Some interesting articles we’re reading to open up the week:

1.  Death of LaSalle St. From Emily Lambert on the Forbes blog, we learn that the Chicago futures exchanges may have ‘sold out’ to the large NY banks after fighting the good fight for so long in the exchange based vs. over the counter derivatives battle.  That doesn’t sound good for a future crisis…

2.  Commodities Decoupling via the WSJ, a look at how agricultural commodities have far outpaced energies this year, with metals falling roughly in the middle. Similar to our post a few weeks ago (US Dollar/Commodity Divergence), this decoupling is a good thing for multi-market managers who rely on market diversification as a risk control.

3.  Goldman Sachs Predicts Best Commodity Returns for 2011 in Precious Metals via Bloomberg, shows Goldman’s estimate that Gold will rise $300 more in 2011 up to $1,690 an ounce, among other things. If that happens without breaking through the 60-180 day moving average, its a good thing for managed futures holding long metals.

4. 10 Lessons of Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme via Barry Ritholtz’s Big Picture Blog, lists some good common sense rules for evaluating an investment (such as: anything that seems too good to be true, probably is). He misses the obvious lesson we outlined in our last post – which is to avoid funds altogether and opt for individually managed accounts.