Financial Markets and Economy
Oil Set for Longest Run of Gains in 5 Years Before OPEC Meeting (Bloomberg)
Oil is set for the longest run of monthly gains in five years as output disruptions from Nigeria to Canada reduce supply before OPEC meets Thursday in Vienna to discuss production policy.
Every Stock Was a Buy to This Analyst Team, Then Shares Tanked (Bloomberg)
Companies probably love getting attention from analysts at Emperor Securities Ltd. in Hong Kong. Investors who followed their advice for the past year, not so much.
Asian shares wobble, on track for monthly loss (Business Insider)
Asian shares wobbled in early trade on Tuesday and were on track for a monthly loss, while the dollar edged away from recent peaks scaled on heightened expectations the U.S. Federal Reserve will raise interest rates as soon as next month.
Sustainable investing sees hippies give way to suits (Bloomberg)
Sustainable investing is moving from the confines of speciality funds to broader traditional investment analysis. A greater recognition of the financial cost of environmental, social and governance issues, better company data disclosure and investor demand are among factors driving the change.
Treasuries Lose Their Lead Over Shares as Fed Moves Toward Shift (Bloomberg)
Treasuries have lost their edge over stocks as the U.S. economy expands enough to push the Federal Reserve toward raising interest rates.
It may be the end of hedge funds as we know it (Business Insider)
There's a colloquialism that hedge fund managers are "masters of the universe."
The Real Problem With Inflation-Protected Bonds (Canadian Couch Potato)
When I announced my stripped-down model portfolios at the beginning of last year, one of the asset classes I dropped was real-return bonds (RRBs). Part of the reason was simplicity: it’s easier to manage a portfolio of three or four funds compared with five or six, and you’re not giving up much diversification. But there was a more important reason for booting real-return bonds from my recommended portfolios.
Top bond trading startups (Trade Streaming)
Bond trading isn’t what it used to be. Regulatory changes that came in the wake of the financial crisis both decreased banks’ risk tolerance and made it more costly for banks to warehouse bonds on their balance sheets. Both changes made it harder for banks to bull and sell bonds.
Higher Taxes Don’t Scare Millionaires Into Fleeing Their Homes After All (Bloomberg)
When it comes to taxes, millionaires have short fuses. Ratchet up their rates and they'll blow you off and move to a low-tax, or no-tax, state.
Hedge Funds Investing (Journal of Accountancy)
Hedge funds are one of the hottest investment opportunities in today’s stock market. They have been very prominent in the financial news, attracting a lot of attention from investors, brokerage firms, the SEC and the attorney general of the state of New York. To help CPAs who provide financial and investment advice to clients, this article describes the nature of hedge funds and reviews the latest news about them.
Politics
What's Behind the Rise of Demagogues? (Bloomberg View)
In Austria last month, nearly half of the electorate voted for the presidential candidate of a party set up by former Nazis. The politics of fear unequivocally triumphed in Assam, a state in India’s northeast, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party came to power for the first time on an explicitly xenophobic platform.
Clinton Is Still the Favorite (Wall Street Journal)
Memo to poll-obsessed Democrats: Don’t freak out. Hillary Clinton remains a strong favorite to defeat Donald Trump in November. Mr. Trump’s poll numbers rose after he secured his party’s nomination, and hers will when she does. Mrs. Clinton enjoys structural advantages in demography, party registration and the Electoral College. And reading beyond the headline numbers of recent surveys, it isn’t hard to find evidence of the strengths on which she can build a successful election campaign.
Trump Time Capsule #8: Illegal Immigrants Are Treated Better Than Veterans (The Atlantic)
Yesterday at the Rolling Thunder mass motorcycle rally here in Washington — which I could hear while at the Atlantic’s offices half a mile away, but didn’t attend — Donald Trump said, “illegal immigrants are taken better care of than our veterans.”
Technology
A First Look at America’s Supergun (Wall Street Journal)
A warning siren bellowed through the concrete bunker of a top-secret Naval facility where U.S. military engineers prepared to demonstrate a weapon for which there is little defense.
Officials huddled at a video screen for a first look at a deadly new supergun that can fire a 25-pound projectile through seven steel plates and leave a 5-inch hole.
Health and Life Sciences
Prescription Pain Killers May Worsen And Lengthen Chronic Pain (Forbes)
News from a research team studying the effects of opioids may help explain the explosion in prescription pain-killer addictions of the last several years. A University of Colorado-Boulder study has found that opioid use increases chronic pain in rats. If the same result holds true in humans, it would mean that prescribed opioids aren’t only viciously addictive, they also worsen the very condition they’re prescribed to treat.
Has a Hungarian Physics Lab Found a Fifth Force of Nature? (Scientific American)
A laboratory experiment in Hungary has spotted an anomaly in radioactive decay that could be the signature of a previously unknown fifth fundamental force of nature, physicists say—if the finding holds up.
Life on the Home Planet
A Lot of Weird Stuff Has Been Happening in the Oceans (Wired)
The oceans have been acting weird lately. While some sea creatures have boomed (octopuses), others have busted (humpback whales), and yet others literally melted into goo (starfish). Whether the causes are El Niño or the “Blob” or ultimately climate change, these events point to just how interconnected and poorly understood the ocean ecosystem is—how little of it observable by humans. A marine biologist who studies whales once likened finding a beached one to finding a specimen of a “space alien.” The sea is dark and full of mysteries.
'Dirty Blizzard' sent 2010 Gulf oil spill pollution to seafloor (Phys)
Scientists working in the Gulf of Mexico have found that contaminants from the massive 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill lingered in the subsurface water for months after oil on the surface had been swept up or dispersed. In a new study, they also detailed how remnants of the oil, black carbon from burning oil slicks and contaminants from drilling mud combined with microscopic algae and other marine debris to descend in a "dirty blizzard" to the seafloor.
