Financial Markets and Economy
Oil Slips After Touching $50 a Barrel for First Time This Year (Bloomberg)
Oil fell after touching $50 a barrel for the first time in more than six months Thursday as U.S. crude supplies and production declined.
U.S. panel launches trade secret theft probe into Chinese steel (Business Insider)
The U.S. International Trade Commission said on Thursday it launched an investigation into complaints by United States Steel Corp <X.N> that Chinese competitors stole its trade secrets, engaged in price fixing and misrepresented the origin of their exports to the United States.
The Dow: An Index of Winners (The Atlantic)
One hundred and twenty years after its birth, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is as relevant as ever. There’s hardly a news story about the American stock market that doesn’t mention the index’s industrial average.
The Real Threat to Currency Traders (Bloomberg Gadfly)
Today's the day when regulators give the financial world a glimpse of how they reckon traders in the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market should behave.
LendingClub Fund Falters (Wall Street Journal)
A fund controlled by LendingClub Corp. that invests in the company’s online consumer loans suffered one of its worst monthly performances for April and disclosed it was buying riskier loans than originally intended, according to letters reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Hedge Funds Seek Brexit Trading Advantage Before Voting Closes (Bloomberg)
Hedge funds and banks are seeking to cash in on the outcome of next month’s referendum on British membership of the European Union hours before the first results are known.
Here's Why Our Infrastructure Is Crumbling and Our Recovery Is So Weak (Mother Jones)
Tim Fernholz says that this chart shocked him.
If You're Such a Great Investor, Where's Your Alpha? (Bloomberg View)
Is alpha, the Wall Street term for market-beating returns, sustainable? Or is it a unique, statistical outlier, indistinguishable from random chance?
2016 Dividend Kings List: Dividend Stocks With 50+ Years Of Rising Dividends (The Reformed Broker)
The Dividend Kings are the best of the best in dividend longevity.
The Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Guide to Trading on Inside Information (Bloomberg)
On Friday, July 27, 2012, Phil Mickelson received a phone call. It wasn’t just any call; it was, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a transmission of business intelligence potentially worth millions of dollars.
Google-Oracle battle isn’t over, but one side holds big advantage (Market Watch)
Alphabet Inc.’s victory Thursday over Oracle Corp. is not the end of an already-long legal war, but the result of this latest skirmish is likely to also be the final one.
U.S. business spending mired in weakness, but economy picking up (Reuters)
U.S. business spending intentions weakened in April for a third straight month amid soft demand for machinery, but a surge in contracts to purchase previously owned homes to a 10-year high supported views economic growth was gaining speed.
Canada Stocks Little Changed After Three-Day Gain as Crude Slips (Bloomberg)
Canadian stocks were little changed, after a three-day rally that sent shares to the highest level since August, as energy and gold producers slipped while investors weighed earnings from the nation’s largest lenders.
Brent Crude Hit $50 (Business Insider)
Oil is back at $50 a barrel.
Kick the Click-Bait Habit (Bloomberg)
What if you saw a headline that said that a brilliant billionaire investor, whose every move is closely watched, had put on a trade that wasn't widely known — and if it were, it might rumble through the markets?
Would you click on that link?
How Return Assumptions Affect Investor Behavior (A Wealth of Common Sense)
Higher than average U.S. stock market valuations and lower-than-average interest rates would lead any rational individual to assume that future market returns should be lower than average from current levels. This is a reasonable assumption when you consider a simple 60/40 U.S. stock/bond portfolio has just had one of the best five year runs in history.
Disney ditches the dollar (USA Today)
Mickey Mouse is getting out of the currency business.
Walt Disney (DIS) this month announced it would no longer publish and sell its own currency: The Disney dollar. The move ends the life of the global entertainment giant's paper form of payment – and has set up a frenzy on eBay (EBAY) for collectors hoping to grab the colorful currency before it becomes even more scarce.
Politics
Donald Trump Tried to Cheat Veterans out of $1 Million (Mother Jones)
Even among sleazebags, this is not normal behavior. This is pathological sleaziness. It's literally beyond belief. Do not let Trump distract you with his latest barrage of insults. Do not turn your attention to the latest polls. Do not let this be normalized away as "just another Trump thing."
Maybe we need to put this in simpler terms.
Clinton has a new weapon against Trump: Elizabeth Warren (Washington Post)
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has a new partner in her battle against Donald Trump: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who gave a speech Tuesday mirroring Clinton’s own talking points accusing Trump of profiting from the housing crash of 2008.
Bill Clinton Gets Into 30-Minute Debate With A 24-Year-Old Bernie Fan (Buzz Feed)
Five different times, aides tried to drag him away from the booth where Josh Brody, a 24-year-old supporter of Bernie Sanders, was holding forth about all that had gone wrong in the 1990s: welfare, NAFTA, Wall Street.
“Other people are waiting,” one staffer said, stepping forward.
Technology
Project Goa Will Bring Virtual Reality To Any Smartphone (Popular Science)
While gamers and technophiles are abuzz about virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Gear VR, these devices fall into two categories: either casual, low-quality experiences on smartphones, or high-end gaming that usually relies on expensive hardware.
Can Apple win the next tech war? (The Verge)
Fifteen years ago, when the time became ripe for post-PC devices that put a premium on integrating software and hardware, Apple was the best-positioned company to lead the charge — and it did. The company's vertical integration, its attention to detail and innovation in both software and hardware, and its willingness to make big bets gave it an edge. And it used that edge to reel off its now-familiar string of game-changing products like the iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook Air, and the iPad.
Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots' (BBC)
Apple and Samsung supplier Foxconn has reportedly replaced 60,000 factory workers with robots.
One factory has "reduced employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000 thanks to the introduction of robots", a government official told the South China Morning Post.
Health and Life Sciences
This tiny implant just got approved to take on America’s heroin epidemic (Business Insider)
A tiny matchstick-size implant called Probuphine could help address some of the toughest parts of treating addiction.
The implant, an inch long and the width of a matchstick, is designed to deliver the drug buprenorphine to people suffering from opioid painkiller addiction continuously for six months. It's the first implanted opioid addiction treatment to be approved by the FDA.
Why Are So Few People Engaging In The 5 Basic Healthy Habits? (Forbes)
There’s a lot of interest in new ways to boost health, but when it comes down to it, there are really only a few habits that are tried and true–and together can cut disease risk dramatically. These are not smoking, exercising regularly, keeping a healthy body weight, drinking in moderation and sleeping adequately, which is a relatively new recommendation.
Mysteriously itchy? Blame your immune system (Futurity)
People who suffer persistent itching without any clear cause may have previously unrecognized defects to their immune system, according to a small study.
Life on the Home Planet
Far from recovering, tigers may be in worst decline in a century (New Scientist)
When two big conservation groups roared that “after a century of constant decline, the number of tigers is on the rise“, the feel-good news was enthusiastically reported around the world.
But all is not settled, despite the pronouncement from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Global Tiger Forum that “around 3890 tigers exist in the wild, up from an estimated 3200 in 2012”, with a doubling to “6000+” hoped for by 2022, the next Chinese year of the tiger.
Mysterious Martian Plumes May Be From a Solar Storm and Not an Impending Invasion (Slate)
Amateur astronomers viewing the Red Planet from Earth noticed weird features on the limb of the planet (the edge as seen from Earth) in March and April 2012. They appeared to be clouds or plumes of some sort, but they were huge, and several hundred kilometers above the surface of Mars. No cloud has ever been seen that high, nor is there any obvious way to make one or get one there.
The features were definitely real; others have been seen (including with Hubble). Lots of ideas were considered—volcanic plumes, aurora, and so on (though Martian war machines were ruled out fairly quickly)—but nothing quite fit.
How bad will a hurricane get? Fly in to find out (Futurity)
“Hurricane hunters” can improve hurricane intensity predictions by up to 15 percent, new research finds.
Prior to this study, no hurricane prediction model incorporated the vast amount of data collected by “hurricane hunters,” which are National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or US Air Force airborne reconnaissance missions that fly into hurricanes to collect data.
