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Amazon’s new Kindle, Cruz’s standup and Microsoft’s deathbed

 Bolt does Oktoberfest

AIG’s Bob Benmosche is sick of getting lynched, and Ted Cruz is fighting the Nazis, the Russians and the British all at the same time. To make matters worse for the suffering ‘haves’, stocks are looking increasingly beaten-up heading into a month with a reputation for investor bloodbaths. Indeed, it’s tough times for rich, white (-ish) people.

But is October really so bad? According to Michael Harris of the Price Action Lab Blog, the month — notorious for its investor-busting crashes — has actually finished higher 61% of the time over the past 53 years. “I have no idea how stocks will perform during this October, but any fear based on the past may not be justified,” he wrote.

Then again, this time is different. It always is. Until it’s not. For now, though, there are pitfalls lurking around every corner, and investors are more than a little cautious, having brought down markets for four days straight. It’s hard to sit idly on the kind of gains we’ve absorbed much of the year, when guys like Peter Boockvar are telling us that “there’s 0% chance this ends smoothly.”

Key market gauges: Futures on the Dow /quotes/zigman/13101801 YMZ3  and the S&P /quotes/zigman/20258900 ESZ3 have been bouncing around the fence, but don’t look all that intent on bucking the recent streak. Europe /quotes/zigman/2380150 XX:SXXP  is equally noncommittal, with most major indexes down. Earlier, stocks rallied in Australia /quotes/zigman/1653884 AU:XJO  while much of Asia /quotes/zigman/6959860 XX:ADOW  was in the red, particularly the Sensex /quotes/zigman/1652085 IN:1 .

The economy: New orders for durable goods rose 0.1% in August after retreating 7.4% in July, largely due to big demand for autos, sales of which surged in August, and most other manufacturers may have seen an increase.

The Commerce Department will release new-home sales data at 10 a.m. Eastern and economists are looking for a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 420,000. If August reached that level, new-home sales would have increased 12% from a year ago, with pent-up demand and low interest rates fueling growth. But they’d still be well below the 1.4-million peak in 2005, and rising mortgage rates could prove to be a big headwind going forward. Read: Spotlight on the economy.

Meanwhile, the clock on the government shutdown is counting down.

Earnings: AutoZone /quotes/zigman/218657 /quotes/nls/azo AZO posted a 15% gain in fiscal fourth-quarter earnings, boosted by improvement for auto-parts and commercial sales. Jabil Circuit /quotes/zigman/128454 /quotes/nls/jbl JBL  and Bed Bath & Beyond /quotes/zigman/68991 /quotes/nls/bbby BBBY are also on the docket.

The buzz: Wealthy guys complaining about those complaining about their bonuses is one thing. Drawing comparisons between that and lynching, well, that takes it to another level. AIG’s /quotes/zigman/557836 /quotes/nls/aig AIG boss found out the hard way. From Wonkette: “Yes, we all remember how the KKK gave millions of dollars to all the black folks and then yelled at them for being so incredibly rich.” AIG’s Benmosche later apologized for his “poor choice of words,” but it’s not going away that easily.

Then there’s Ted Cruz, and his vow to “speak until I can no longer stand.”  And he’s still standing. Check out the highlights of his speech, in which Dr Seuss, ‘Duck Dynasty’ and Ashton Kutcher all got a shoutout. Here’s how his epic rant, calculated in the late-night hours, stacks up to some of the longest filibusters in history.

UPDATE: the only bad things Ted Cruz has still not yet compared to Obamacare: wedgies, stale bread, Vlad the Impaler, the Twilight saga.

— skullsinthestars (@drskyskull) September 25, 2013

Jeff Bezos isn’t about to let Apple /quotes/zigman/68270 /quotes/nls/aapl AAPL  steal all the gadget thunder. Amazon.com /quotes/zigman/63011 /quotes/nls/amzn AMZN  late last night announced new versions of its Kindle Fire tablet, one with a 7-inch screen starting at $229, and one with a 8.9-inch screen starting at $379. It also lowered the price of its Kindle Fire HD tablet to a $139 starting point. The smaller HDX tablets will begin shipping on Oct. 18.

The chart of the day: We’re heading toward what would be only the third time since 1980 that the Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index /quotes/zigman/5970758 UK:USAG  has posted an annual loss, as “interest rate-sensitive strategies that are reliant on falling interest rates have been punished since May. Here’s an illustration capturing just how rare this current retreat is, courtesy of BlackRock. (h/t @cullenroche) The call of the day: Microsoft /quotes/zigman/20493 /quotes/nls/msft MSFT  is a value trap. It’s a simple, straightforward, not-too-controversial assessment by NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran, but it made our call of the day because of how it was delivered. It’s rare that financial writers can seamlessly meld philosophy and the stock market, but that’s what Damodaran achieves in this blog post on lifecycles, specifically as they relate to Microsoft and BlackBerry /quotes/zigman/19622165 /quotes/nls/bbry BBRY . “A Chinese saying, that we are all born, grow old, get sick and the die (生, 老, 病, 死 ), which provides an unvarnished assessment of the cycle of human life, can be extended to businesses as well,” he wrote.

After running through the reasons he believes Microsoft’s quest for growth will be value-destructive, he brings it all home with a personal touch. “I will one day be in my Blackberry/Microsoft phase of life,” he wrote. “I can only pray that when that phase arrives,  I will have the grace to do an orderly winding down of my activities and not keep reaching back in time for the glory of bygone days. In the meantime, I will get my revenge on time by using it as productively as I can.” Is it dusty in here?

Random reads: The first Indian-American Miss America opens up her nerdy, hot self after Twitter goes all “not American enough” on her.

Twitter catfight. Keep it classy, RiRi.

These 24 geniuses collect $625,000 each from the MacArthur Foundation.

If you liked that Russian drivers video,  you’ll love the antics of the pedestrians.

While Ted Cruz was engaged in a fantasy battle with Hitler, the dead Nazi was probably rolling over in his grave when Usain Bolt showed up at Oktoberfest.




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