A wealthy guy about to turn 58 who arranges to sell a slug of his employer’s stock to take a few eggs out of the company basket is a pretty routine bit of personal financial planning.

Yet when the guy is Google Inc. (GOOG) executive chairman Eric Schmidt, when the 42% slug of his stake that might hit the market is worth $2.5 billion and the news of the sale plan comes with the stock at an all-time high, some reflex questions pop up about whether it makes for a sell signal.

Well, it doesn’t - not by the evidence of Schmidt’s motivation, the negligible impact the sales would have on the stock or the fundamental story that lifted Google shares to a new peak above $785 before backing off to below $780 Monday.

In a regulatory filing, Schimdt detailed his intention to unload up to 3.2 million Google shares – 42% of his personal interest and about 1% of the entire company. This automatic selling plan, under which he can sell at preset intervals over the next year, was set on paper Nov. 15.

Whether the board of Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) is closely studying a plan to break the company apart or not, investors would be wise to focus on the prospects for corporate bust-ups.

Not because they offer compelling drama or represent a rare admission of management failure, but because separating discrete businesses from a parent company is an often logical and profitable move.

Unlike on network TV, where series spinoffs rarely distinguish themselves, on Wall Street the stocks of spun-off companies as a group consistently score hits. The Bloomberg Spin-Off Index, which tracks the stocks of hived-off corporate divisions, is up 41% in the past year, compared with about 12% for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

This ripping gain was particularly pronounced, but the outperformance of spun-out stocks was no fluke. In the 10 years through Dec. 31, an actively managed institutional spinoff strategy of asset manager Horizon Kinetics outpaced the market return by more than seven percentage

Having already logged its best January since 1994 with a 5.8% gain, the Dow Jones Industrial Average started February by tagging the 14,000 mark Friday for the first time since October 2007. That followed the Standard & Poor's 500 index's recent summit of the 1500 level, the market’s other notable climb past round-number altitudes.

So far in 2013, the "risk" has resided in over-thinking the situation by focusing on the potential pitfalls and complications that might arise from a slow-growth economy, peak corporate profit margins, policy dysfunction and stock prices that had already doubled since the March 2009 market bottom.

Instead, the straightforward rationale for buying stocks has prevailed in recent weeks: Inflation is tame, economic growth stable, companies have posted better earnings, investors are under-exposed to stocks and money remains cheap.

Given this backdrop, the employment numbers for January, released on Friday morning, spoke to the optimists the words they most

It’s surprisingly easy to pledge a trillion dollars toward a favored cause. The money, of course, doesn’t always cooperate by hustling along the promised path.

There are essentially two pools of about $1 trillion sitting in places where lots of people feel it doesn’t belong. So they are calling for it to move elsewhere.

A trillion dollars is approximately the cumulative amount that investors have shoveled into bond mutual funds since 2008, while pulling a net $400 billion or so from stock funds. The popular market prediction for this year is for this money to begin hastily shifting back toward stocks, which is one reason lots of market commentators got overexcited in extrapolating two weeks of strong stock-fund contributions this month.

The other trillion-dollar stash is on the books of the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, which have spent the past several years allowing cash to pile up as they focused on expense control to pad profit margins, rather than hiring and

State Street Global Advisors threw a 20^th anniversary party this week for its pioneering SPDR S&P 500 Trust (SPY), which ushered in the exchange-traded-fund era.

And rightly so: The flagship “Spyder” ETF is among the most successful investment products ever, rising to $123 billion in assets, trading 144 million shares a day and anchoring an industry that has gone from zero to $1.4 trillion in two decades.

ETFs are the rare instrument that work equally well both for eye-blink day traders and buy-forever tortoise investors by combining near-frictionless liquidity, fidelity to their underlying indexes, low expenses and tax advantages.

And yet the popularity and financial heft of ETFs have created some distortions related to the way indexes are fashioned to accommodate the funds.

The "free-float" formula

Standard & Poor’s several years ago began assigning companies weights in the S&P 500 index according to their “free float” market value, counting only the shares that trade freely and

As privately compiled economic numbers go, the Conference Board's monthly consumer confidence index enjoys a pretty high profile. Maybe that's because its name promises something essential about the prospects of an economy that is commonly said to be 70% reliant on household consumption patterns.

Yet the data in recent years have been of little use either in divining the fortunes of retailers and restaurants, or in handicapping stock prices in the day or month they are released.

Tuesday's unexpectedly steep drop in consumer confidence well below forecasts and to its lowest level since November 2011 illustrates how the number speaks quite softly in the market. The S&P 500 index, as is its recent habit, is drifting gently higher. And the Consumer Discretionary Select Sector SPDR fund (XLY) was off marginally, a few pennies from its all-time high. The 10-year Treasury note, meantime, held its recent backup in yields toward 1.99% rather than declining as it would if fresh consumer stress

The only real reason the lazy little market pullback early Monday merits notice at all is that it came after eight straight winning trading sessions and as the broad indexes were pushing against all-time highs. That, and the fact that the very same calm, clockwork ascent of recent weeks has so many traders and investors expecting, and even pleading for, a pullback -- either to buy at more comfortable prices or capture some overdue downside returns.

Whether this shallow sag in the Standard & Poor's 500 index -- of no more than 0.4% so far -- builds into that much-awaited correction is impossible to say. Yes, in the short term stocks seem overstretched, bullish sentiment is percolating and the market strength is gaining the attention of the non-financial media, just as some high-stakes economic data will arrive this week.

Even a sharp and sudden pullback (the most common kind) probably wouldn't be an important market top, though, given sturdy credit conditions and plausibly bullish

The only real reason the lazy little market pullback early Monday merits notice at all is that it came after eight straight winning trading sessions, and as the broad indexes were pushing against all-time highs. That, and the fact that the very same calm, clockwork ascent of recent weeks has so many traders and investors expecting, and even pleading for, a pullback - either to buy at more comfortable prices or capture some overdue downside returns.

Whether this shallow sag in the Standard & Poor's 500 index, of no more than 0.4% so far, builds into that much-awaited correction is impossible to say. Yes, in the short term stocks seem overstretched, bullish sentiment is percolating and the market strength is gaining the attention of the non-financial media, just as some high-stakes economic data will arrive this week.

Even a sharp and sudden pullback (the most common kind) probably wouldn't be an important market top, though, given sturdy credit conditions and plausibly bullish