Financial Markets and Economy
Bull Market in U.S. Stocks Goes AWOL as History Rewards Patience (Bloomberg)
For investors getting antsy after a yearlong stretch in which U.S. stocks have gone nowhere, patience may yet be a virtue.
That sound you hear is $100 billion getting ready to charge back into the Chinese stock market (Business Insider)
Here's another reason to expect a Chinese stock market rally in the near future: China's pension fund is getting back in the game and bringing $100 billion with it. This totals 90% of the country's social security pool, and the news is China's state media.
The 89% Pay Cut That Brought Trump-Mania to America's Heartland (Bloomberg)
Prior to Nafta, trade between the U.S. and Mexico was a relatively tame affair. The two sides alternated between deficits and surpluses—small figures, typically no bigger than a few billion dollars. U.S. exports quickly jumped after the accord went into effect in 1994, but the imports pouring in from Mexico climbed faster, and by 2015, the U.S. was posting a deficit of almost $60 billion. (With China, the U.S.’s largest trading partner, the gap has ballooned to over $360 billion a year.)
Robert E. Scott of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank critical of free-trade deals, estimates these deficits with Mexico alone have cost 850,000 Americans their jobs.
Oil Enthusiasts Stay Out of Rally Led by Shrinking Bearish Bets (Bloomberg)
Oil enthusiasts haven’t been jumping on board the latest rally.
Oil Firms Slow Exploration to Weather Low-Price Era (Wall Street Journal)
The world’s biggest oil companies are draining their petroleum reserves faster than they are replacing them—a symptom of how a deep oil-price decline is reshaping the energy industry’s priorities.
U.S. job gains keeping economy from grinding to a halt (Market Watch)
Retailers and manufacturers are hurting. Companies have cut back on investment as profits fall. And the economy is likely to show disappointing growth again in the first three months of 2016.
And yet there’s no need to fret, economists say. As long as the U.S. keeps adding 200,000-plus new jobs a month, the danger of recession is remote.
China and India are changing the game for oil and gas (Business Insider)
As the current oil price crisis leads to some game-changing upheavals in the global energy market, Asia’s two powerhouses, China and India, are taking advantage of the supply glut to rewrite the long-established rules of business.
Saudi Arabia Sets A $20-$40 Price Range For Crude Oil, For Now (Forbes)
Saudi Arabia has found itself between a rock and a hard place lately. When it comes to the direction of the price of crude oil, that is.
Japan looks to kickstart 'fintech' revolution (Reuters)
A laggard in embracing the 'fintech', or financial technology, revolution, Japan is set to ease investment restrictions that could free up the flow of capital in an economy sitting on an estimated $9 trillion in individuals' cash deposits.
Strict regulation, easy access to credit due to rock-bottom interest rates, and weak demand for innovative financial services from a risk-averse population that still prefers cash to credit cards, have strangled fintech's advance in Japan.
Gold Sinks to Lowest in a Month as Dollar's Rally Blunts Allure (Bloomberg)
Gold has been thrown onto the defensive by a resurgent dollar, sinking to the lowest in more than a month as the U.S. currency’s rally hurts the allure of the metal that’s been the best-performing commodity of 2016.
"If China Devalues By 20% The World Is Over, Everything Hits A Wall" (Zero Hedge)
Once upon a time Hugh Hendry was one of the world's most prominent financial skeptics, arguing with anyone who would listen that the status quo is doomed and that central planning will never work.
Marijuana Could Have a Surprising Economic Impact, New Report Shows (Fox Business)
Yesterday we witnessed the release of Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, a highly anticipated movie depicting an unstoppable force and the proverbial immovable object. But what many people might overlook is that we've been witnessing a real-life battle for years beyond the confines of the movie theater between a seemingly unstoppable force known as marijuana, and the federal government which has maintained its position as the immovable object.
Visualizing Why Manufacturing Jobs Aren't Coming Back (Zero Hedge)
The market for industrial robot installations has been on a skyward trend since 2009, and it is not expected to slow down any time soon. According to the World Robotics 2015 report, the market for industrial robots was approximated at $32 billion in 2014, and in the coming years it is expected to continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of at least 15%.
Japan still can't generate inflation (Business Insider)
Japan is still struggling to generate inflation three years into its extraordinary policy assault on low growth and deflation.
Consumer prices remained flat in February, while annual inflation rose by 0.3pc – still a far cry from the Bank of Japan's official 2pc inflation target . Core inflation – which excludes fresh food and energy – rose by 1.1pc last month, unchanged from February.
"Worse Than 2008" World Trade Collapses To 10 Year Lows (Zero Hedge)
The Merchandise World Trade Monitor by the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, a division of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, tracks global imports and exports in two measures: by volume and by unit price in US dollars. And the just released data for January was a doozie beneath the lackluster surface.
What the Valeant saga tells us about the modern hedge fund (Zero Hedge)
The one topic that dominated conversations in the bars and steakhouses of mid-town New York in the past week was the spectacular events that unfolded at Valeant Pharmaceuticals.
Investors in the Canadian drug-maker, once hailed as a market darling with a visionary chief executive, endured a tumultuous seven days after an earnings confession sent the stock price tumbling 50 per cent in a single session.
Chinese firms hiring less, capex hits five-year low: Beige Book private survey (Business Insider)
Capital expenditure by Chinese companies fell to the lowest in at least five years in the first quarter, a private survey showed, highlighting persistent weakness in the economy even as the government ratchets up policy support to head off a sharper slowdown.
China Industrial Profits Rise 4.8%, Ending 7-Month Losing Streak (Bloomberg)
Chinese industrial profits snapped a seven-month losing streak in the first weeks of this year, while the data also showed companies fell deeper in debt while inventories grew.
Everyone else on Wall Street is dead wrong about these 23 stocks (Business Insider)
It's usually easier to move with the crowd, even on Wall Street.
The Seven Countries Most Vulnerable To A Debt Crisis (Forbes)
For decades, some of the most important data about market economies was simply unavailable: the level of private debt. You could get government debt data easily, but (with the outstanding exception of the USA—and also Australia) it was hard to come by.
Random Observations (Trader Feed)
If you decompose market behavior into a linear, trend component and one or more cyclical components, you can identify optimal time horizons for holding positions. Those optimal horizons are much longer than traders and portfolio managers typically hold. Most people hold positions for shorter-than-optimal periods because of such factors as the need to trade, the fear of losing money, overly tight risk management, etc.
Emerging-Market ETFs Add $1.45 Billion in Sixth Week of Gains (Bloomberg)
Investors added $1.45 billion to U.S. exchange-traded funds that buy emerging market stocks and bonds last week in the longest stretch of gains since May.
Politics
Sanders Says He's Seized Momentum After Crushing Caucus Wins (Bloomberg)
Bernie Sanders said he’s seized the momentum in the race for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination after trouncing Hillary Clinton in three caucuses.
Trump Is a Very European Strongman (Bloomberg View)
U.S. politics today presents, to this foreign observer at least, a very un-American spectacle. A country originally built on immigration is awash with popular hatred against immigrants. A candidate of the right rails against free trade and foreigners, while that of the left proclaims his faith in socialism. Xenophobia is rife. Class war seems perilously close to the surface.
Fidel Castro Slams Obama Following Historic Cuba Visit (Reuters via Huffington Post)
Retired leader Fidel Castro accused U.S. President Barack Obama of sweet-talking the Cuban people during his visit to the island last week and ignoring the accomplishments of Communist rule, in an opinion piece carried by all state-run media on Monday.
Obama’s visit was aimed at consolidating a detente between the once intractable Cold War enemies and the U.S. president said in a speech to the Cuban people that it was time for both nations to put the past behind them and face the future “as friends and as neighbors and as family, together.”
Georgia governor vetoes bill favored by foes of same-sex marriage (LA Times)
Amid mounting pressure from multinational corporations, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal on Monday vetoed a contentious bill framed as protecting religious freedom but that critics warned would lead to anti-gay discrimination.
The bill, dubbed the Free Exercise Protection Act, would have given faith-based organizations in Georgia more leeway to deny services to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Supporters said the measure was meant to protect religious freedom, while critics described it as "deplorable" and "divisive.”
The Slow, Inevitable Collapse Of The Two-Party System? (Oriental Review)
In this election year, it’s clear that a seismic political shift is rumbling through America. Widespread discontent for the status quo is surfacing from both the left and right. A year ago, it would have been impossible to envision a card-carrying socialist and a pre-WWII style populist mounting legitimate presidential campaigns (much less without Super PACs). Now, far-left and far-right sentiments are emerging from the underground as perfectly palatable options to Middle America.
Technology
The Singularity and the Neural Code (Scientific American)
Like heaven, the Singularity comes in many versions, but most involve bionic brain boosting. At first, we'll become cyborgs, as brain chips soup up our perception, memory, and intelligence and eliminate the need for annoying TV remotes. Eventually, we will abandon our flesh-and-blood selves entirely and upload our digitized psyches into computers. We will then dwell happily forever in cyberspace, where, to paraphrase Woody Allen, we'll never need to look for a parking space.
GameStop Needs a New Game to Play (Fox Business)
You have to be brave if you're going to own shares of GameStopahead of the video game retailer posting quarterly results. It happened in August, when the stock tumbled 8% the day after posting uninspiring results for the fiscal second quarter. It happened three months later when the stock opened 16% lower after a rough fiscal third quarter.
Netflix's Grand, Daring, Maybe Crazy Plan to Conquer the World (Wired)
Late into the night on St. Patrick’s Day, Netflix hosted a makeshift “war room” at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters. Engineers and product wranglers sat loosely around a long, U-shaped formation of desks, monitoring diagnostics and Hipchat conversations. Linguists and translators patrolled a ring of television sets to check subtitles and dubs in a dozen languages. Series star Charlie Cox was there, flanked by Netflix’s social media czars, firing tweets from his character’s account. They were all gathered for one of Netflix’s biggest moments so far this year…
Learning Larry Page's Alphabet (Fast Company)
"It’s kind of counterintuitive," Google cofounder Larry Page remarked a couple of years ago. "Normally in a business, you think about, ‘What’s the adjacent thing that I can do?’ But maybe you can actually do more projects that are less related to each other."
We will all have personal robot assistants within the next decade (Business Insider)
Figuring out where to live is never easy. Do you settle in the house next to the elementary school or the one a few miles away that's cheaper?
You decide to confide in your robotic assistant, who asks you a series of questions about what's most important to you: Nearby schools, bars, or parks? A price range? A home for two or seven?
Limitless Linux projects await with VoCore’s Mini Linux Computer (The Next Web)
Robotics fans and tinkerers around the globe are excited about the VoCore Mini Linux Computer, a versatile board that could be seen as a cousin to the Raspberry Pi. The open-source mini Linux machine offers a world of creative options, whether to invent a new device, build a motherboard, repurpose old speakers, setting up a smart home and more. It can even be used as a standalone device running OpenWrt or as part of a larger system.
Health and Life Sciences
Chocolate-killing fungus skips sex to clone (Futurity)
A fungal disease that poses a serious threat to cacao plants—the source of chocolate—reproduces by cloning, a new study finds.
The Benefits of Spicing Up a Breast-Feeding Mother’s Diet (NY Times)
The variety of flavors that you eat during pregnancy go into your blood and then into the amniotic fluid, which the baby is constantly drinking, in utero, and the flavors that you eat while nursing cross from the blood vessels that supply the mammary glands into the breast milk. So instead of restricting the maternal diet, there’s now good evidence that by eating a wide variety of healthy and tasty foods during these periods, we are actually doing our babies a major favor.
Life on the Home Planet
Suicide bomber targeting Christians kills 65, mostly women and children, in Pakistan park (Reuters)
A suicide bomber killed at least 65 people, mostly women and children, at a park in Lahore on Sunday in an attack claimed by a Pakistani Taliban faction which said it had targeted Christians.
U.S. Quake Forecast Includes Human-Induced Temblors for First Time (Bloomberg)
The U.S. agency responsible for monitoring earthquakes has for the first time issued a short-term seismic forecast that includes both natural and human-induced risks.
Imported Mud to the Rescue in San Francisco Bay (Scientific American)
Along the San Francisco Bay, just beyond the din of gridlock, industry and residential lawn mowers, an ecological transformation is quietly unfolding. A glance at satellite images or out of the flight window reveals a striking quilted landscape of green, red, orange and yellow colors hemmed to Silicon Valley.
