help curtail the worst of these abuses. This development will accelerate the demise of the bloated and arthritic mutual fund industry, whose end has been a long time in coming. Not only will management fees and expense ratios plunge, there will be a far broader range of offerings, as new funds are launched from a diverse range of institutions coming from differing areas of expertise. Failure to enter the newly lucrative ETF market by the remaining giants sitting on the sidelines means that their existing mutual fund businesses will be cannibalized.

Look no further than bond giant PIMCO, which is coming out with a plethora of fixed income related funds, Van Eck's expanding list of ETF's for commodities, and the even growing list of inverse and leveraged inverse ETF's presented by ProShares. The bottom line will be that lower costs and tighter spreads will leave more profits on the table for the rest of us.

The Mutual Fund Industry is Getting Cannibalized

I have been banging the table for years now about the importance of demographic trends for the economy, the financial markets, and the housing market. Well, politics is no different.

According to recent surveys, Millennials, who are now aged 19-30 (I have three of them) are suspicious of government, have a strong anti-business bias, are opposed to new regulation, are highly conscious of environmental issues, and give the president his highest marks. They also happen to care the least about health care, and put a high value on ethics. We also have learned that they don't bother to vote in midterm elections. This is important because the Millennium Generation surpassed in size 80 million strong baby boomer generation last year.

No wonder the last election focused so much energy on online campaigning and social media. Is the outcome of future elections to be determined by clicks and bandwidth? The data effectively means that the population of liberals is growing, while that for conservatives is shrinking. Politician planners and makers of campaign tchotchke take note.