Financial Markets and Economy
Dollar, oil and Fed to drive stocks as earnings and data take backseat (Market Watch)
The troika of dollar, oil and the Federal Reserve will continue to hold sway over the stock market in a comparatively quiet week for corporate earnings and economic data, according to analysts.
“The dollar will be very much a part of market conversation and, given the stronger economic data this week, we will watch to see what happens with the dollar,” said Quincy Krosby, market strategist at Prudential Financial.
Russian oil output highest in 30 years ahead of Doha meeting (Business Insider)
Russia's oil production rose 0.3 percent to 10.91 million barrels per day in March, its highest level in nearly 30 years, raising questions over Moscow's commitment to freeze output ahead of a producers' meeting in Doha later in April.
The More Unique Your Portfolio, The Greater Its Potential (Investor Field Guide)
If there is a lot of overlap between your portfolio and the market, there is only so much alpha you can earn. This is obvious. Still, when you visualize this potential it sends a powerful message. Active share—the preferred measure of how different a portfolio is from its benchmark—is not a predictor of future performance, but it is a good indicator of any strategy’s potential excess return. As you’ll see below, the higher your active share, the more extreme your performance can be, good and bad.
British manufacturing growth inches up from 34-month low in March – PMI (Yahoo! Finance)
British manufacturing growth edged up in March from its weakest level in nearly three years, a survey showed on Friday, suggesting the sector will contribute little to economic growth in early 2016. The Markit/CIPS manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) rose to 51.0 last month from 50.8 in February, rounding off one of its weakest quarters in the past three years, the survey showed.
What Are Your Trading Principles? (Trader Feed)
Now take a look at how long it took you to think of and write down those five cardinal trading principles. If it took effort to think of them and took you a while to write them down, then you've learned one thing: Your trading principles are not front and center in your mind. If someone asked you to write down principles of healthy eating or principles of how to be successful in a romantic relationship, you would have little problem coming up with your answer. If you have trouble identifying your principles, you're probably trading in an unprincipled manner.
The world is near a 'major turning point' in the currency wars (Daily Reckoning)
Currency wars are like real wars in more ways than one. They can last longer than the combatants expect, and produce unexpected victories and losses. Real wars do not involve all fighting, all the time. There are quiet periods, punctuated by major battles, followed by new quiet periods as the armies rest and regroup.
Adding Alpha With Closed-End Funds (Paul Price, Guru Focus)
Catching a rising market is exhilarating. Outperforming the broad averages provides an even greater rush. Accomplishing that task, without taking on extra risk, is the icing on the cake.
GuruFocus readers know I was bullish back on Jan. 10, just a day before this year’s first real bottom was made. They read my optimistic article regarding the full year back on Jan. 17, when almost nobody was thinking positively about stocks.
Should Hain Celestial Be Your Cup of Tea? (Paul Price, Guru Focus)
This week’s Barron’s made the case for buying natural and organic food maker Hain Celsetial Group (NASDAQ:HAIN). The shares had come down from $70.65 at last year’s peak to under $42.
FY 2015 set a new earnings record at $1.88 per share, and FY 2016 (ends June 30, 2016) EPS appear on track to hit $2.02. I wanted to know why the stock had dropped so badly and whether it was a good buy now.
Politics
How Trump Hacked The Media (Five Thirty Eight)
Donald Trump took over the news cycle on Feb. 26, as he had so many times before. In the morning, the media chatter was about Marco Rubio’s seemingly strong debate in Houston the previous evening in which he’d confronted Trump. By midday, however, there were rumors and reports that Trump would be endorsed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Once Christie, who’d been flown to Trump’s event in Texas surreptitiously, delivered his endorsement late that afternoon, Rubio was swept off the front pages and relegated to sideshow status.
More Than Just a Symbol (The Atlantic)
National polling, primary results, and numerous articles have highlighted the unexpected gap in support that Hillary Clinton is seeing among young women—a demographic that had once been favored to help her clinch the 2016 election. While many of this group’s questions about Clinton’s candidacy focus on an array of issues similar to those brought up by the broader electorate—including her connections with Wall Street and a thorny email investigation—a particular view has emerged among young women: While they are excited about a female president, they want somebody who is more than just a symbol.
More politics from BillMoyers.com's Morning Reads (originally published 4-1-16):
Big Money Push to Help GOP Save Congress From Trump
Holding the line in the states –> "Establishment Republicans and their big-money allies are rushing to build a multistate defense system to protect Senate and House candidates, fearing that the party could lose its hold on Congress if Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket in November," Matea Gold and Paul Kane report at The Washington Post. "The behemoth Koch operation — which aims to spend almost $900 million before the November elections — is now considering abandoning Trump as a nominee and focusing its resources on behalf of GOP congressional candidates."
And Eliza Newlin-Carney writes for The American Prospect, "The money will be concentrated on nine competitive contests in Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Depending on how the GOP presidential primary unfolds, now-safe Republican seats in Arizona and Missouri could come into play as well… Democrats predict that they will be outspent again in this year’s Senate contests, but that they will have enough money to get their message out. If they win, however, it won’t prove that money doesn’t matter — only that even money can’t hold back a tidal wave."
Foreign entanglements –> In his State of the Union address soon after Citizens United came down, Obama said the decision would allow foreign special interests to pour money into our elections — to which Justice Samuel Alito, who had sided with the court's majority, shook his head and appeared to mouth the words "not true." At The Intercept, Jon Schwarz writes, "Alito was right to the extent that Citizens United didn’t change the law that forbids political spending by 'foreign nationals' (which covers foreign governments, corporations, and individuals)… But what Citizens United did do was make it possible for U.S. corporations to spend unlimited amounts directly from their corporate treasuries on electioneering — and the money in corporate treasuries belongs to the company’s shareholders." Many of those shareholders may be the aforementioned "foreign nationals."
FEC commissioner Ellen Weintraub described a plan to change this in The New York Times this week, but acknowledged to Schwarz that Republican commissioners at the famously deadlocked agency will almost certainly prevent her idea from getting very far.
And, at Bloomberg, Bill Allison writes, "A nonprofit with ties to Senator John McCain received a $1 million donation from the government of Saudi Arabia in 2014, according to documents filed with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service… [Public Citizen’s Craig] Holman said that the Clinton Foundation, whose top donors include Australia, Norway, Saudi Arabia and Sweden, may have started the trend of foreign governments donating to nonprofits connected to political figures."
New dog whistle –> At Slate, Jamelle Bouie points to a recent article by Kevin Williamson in the conservative National Review in which Williamson wrote, "If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy… The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die." Bouie observes, "… More whites than ever are sinking toward the bottom, living in the same conditions that have faced black Americans for decades. And suddenly, conservatives are talking about them in the same way…
"The inversion of status, or at least a dramatic decline in status, is happening. National Review did us the service of making that explicit. The big question—perhaps the single largest question of American history—is whether this will inspire empathy and fellow feeling with minorities or just become tinder for the ongoing racial reaction."
Harbinger of things to come? –> Trump won Louisiana, but Cruz has managed to wrangle the system so that he will head to the convention in Cleveland with the majority of the state's delegates. TPM's Tierney Sneed explains what happened — and suggests that the fight over delegates in this state could be the first of many as Republican elites steer toward a contested convention.
And, at our site, Michael Winship takes a hard look at the Democratic Party's system of "superdelegates" — elected officials and party insiders who get a vote at the convention. Most have declared for Clinton but the Sanders campaign is trying to persuade them otherwise.
Taking on the misinformation industry –> David Heath at the Center for Public Integrity: "A group of U.S. senators has asked the National Institutes of Health to make it easier to tell who funds research published in scientific journals. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, on Wednesday released a letter sent to NIH Director Francis Collins asking that the National Library of Medicine make changes to its public database of 25 million journal articles, called PubMed, to reveal conflicts of interest in research." The letter follows reporting by Heath on the ways corporations hire scientists to produce research showing their own products are safe, even when they're not. According to Blumenthal's letter, industry now employs "more scientists than nonprofits, universities and the government combined," and cites "growing concerns about objectivity in numerous scientific disciplines — including nutrition science and research on health risk from chemicals.”
What's the standing record? –> "On Wednesday, The Huffington Post assigned five and a half reporters to look into a roughly 12,000-word transcript of Trump’s town hall event on CNN the night before. It took us hours, but in all, we found 71 separate instances in which Trump made a claim that was inaccurate, misleading or deeply questionable. That’s basically one falsehood every 169 words (counting the words uttered by moderator Anderson Cooper), or 1.16 falsehoods every minute (the town hall lasted an hour, including commercial breaks)."
Morning Reads was written by John Light and edited by Michael Winship. See a story that you think should be included in Morning Reads? Tell us in the comments!
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Technology
Nintendo’s first mobile app is a Kafkaesque exercise in madness (Quartz)
On Mar. 31, Nintendo’s first mobile app, a strange question-and-answer social network called Miitomo, launched in the US. It’s been available in Japan for a few weeks, and according to Nintendo, it was downloaded over 1 million times in the first three days there.
The Blink Board is the lightest and cheapest electric skateboard yet (The Verge)
Electric skateboards are an exciting new technology that is currently being hampered by cost. Few companies offer boards below the $1,000 mark, which is five to ten times as expensive as a traditional skateboard or longboard. Price is such an issue with electric skateboards right now that I was recently served a banner ad that prompted me to sign up for a monthly financing program just to buy one.
Health and Life Sciences
Coffee, Decaf, Espresso, Or Instant: All Brews May Lower Colon Cancer Risk (Forbes)
This has certainly been a good decade for coffee lovers. Far from the guilty pleasure we once believed it, coffee has in recent years not only been exonerated, but it’s practically been heralded a health food. Studies have linked it to reduced risk of heart disease, certain cancers, diabetes, depression, and even Parkinson’s disease and dementia. But there’s been some discussion about whether all types of coffee are created equal when it comes to health benefits, since the active compounds may be more or less present in, say, boiled vs. brewed or caffeinated vs. decaffeinated coffees. Now, a new study suggests that coffee of any description seems to offer some level of protection against colon cancer.
Life on the Home Planet
The Secret Money Behind ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ (Wall Street Journal)
Despite the star power of Leonardo DiCaprio and director Martin Scorsese, the 2013 hit movie “The Wolf of Wall Street” took more than six years to get made because studios weren’t willing to invest in a risky R-rated project.
The enormous carbon footprint of food that we never even eat (Washington Post)
Discussions about how to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions frequently center on clean energy, more efficient transportation and sustainable agriculture. But research suggests that if we really want to pay attention to our carbon footprints, we should also be focusing on another, less-talked-about issue: the amount of food we waste each day.
Parrots Are a Lot More Than ‘Pretty Bird’ (NY Times)
Juan F. Masello never intended to study wild parrots. Twenty years ago, as a graduate student visiting the northernmost province of Patagonia in Argentina, he planned to write his dissertation on colony formation among seabirds.
