What sort of cognitive dissonance does it cause when you read a new post in February and the title contains a data in January? Whatamess!

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A lot of recent financial news has focused around the spreading European sovereign debt crisis. The big question many Americans now try to answer is what this means for them on a day-to-day basis. At the same time as this is happening, the Fed has declared that they will endorse a policy of more transparency, opening up their forecasts to scrutiny and understanding.

Don’t Quit Your Day Job is a site which varies between many types of articles – Personal Finance, Politics, Investing, Economics, Random. One of those categories, Investing, has been given short shrift in order to make way for more articles in the other categories. Today we plant a stake; ‘Investing’ will now have a featured article monthly, where we’ll use options to try to determine the outlook for the S&P 500 in the near future. Since this is the first article, let’s discuss the method we will use to predict movement.

You’re back reading the Weekender! Happy weekend!

Let’s dig into the best articles of the week!

Well, Newt Gingrich took down previous favorite Mitt Romney in a shocker in South Carolina. What can we say about the upset? These exit poll posts will continue until morale improves!

You can read the cross-tabs here.

The Economist posted a not-so-interesting graph relating a year’s stock market returns to it’s Chinese Zodiac sign. I would imagine that a random number generator making up returns for clusters of numbers of years since 1900 and ranking the outcomes would produce a similar outcome… but let’s play devil’s advocate and see if there is something to be said from these numbers.

You’ve got an IRA, right? This site has been preaching the tax benefits of both traditional and Roth IRAs since the beginning… and we aren’t going to stop now. So hopefully you’ve been diligently saving in your IRA, with the hope that some day you’ll have a couple million dollars in there (or at least a good amount of funds you can tap in retirement).

Mitt Romney, it was revealed in financial disclosure documents, has an Individual Retirement Account worth somewhere between $20.7 and $101.6 million dollars. Note that IRAs have a small limit when compared to 401(k)s and other employer retirement accounts, so this came as somewhat of a shock to people with IRAs. How did Mr. Romney achieve such an impressive sum in his retirement account?

Can you ever forgive us for blacking out the site Wednesday? You can? Okay… then hopefully you’ll forgive a bit more ranting on the issue in this edition of the Weekender (most of it way below the fold.)

Well, S&P has finally done it – it cut the credit rating of nine European countries in response to the sovereign debt crisis in Europe. Two of those countries, France and Austria, formerly held AAA ratings, the highest grade which S&P assigns to sovereign debt (read: the lowest default risk). You know that DQYDJ thinks rating the debt of countries is silly because risk (default and debasement/inflation) is already priced in, but let’s humor S&P and take a look at how the world’s debt ratings now stack up. You can also see a similar map from the US debt ratings cut back in August.

That didn’t take long, did it?

I gave you this rambling post on college major salaries a few months back. Today I present to you a fresh perspective from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (pdf). It breaks down the categories a little bit differently, but now that we’ve got some hard 2011 data you know the DQYDJians demand a graph!