Financial Markets and Economy
U.S. Stocks Drop as Earnings Start; Dollar Slump Buoys Oil, Gold (Bloomberg)
U.S. equities fell, erasing gains as what is forecast to be the worst American earnings season since the financial crisis gets under way. The dollar tumbled to a nine-month low, boosting commodity prices.
Standby for terrible news from Wall Street (Business Insider)
We are about to get confirmation that earnings growth for America's biggest companies was negative in the first quarter, compared to the same period a year ago.
Options investors cautious as consumer staples earnings loom (Reuters)
Consumer staples stocks have served investors well through the last 12 months of market turmoil, but with quarterly earnings around the corner, activity in the options market spells caution.
By One Measure, U.S. Rates Are Already Negative (Wall Street Journal)
Negative interest rates have swept the globe, from Switzerland to Sweden to Japan.
Wall Street Wages Double in 25 Years as Everyone Else’s Languish (Bloomberg)
Dear Wall Street: Stop complaining about your pay.
Five years after Occupy Wall Street protesters took over Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, spawning a national discussion about the divide between America’s highest and lowest earners, the pay gap has only gotten wider.
Why no economic boost from lower oil prices? (Econbrowser)
Many analysts had anticipated that a dramatic drop in oil prices such as we’ve seen since the summer of 2014 could provide a big stimulus to the economy of a net oil importer like the United States. That doesn’t seem to be what we’ve observed in the data.
Hedge Funds Boost Treasury 10-Year Shorts to Most Since November (Bloomberg)
Hedge funds and other large speculators set the biggest bet against Treasuries in five months as Federal Reserve officials debate when to raise interest rates.
A Fake Freeze on Oil Is Good Enough (Bloomberg View)
In less than a week, major oil-producing nations will meet in Qatar to discuss capping their output. Yet even if they decide to do that, the purpose of the meeting probably has little to do with balancing global supplies. Crude market fundamentals are set for many months to come; the oil producers are more interested in finding a way to manage financial markets' expectations, which have a greater effect on prices.
Take Dividends Over Buybacks (Bloomberg View)
There's been a lot of chatter about stock buybacks the past few years. Some people believe share repurchases are propping up the market; others think this is a myth, or a non-story. There is the claim that buybacks are identical to dividends, but this turns out to be less truein practice than in theory. Some analysts claim dividend stocks arethe new bonds, because dividends represent positive returns and tend to be more reliable than buybacks. Meanwhile, asset managers have been wondering why companies have been buying back shares rather than investing in their underlying businesses.
How Come It’s Still Harder to Become a Hairdresser than a Financial Adviser? (Wall Street Journal)
My column this weekend points out that in an online survey of nearly 500 investors last month, 51% said — incorrectly — that brokers must always act as fiduciaries. Only 44% correctly said that about investment advisers.
Trading Costs & The New Market Averages (A Wealth of Common Sense)
As U.S. stocks and valuations have continued to move higher throughout this latest cycle there has been a growing chorus of intelligent industry observers — beyond the usual fear-mongering perma-bears — who are predicting lower stock market returns in the coming years or even decades for the stock market.
The Grave Danger Behind Investment Concentration (Value Walk)
Great individual wealth has been built through investment concentration, a JPMorgan report notes. But, as 2015 and 2016 has proven with concentrated portfolios from the likes of William Ackman’s Pershing Square and Larry Robbins’ Glenview Capital Management, both of whom, after achieving great success, find themselves at the low end of the returns scale in 2016.
What the Military Can Teach Us About Investing (Fortune Financial Advisor)
Like most armchair generals, I enjoy reading about military history, particularly about strategy and tactics. One thing I've learned, however, is that reading classics such as Carl von Clausewitz's On War and Sun Tzu's The Art of War doesn't just satisfy a curiosity or historical interest. These types of books cover many basic principles that can easily be applied to most endeavors in life. It's one of many reasons why The Art of War is often listed as among the best business books to read.
Politics
How Fox News Unwittingly Destroyed the Republican Party (Huffington Post)
The Republicans, however, have no one to blame but themselves. This is a crisis of their own creation. And it didn’t just happen overnight.
The Republican Party has been fomenting anger and discontent in the base of its own Party for years. The mechanism through which this hate has been disseminated has been the network of extremist media of right-wing talk radio and the Fox News Channel, which is essentially talk radio transposed onto television.
The Ambition of Bernie Sanders (Bloomberg View)
Ambition is the most consistent, yet variable, component of public life. Lincoln and FDR had it, and that was good. Benedict Arnold and Joseph McCarthy had it, too. And that turned out very bad.
Obama Is ‘Pleased’ With Yellen as Economy Shows Signs of Slowing (Bloomberg)
President Barack Obama met with Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on Monday to discuss the U.S. economy amid signs that growth may be slowing as consumers retreat from spending.
Ahead of the afternoon meeting, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest described Obama as "pleased" with Yellen, who he appointed to lead the Fed in 2014.
Technology
This Weird Flying Board Is A Jetpack For Your Feet (Popular Science)
“Flying machine” needs to come back in style. The catch-all term, which conjures up Jules Verne as much as anything else, is the term we need in an age where everything from maglev boards to motorized scooters are hoverboards. “Flying machine” instead captures the simple beauty of a device like Zapata Racing’s Flyboard, an aerial maneuvering platform with a human on top.
How to win friends and influence people (The Economist)
A HUGE thumbs-up, Facebook’s “like” symbol, greets visitors at the entrance to the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, in the heart of Silicon Valley. The imposing sign is crafted from that of a former occupant of the attractive corporate campus, Sun Microsystems, a once high-flying startup that crashed before Facebook moved there in 2011. When employees leave they can see Sun’s name and logo still inscribed on the back of the sign.
Health and Life Sciences
Scientists found 13 'genetic superheroes' who are resistant to inherited diseases — and it could offer hopes for treatments (Business Insider)
They are the genetic equivalent of unicorns: 13 adults with genes for rare disorders that always strike in childhood, yet who never developed the disease.
The genes are not for complex diseases, such as cancer where DNA variants merely raise the risk of developing a disease; these mutations cause the disease — cystic fibrosis or familial dysautonomia, for example — as surely as 22 makes you go bust in blackjack. Or so everyone thought.
12 Ways Your Body Changes How Your Mind Perceives the World (Mental Floss)
Ever since René Descartes, scientists and philosophers have wrestled with the relationship between our minds and our bodies. Today, science and medicine typically assume that our mental processes take place in the head, not the body. But our physical bodies, abilities, and motions actually can bias the conclusions drawn by our mental machinery in strange ways, according to a growing body of research by Jessica Witt at Colorado State University and other psychologists who study human perception and cognition. Our bodies tweak our perceptions in a fascinating range of unexpected ways.
The FDA just approved a new cancer drug — here's what you need to know about it (Business Insider)
The FDA just approved a brand new kind of cancer drug.
The drug, called venetoclax, was approved to treat a subset of people with one of the most common forms of adult leukemia, a type of cancer that affects the blood and bone marrow. It's made by drugmaker AbbVie.
Life on the Home Planet
Why Can't We Plant Trees in Highway Medians? (Scientific American)
The idea of beautifying highway medians with plantings goes back five decades when Lady Bird Johnson pushed the Highway Beautification Act through Congress in 1965. Today, Americans are starting to think about undeveloped land alongside and between roadways as a low cost and widely dispersed strategy for carbon sequestration. Researchers from the Western Transportation Institute (WTI) at Montana State University report that roadside soils and vegetation on federal lands alone are already capturing almost two percent of total U.S. transportation carbon emissions.
