1. On the NYSE and ASE, the specialist determines the .......... price by looking at his 'book'; he is supposed to select the one price that clears out the maximum number of orders; i.e. by looking at the buy and sell offers and choosing a single price that will execute the most orders (shares).

2. UBS Warburg strategist George Vasic said conversations with soccer moms are good places to gather anecdotal research; "typically, it's a lagging ..........," he says, "if they're asking me about resource or tech stocks, you know the phenomenon has run its course and has already peaked."

3. Traditionally, there is a premium in which the leading television station gains a bigger share of the advertising market than its audience share — hence the name of this effect among media buyers, 'the power .......... '.

4. The stock market has done a remarkable swoon, reducing some sectors to ' .......... bit' stocks (you know... 3/8, 1/2, 3/4) and it would appear (if you read, watch or listen to much of the media reports) that we are in for even more troubling times.

5. Michael Lee Davis of Plano was convicted Wednesday of felony charges that identified him as the ringleader of a 'clean .......... ' scam that led insurance companies to issue more than $5 million worth of life insurance policies to people with life-threatening illnesses.

6. Nuclear investigators from the US and other nations now believe that the .......... market network run by the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan was selling not only technology for enriching nuclear fuel, but also some of the darkest of the bomb makers' arts: the engineering secrets needed to fabricate nuclear warheads.

7. I do have a big problem with the fact that Yahoo! has failed to articulate a clear strategy about how the company will be dominant for years to come independently; doing lots of .......... acQuisitions is not a strategy (although I like and use MyBlogLog, Flickr, del.icio.us).

8. To announce that a forex trader wants to buy he/she may say or type ' .......... '; this would also be known as taking the offer.

9. I've been trying to understand why General Motors is so oppressed by .......... costs, and I think I finally have got it: GM, a company with 300,000 employees, is supporting the number of retirees appropriate for a company with a workforce of 800,000, almost triple the size.

10. The .......... for the Google IPO appeared in 'The Wall Street Journal' on September 15, 2004; it showed an IPO date of August 18, 2004, the day the issue was priced, and a total sale of 22,534,678 Class A shares, somewhat less than the full overallotment would have produced.