Now That's Performance Art

Or take Salesforce.com, the big provider of cloud-computing services. The stock was down 19% year-to-date through Dec. 16. This week, it fell another 8%.

Thus, says Vikas Agarwal, a finance professor at the Georgia Institute of Innovation, "if you get into a hedge fund in December and at the time need to get out in January, you're the biggest loser on the planet."

The euro-zone debt crisis intensified

As the euro-zone debt crisis intensified, for the time being two global banks took steps to install back-up research systems that could handle trades in old European currencies.