Shell Oil and a bunch of its friendly top executives are bringing a genuine old-fashioned dog and ......... show to 50 towns this summer, and their goal is to convince angry consumers that Big Oil is not ripping them off; it's sure to be complete with photo ops and baby kissing, and it ought to be called the Web Minus Zero spin tour.

The ......... indicator gets attention at this time every year due partly to the fact that there are so many fans on Wall Street trading desks; even Bob Stovall, who helped popularize it in the 1970s when he served as investment policy director at Dean Witter Reynolds, admits there's not a lot of logic or validity behind it.

A newer trading strategy is the ......... spread, which is intended to simulate the profits from a power plant; it was possible from 1996 to 2002 to hedge or sell such a spread on Nymex by shorting electric power and buying the fuel used for generation fuel oil, natural gas, or coal.

Dunlop Standard Aerospace Holdings plc announced today that it will make an optional ......... redemption of US$ 23.6 million aggregate principal amount of its 11-7/8% Senior Notes due 2009; the outstanding principal amount of the Senior Notes remaining after this redemption will be US$ 321.4 million.

The critical piece of this puzzle, the element that made it all work, was a transaction called a 'price ......... derivative' between Enron and Raptor, in which Enron committed to give stock to Raptor if Raptor's assets declined in value; but the more Raptor's assets declined, the more of its own stock Enron was required to post.

In a number of ......... marketing cases, a company has approved an email campaign because the marketer promised that it would send only to people who opted in to receive stock announcements; then the company is surprised to learn that the so-called 'opt-in list' is just a standard bulkmailer's list of addresses scraped from Usenet and the Web.

Six-year futures for light sweet oil and natural gas are among the most important indicators of value for oil and gas producers; such a far-sighted view, imperfect as it may be, is not widely available for the refining ........., the margin between crude oil and refined products.

In a ......... takeover, iBank was suddenly history, and its blue, white and yellow marquee will soon be replaced by the blue and white of Unionbank, following the former's multibillion buy-out of the latter's majority shareholders concluded Friday; "The speed in which it was consummated really caught us off guard," quipped an iBank executive.

Technology is better than ever and more people than ever before are using it, but still, technology stock prices keep falling, and Wall Street is overcompensating by giving these stocks the cold shoulder: this is where we've gone astray. and it has more to do with the happenings on Wall Street than with problems on ......... Street.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said yesterday that the U.S. economy is 'going through a ......... patch,' but that it won't hold back a 'broadening' economic expansion that has gained momentum this year.