1. Market .......... are nursing a bad case of whiplash: most of the 42 strategists surveyed by 'Business Week' a year ago saw their year end forecasts surpassed in the first few months of 1996 — the consensus view then was for the Dow Jones to rise 5% and end the year at 5430, but the Dow passed 5430 in early February.

2. Long-struggling Randall Park Mall now is in the hands of a Raleigh, N.C., real estate investor who specializes in buying ailing malls and who, until earlier this year, owned Euclid SQuare Mall; investor Haywood Whichard bought Randall Park for the type of price that gives spice to the life of real estate ..........

3. One reason traders are moving to the Forex is the momentum and longevity of trends: currencies tend to trend 1,000 pips or more in a direction, and then move back 1,000 pips or more within a 4- to 6-week period, and this type of movement gives the position trader a great opportunity for .......... the market.

4. If the total asset value of your portfolio averaged $1 million and the total value of assets sold during the year equals $200,000, then the portfolio .......... is 20% or one fifth.

5. The purchase of YouTube by Google for $1.65bn (883m) is just the latest in a series of high-profile, high-value deals among internet firms, but does it mean that we are entering another .......... boom era, like the one in the late 1990s that ended in a stock- market collapse?

6. The 1980s was a decade of corporate .......... as companies sought to buy out or build strategic alliances with competitors; nearly $1.3 trillion was spent on corporate mergers in the 1980s, more than the annual economic output of the UK.

7. The Act also restores the power of local governments to issue .......... bonds, which are general obligation bonds payable from enterprise funds or from a special revenue source or both, with the general obligation of the local government acting as a back-up security.

8. Dennis N. Abbott, a former trader at BP, admitted that he carried out a strategy to buy large quantities of February 2004 TET propane to become the dominant long-holder of TET propane; he intended that the purchasing strategy would .......... the market by reducing the supply, permitting him to sell propane at an artificially inflated price.

9. Almost 10 years after Telfonos de Mxico (TMX), Mexico's 800-pound .........., was privatized, Mexicans still find reasons to hate the phone company; although the Mexican market has been open to competition for four years, the company is still a quasi-monopoly.

10. Since it is nearly Christmas, I thought I would write something about the Boston Snow .......... : the theory is that if there is snow in Boston on Christmas day then the price of stocks will go up for the coming new year.