The performance, which included a return to advertising growth at the cable giant after a two-year drought, beat expectations on Wall Street and signaled that the cable industry is weathering a storm of new competition and bouncing back from a deep recession that had raised concerns about consumers cutting back their monthly television, Internet and phone bills.

Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Craig Moffett said Comcast’s first-quarter growth “looks good on virtually every dimension,” noting that even its video subscriber losses were less than expected.

“With telCo incursions now slowing, and household formation likely stabilizing, this could potentially be the front edge of a meaningful trend improvement,” said Moffett.

Comcast Corp. has every reason to remain optimistic, but they should also remain vigilant and not get overconfident–the recession isn’t over yet, which means they aren’t out of trouble yet.

Gold initially extended Friday’s slide overnight, with the June futures hitting a 1 1/2-week low of $1,124.30 an ounce, on “leftover sell orders and some fresh bailing-out instructions” left with trading desks, said Jon Nadler, senior metals analyst at Kitco Metals. The main catalyst continued to be Friday’s news that the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Goldman Sachs with defrauding investors by misstating and omitting key facts about a financial product tied to subprime mortgages.

This prompted a general shift out of so-called riskier assets ranging from equities to commodities such as gold, oil and base metals. But as the day wore on, some of these fears began to fade, said one New York trader, although not due to any specific breaking news.

It looks as if gold is not going to go on a downhill slide, as many investors claimed over the last week. When the price dipped, jewelry manufacturers in India began buying up the metal in order to take advantage of the bargain–this is apparently what caused the minor surge in price today.

Though the software visionary’s net worth rose $13 billion to a whopping $53 billion in the last year, he was ousted from the top of the money bin by Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helu, who took the No. 1 spot on Forbes’ billionaire list this year, with a fortune of $53.5 billion.

Despite this coup, the top 10 richest tech billionaires saw their fortunes rise a collective $55.8 billion over the past year, helped by a surge in the value of technology stocks.

The article, here, details how much billionaires involved in technology benefited from that involvement, and why. The article is a good read and reminder of how powerful technology is.