Some hedge funds report gains and losses to customers on a monthly basis, which has led to some talk that perhaps they trade in a way to goose gains at the end of the month and spill over into the beginning of the next month. There may be something to this. One columnist crunched some numbers and found that the Standard & Poor's 500 was up an average of 0.72 percent over the four-day span comprising the last two trading days of a month and the first two of the next. That is considerably better than the 0.56 percent average gain in those same four days if you extend the time frame to the last 25 years before hedge funds existed.

> Here's a New York Post column.