Financial Markets and Economy
This Market Cycle Diagram Explains The Best Time To Buy Stocks (Value Walk)
Is it possible to time the market cycle to capture big gains?
Big U.S. banks grapple with costs as they face an ominous 2016 (Reuters)
Five large U.S. banks cut more than $5 billion from their expenses during the first three months of the year, but it was still not enough to stop the financial bleeding in what was by many measures the worst quarter for Wall Street since the financial crisis.
China's Bubble 'Like Trying To Diffuse A Bomb' (Forbes)
According to a recently released book written by finance scholar Ning Zhu, unless China’s central government is able to quickly confront the multi-faceted and intertwined challenges facing the country’s economy, the outcome will be catastrophic.
Growth Trends – Looking For Growth In The Right Places (Value Walk)
When the market is fixated on short-term macroeconomic trends, investors should think differently. Look for companies and industries that benefit from distinctive long-term growth trends and that aren’t held hostage by a country’s macroeconomic fortunes.
GDPNow Holds Steady at 0.3% as Low Inflation Adds to GDP, Housing Subtracts (Mish Shedlock)
The Atlanta Fed GDPNow Forecast remained at +0.3% following recent economic reports.
Emerging-Market Assets Roar Back to Life (Bloomberg)
The best rally in emerging-market stocks and bonds in seven years is sending bears back into hibernation.
Unconstrained Bond Funds: Not Worth the Risks (Mutual Funds)
Faced with a low interest rate environment since the financial crisis of 2008, many investors have begun to seek higher returns than those available from safe fixed-income investments such as Treasuries and FDIC-insured CDs.
Why Investors In Alternatives Perform So Poorly (A Wealth of Common Sense)
There was a story in Bloomberg today about the University of California’s endowment fund and their latest moves to shake up the portfolio.
Low Productivity Driven By Less Competition? (Ritholtz)
I have written about the productivity paradox previously. Perhaps thats why I found this discussion by Torsten Sløk so intriguing. He looks at competition as a key driver of innovation and inventions of new products, and observes that “Maybe one reason why productivity growth remains low is because of the decline in competitive pressures in the US economy.”
Meet the Norwegian Currency’s Oil Buffer (Wall Street Journal)
When oil price gyrations hit currencies, it’s good to have a cushion to soften the blows.
ETFs’ ‘Spider Woman’ Argues for a Bitcoin Fund (Wall Street Journal)
When one of the first exchange-traded funds launched in 1993, securities lawyer Kathleen Moriarty received a gift from her legal assistant: a Spider-Man comic-book cover altered to depict the superhero facing off against a hulking Securities and Exchange Commission.
What to do when it’s time to prune your funds portfolio (Market Watch)
Sully is a retired teacher who is proud of the mutual-fund portfolio he has amassed with his life’s savings.
But he could be just and proud and happy if it had half the funds.
Mean Reversion From the Lost Decade (A Wealth of Common Sense)
A decent bull market sandwiched between two of the most brutal bear markets in history produced one of the worst 10 year stretches ever in the S&P 500* in the first decade of the 21st century. Many investors labeled the 2000s as the “lost decade” for stocks. Considering the S&P lost around 1% a year in this time, it’s hard to argue with that classification.
Amazon Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg for Netflix When It Comes to Competition (Fortune)
Amazon caused a significant tremor in Netflix’s share price earlier this week by announcing that its Prime Video streaming service will become a standalone offering and go head-to-head with Netflix. But the online retailer is far from the only competitor about which Netflix needs to be concerned. Much larger predators have eyes on the company’s market.
The Ups and Downs of Americans' Finances (The Atlantic)
Neal Gabler’s beautiful and brave exploration of his financial life captures many of the reasons that millions of Americans live precarious financial lives: stagnating wages, the rising costs of a middle class life, and an overreliance on debt to fund the gap. But, there is another, more hidden cause of financial insecurity: volatility. In the U.S. Financial Diaries project, Jonathan Morduch and I found that, on average, households in our sample experienced more than 5 months a year in which their income was 25 percent more or 25 percent less than the average. The same was true for spending.
Quality Woes a Challenge for Tesla’s High-Volume Car (Wall Street Journal)
Anne Carter had her Tesla Motors Inc. Model X sport-utility vehicle for a few days before the $138,000 electric vehicle suffered a mechanical malfunction.
Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs as PC Demand Slumps (NY Times)
Intel, reeling from a collapse in demand for personal computers, said on Tuesday that it would cut 12,000 jobs, about 11 percent of its work force.
France bills McDonald's $341 million for unpaid tax (Reuters)
French authorities have sent McDonald's France a 300 million euro ($341 million) bill for unpaid taxes on profits believed to have been funneled through Luxembourg and Switzerland, business magazine L'Expansion reported on Tuesday.
Politics
Republican Party No Longer Pro-Business, Says Billionaire Michael Bloomberg (Huffington Post)
The Grand Old Party is no longer the party of business, Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday.
“The Republican Party is becoming the party of labor,” this city’s former mayor said in a keynote speech at the Bloomberg Philanthropies What Works Cities Summit at Manhattan’s ritzy Lotte New York Palace. “The Republican Party does not represent business anymore.”
Why Parties, Not Voters, Choose Their Nominees (Bloomberg View)
Supporters of Bernie Sanders are complaining about how restrictive the rules are for Tuesday's New York's primary. It is a closed election — only registered Democrats can vote for Democratic candidates — and the deadline for registered voters to switch affiliations was way back in October.
New York’s Trump-Sized Identity Crisis (Politico)
Donald Trump as the GOP front-runner has surprised in a lot of ways this election season. But it is his lead in New York that is particularly striking—dramatizing just how much the electorate’s mood has shifted in 2016.
Humor
Nation’s Racists Suddenly Warming Up to New York (Borowitz, NewYorker)
Improving attitudes about New York were not limited to racists, however, as interviews on Tuesday night revealed a sudden warming toward the state among misogynists, xenophobes, and people who enjoy sucker-punching others in the face.
Technology
Scientists want to use nanobots to suck pollutants from the ocean (Business Insider)
Swarms of graphene-coated nanobots could be our best hope yet of cleaning up the murky oceans, with scientists demonstrating that new microscopic underwater warriors can remove up to 95% of lead in wastewater in just 1 hour.
The invention couldn't have come at a better time, with ocean pollution at an all-time high, much of it stemming from industrial activities such as electronics manufacturing.
Valkyrie Might Be The Baddest And Most Gorgeous Plane Ever Made (Popular Science)
David Loury isn’t a classic-car kind of guy. But when he decided to radically redesign the private plane, he turned to luxury automobiles—and their design-forward aesthetic—for inspiration. “Maserati and Mercedes-Benz were the two main cars I looked at, and I engineered ideas and concepts from them,” says the independent aerospace engineer. Those concepts evolved into the Valkyrie: a five-seat, single-piston-engine plane that he calls a “high-tech vehicle of the future.
Health and Life Sciences
Should the U.S. put a ‘red light’ on junk food? (Futurity)
A new analysis suggests a few changes to nutrition labels on food would make it easier for US consumers to make healthier choices.
Adding labels to the front of packages that include a few key ingredients commonly associated with disease—sugar, sodium, and fat—would improve attention to critical nutritional information and selection of foods. The findings support a growing body of research that indicates government-mandated panels, which currently list comprehensive information on the sides of products, can be improved, says Laura Bix, a packaging professor at Michigan State University.
Circumcision May Not Reduce Sensitivity of Penis (NY Times)
Canadian researchers studied 62 generally healthy men ages 18 to 37, 30 of whom had been circumcised as infants, and 32 who remained uncircumcised. The researchers controlled for age, education, occupation and religious affiliation, and concluded that sexual functioning did not differ between the groups. The study is in the Journal of Urology.
Gene-Editing Research in Human Embryos Gains Momentum (Scientific American)
At the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Fredrik Lanner is preparing to edit genes in human embryos. It’s the kind of research that sparked an international frenzy in April last year, when a Chinese team revealed that it had done the world’s first such experiments.
Life on the Home Planet
NOAA: Monthly Temperature Reports Are ‘Sounding Like A Broken Record’ (Think Progress)
Last month was the hottest March on record by far, NOAA confirmed Tuesday. March was 2.2°F above the 20th century average. This anomaly (departure from “normal”) was “the highest monthly temperature departure among all months” in the 1880-2016 record.
