Financial Markets and Economy
Buying the Deepest Stock Dips in 2016 Returned Three Times S&P 500 (Bloomberg)
It’s been a great year for catching falling knives.
Big Week Ahead Highlighted By Fed Meeting, Key Earnings, GDP Estimate (Forbes)
The recipe for this coming week? A stew of earnings, peppered with data and a Fed meeting. Also ahead: A first look at estimated Q2 gross domestic product.
People don’t trust economists anymore (Quartz)
For most of my career it has been good to be an economist. I felt wise, I felt heard. Sure, I got constant reminders from well-meaning people that no one behaves in the rational way that economists generally presume people do. But otherwise it seemed economists had influence and prestige.
Do the Hard Thing, Don’t Do the Easy Thing (Wall Street Journal)
The reach for yield is becoming a reckless lunge.
Credit conditions are the worst since 2009, and yet the market is soaring (Business Insider)
You wouldn’t know it from the boom in stocks that hit new highs after tottering for over a year, and from the surge in junk bonds, even the riskiest ones, whose prices have soared and whose yields have plunged: At the riskiest end of the spectrum, the average yield of CCC-and-below rated junk bonds went from 21.5% on February 12 to 14.2% now, as if all credit problems, defaults, and bankruptcies had suddenly disappeared after the latest Fed flip-flop or whatever.
Apple: The Next Trillion Dollar Company? (Sum Zero)
Ever since legendary business magnate Carl Icahn sold his Apple shares earlier this year, many investors lost faith in the company’s future and withheld from taking a position in the tech giant. But history shows that following the herd mentality, even if propagated by someone as prophetic as Icahn, isn’t always the best idea.
Why Is Microsoft Making Huge Adjustments To Its GAAP Results? (Seeking Alpha)
On Tuesday, after the market closed, Microsoft reported its fourth quarter and full year results, beating estimates widely. I'll take a look at the results and the adjustments Microsoft made to get to the numbers they have shown us.
The 19 most productive countries in the world (Business Insider)
Productivity is one of the key drivers of economic success. The more productive a country's workers are, the more value they can bring to their employers and therefore their home nation's economy.
Americans Favour Coffee Over Financial Freedom (Huffington Post)
Towards the end of last year, we published an article titled Americans favour coffee to stock market investing where we demonstrated that an overwhelming majority drink coffee as opposed to investing in the stock market’ 61% of Americans drink coffee on a daily basis as opposed to the 48% that invest in the market.
The Folly of Stock Market Forecasting (Alpha Architect)
The idea that one can predict stock market movements is somewhat insane. – Read more at: http://scl.io/ABfqwq-j#gs.C4OH1FY
Rationality: The Source Of All Trading Success (Trader Feed)
This will not be the most popular post I'll ever write about trading psychology, but I believe it's my best and certainly my most heartfelt.
Politics
Now Clinton Has to Even Out Her Contradictions (Bloomberg View)
Hillary Clinton has been a national political figure for a quarter-century, longer than any presidential candidate. Yet contradictions and conflicting portraits of her persist.
She is smart, well-versed in domestic and foreign-policy issues, revels in working things out and commands strong loyalty. She also is overly suspicious, insular, often nontransparent and disposed to cutting corners. She has a history of reaching across the partisan divide, yet, as the Republican convention in Cleveland last week showed, is despised by many in the opposing party.
Wikileaks publishes thousands of DNC emails (Engadget)
As if Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party needed any more fuss over emails, Wikileaks has published a trove of messages sent to and from top DNC officials. It covers a period from January of last year to May of 2016, and appear to show party officials spreading negative angles about Bernie Sanders, dreaming up fake Craigslist ads to target Donald Trump and constantly sharing "off the record" details with reporters. The source of the leak is apparently the hacker calling themselves "Guccifer 2," although claims by the DNC itself, Motherboard and the Washington Post point to Russian government hackers, and Wikileaks has not identified a source.
Technology
This solar-powered home security cam is truly wireless and 100% green (Mashable)
"The raccoons are back," I frustratingly said to my wife the night after installing the Ring Stick Up Cam in our backyard.
You see, last summer we had a mommy raccoon and her three babies coming into our backyard and ravaging through bins, looking for every morsel of cat food they could find.
11 Police Robots Patrolling Around the World (Wired)
Law enforcement across the globe use semi-autonomous technology to do what humans find too dangerous, boring, or just can’t. This week, the Cleveland Police had a few nonlethal ones on hand at the Republican National Convention. But even those can be outfitted to kill, as we saw in Dallas earlier this month when police strapped a bomb to an explosive-detonation robot, and boom: a non-lethal robot became a killer. If that thought scares you, you’re not alone. Human rights activists worry these robots lack social awareness crucial to decision-making.
Health and Life Sciences
Glowing Green Juice Could Change How We Examine Intestines (Popular Science)
If you’ve ever had to throw back a big glass of chalky barium sulfate liquid before an x-ray of your guts, this will sound like a delightful trip to Smoothie King.
Scientists work toward storing digital information in DNA (Phys)
Her computer, Karin Strauss says, contains her "digital attic"—a place where she stores that published math paper she wrote in high school, and computer science schoolwork from college.
Life on the Home Planet
Additional testing rules Colorado town's water THC free (The Verge)
Residents of Hugo, Colorado can resume drinking their tap water. That’s the verdict after fears that the town’s municipal water supply had been contaminated with THC, the main psychoactive chemical in marijuana. After additional testing by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, no trace of the chemical was found.
My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land (Bloomberg)
Thursday. My one chance in the week to buy staples—cooking oil, rice, laundry detergent—at state-set prices. All Venezuelan adults are assigned days of the week to shop for regulated goods based on the numbers on our national ID cards. My days are Sundays and Thursdays. Sundays are useless, though. Stores stopped selling regulated goods over the weekend a long time ago.
