Financial Markets and Economy
The World’s Most Powerful Stock Pickers Don’t Manage a Penny (Bloomberg)
MSCI Inc. isn’t usually a name that springs to mind when one thinks of the most powerful players in the global equity market.
The US economy's biggest puzzle explained in 2 paragraphs (Business Insider)
The US labor market is a bit of a puzzle.
Fed Says Economy Growing Modestly With Slight Price Pressures (Bloomberg)
The U.S. economy expanded at a modest pace since mid-May amid slight price pressures and some softening in consumer spending, a report from the Federal Reserves 12 districts showed.
Fed's Harker now sees just up to 2 rate hikes this year (Business Insider)
The Federal Reserve could hike interest rates up to two times before year end, a top U.S. central banker said on Wednesday, slightly downgrading his expectations for monetary tightening even though he said the economy is on "fairly firm footing."
Five Things to Watch in China's GDP Report (Bloomberg)
China's steady grind to a slower growth pace looks to have continued in the second quarter as government stimulus underpins expansion even as businesses remain cautious.
This market is hastening a future that has been terrifying Wall Street for years (Business Insider)
In the future, they keep telling us, investors will pay lower fees to run their money around the world. This is a future that upends a business model Wall Street and hedge funds have known for decades, with relatively inexpensive passive index funds largely replacing high-fee active management.
Hedge-Fund Investors Dump Laggards, 84% Redeem in First Half (Bloomberg)
Running an underperforming hedge fund? Your clients are noticing.
There's a huge misinterpretation of the US auto market that's confusing investors (Business Insider)
Auto sales set a record in 2015, with 17.5 million new cars and trucks rolling off dealer lots, but a lot of market analysts now think 2016 will come in below that mark.
‘Inverted head-and-shoulders’ pattern in small-cap stocks sounds a bullish signal (Market Watch)
A bullish chart pattern in the small-cap Russell 2000 index suggests that the broader market may have a lot more room to run beyond its record levels, according to Asbury Research.
Oil Traders Hoarding Most Oil Since 2009 Amass North Sea Fleet (Bloomberg)
Oil traders increased the fleet of ships deployed in the North Sea to store crude, the latest sign of faltering demand that has triggered the biggest build up of stockpiles at sea since 2009.
Buybacks Pump Up Stock Rally (Wall Street Journal)
Records reached this week by major U.S. stock indexes underscore the power of a popular but controversial tool: the corporate share buyback.
The Profit Motive Behind Financial Complexity (Bloomberg View)
Economist George Akerlof has spent much of his celebrated career thinking about how trickery and deceit affect markets. His most famous insight, which won him the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics, is that when buyers and sellers have different information, lack of trust can cause markets to break down. In those models, no one actually ends up getting tricked — everyone is perfectly rational, so even the possibility of getting cheated causes them to stay prudently out of the market. But in his book “Phishing for Phools,” written with fellow Nobelist Robert Shiller, Akerlof goes one step further.
Every Day Is Prime Day at Amazon (Bloomberg Gadfly)
Amazon has long been the "Everything Store." Now, thanks in part to its Prime membership program, it has become the everyone store.
Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts – Stock Option Expiry Shenanigans (Jesse's Cafe Americain)
Gold and silver bounced back a little today.
Politics
Trump demands U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg resign over criticism (Reuters)
Republican Donald Trump thrust the U.S. Supreme Court into the presidential campaign debate on Wednesday, rallying conservatives with a call for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to resign after she lambasted him in a series of media interviews.
Why Is Indiana the Center of the Political Universe? (The Atlantic)
This could be awkward: Donald Trump has invited some of his top contenders for the vice-presidential slot to Indiana, the home state of one of their competitors, Governor Mike Pence. It’s not clear whether these sessions with Trump are meant to let the losers down easy—Pence is allegedly Trump’s No. 1 candidate—or to serve as a final test in the veep selection process, as CNN reports.
Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie (Rolling Stone)
Years ago, over many beers in a D.C. bar, a congressional aide colorfully described the House of Representatives, where he worked.
It's "435 heads up 435 asses," he said.
Technology
Robots Could Hack Turing Test by Keeping Silent (Scientific American)
The Turing test, the quintessential evaluation designed to determine if something is a computer or a human, may have a fatal flaw, new research suggests.
Health and Life Sciences
Neuroscientists Still Don’t Know Why Music Sounds Good (Wired)
Your taste in music is weird. Maybe you just can’t stop listening to that power ballad, or you’ve wondered about your bewildering weakness for yodeling. And maybe, just maybe, nobody understands your all-consuming obsession with Steely Dan, the greatest band of all time.
Life on the Home Planet
Not all birds can survive double threat to rainforest (Futurity)
Deforestation and climate change combine to push particularly vulnerable rainforest birds toward extinction, while their dry-climate counterparts persist, new research shows.
'Three centuries' to catalogue all Amazon tree species (BBC)
Tree species in the Amazon rainforest are so many and varied that it would take three centuries to catalogue them, a major study has estimated.
In research published in the journal Scientific Reports, more than 500,000 museum specimens dating back 300 years were audited.
