Financial Markets and Economy
Train Your Brain for Trading (No, Really!) (Bloomberg)
A stock's price is ticking up and down on a screen in front of you. Do you rationally evaluate the probabilities that the price will rise before you pull the trigger on a trade? Or do you go with your gut?
Here's the meltdown Bill Ackman had when he found out what was going on at Valeant (Business Insider)
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, founder of Pershing Square Capital Management, had been working with Michael Pearson, the former CEO of Valeant Pharmaceuticals, for over a year when it was revealed that the company was funneling drugs through a shady secret pharmacy called Philidor.
Digital Payments Are Shaking Up Asia's Credit Card Industry (Bloomberg)
Free rice cookers and suitcases were among the special deals that tempted Chiu Wing-suet into accumulating her 20 credit cards, many of which are crammed into her wallet. She’s unlikely to accept any more such offers.
Stock rotation to continue as Fed seen open to 2016 hike (Reuters)
The rotation to cyclical sectors of the S&P 500 and away from defensive stocks could continue next week if Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen strikes a tone more welcoming to an interest rate increase later this year.
Biometrics in the Payments Industry: Why biologically based authentication is becoming the go-to security feature for enabling digital commerce (Business Insider)
Passwords and PINs are being rendered irrelevant thanks to rising digital fraud, growing concern about data privacy, and difficulty remembering an endless stream of letters and numbers.
GOLDMAN: Hedge funds are betting billions that these 19 stocks are going to get demolished (Business Insider)
Hedge funds love making waves.
One of the easiest ways to make waves is to announce a huge bet against a giant company.
Chipotle's Food-Safety Crisis May Be Over But the Stock Is Still Way Down (Bloomberg)
Maybe Chipotle just needs to grow up.
Before what’s obliquely referred to as the food-safety issues — the norovirus, E. coli andsalmonella contaminations that sickened about 500 diners between July 2015 and December — Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. was a superstar that flouted some big-company norms.
Walmart and Target are struggling to compete with Amazon (The Motley Fool)
Target and Walmart face significant challenges as American and global consumers change how they shop.
Central bankers are doing something that hasn't happened in 5,000 years — and drastically changing the world economy (Business Insider)
Earlier this month, the Bank of England did something never before seen in its 322-year history. It cut its key interest rate to just 0.25%.
STOCKS SLIP: Here's what you need to know (Business Insider)
Stocks closed lower on Friday, and finished slightly in the red for the quiet summer week.
Crude oil fell for the first time in several sessions amid a rise in the dollar.
Vancouver's crazy housing market is melting down (Business Insider)
Vancouver's frothy housing market appears to be melting down.
Home sales in August are down sharply compared with a year ago, Jill Slattery at Global News reports.
The 9 stocks that matter most to hedge funds (Business Insider)
Goldman Sachs recently published its latest Very Important Position list of stocks that appear the most among the funds' largest 10 holdings.
Cathay Pacific Crushed As Chinese Corporate Travel Collapses (Zero Hedge)
Cathay Pacific announced earnings earlier this week which paint a fairly ominous picture for China. The airline posted a 9.3% YoY drop in revenue and an 82% decline in net profit which they attributed to, among other things, "weak passenger demand, particularly in the premium class".
'Hedge fund' doesn't mean anything anymore — that's why they've been such a disappointment (Business Insider)
For the last eight years, hedge fund investors have been paying high fees for lackluster performance.
There are rare exceptions — this New York fund is crushing competitors — but for the most part, hedge fund managers have come up with layers of excuses for why they are performing so poorly.
Politics
Britain should leap-frog Hinkley and lead 21st Century nuclear revolution (The Telegraph)
Ernest Rutherford first broke the nuclei of atoms at Manchester University in 1917. Our Queen opened the world's first nuclear power plant in 1956 at Calder Hall.
The Summer of the Shill (Rolling Stone)
Years ago, when I was an exchange student in the Soviet Union, a Russian friend explained how he got his news.
"For news about Russia, Radio Liberty," he said. "For news about America, Soviet newspapers." He smiled. "Countries lie about themselves, tell truth about others."
Naked Trump Statues: Meet Anarchist Artists Behind 'Emperor Has No Balls' (Rolling Stone)
Just before 11 a.m. Eastern Time yesterday, about 40 people spread across five cities – Seattle, New York, San Francisco, Cleveland and Los Angeles – arrived at their predetermined spots to pull off an artistic protest of the Republican presidential nominee that would shock, horrify and endlessly amuse the general public.
Technology
Keep Your Ear to the Streets with the Best Police Scanner Apps (Digital Trends)
A pop, then a crackle. “11-06?” a woman asks through the static. A man replies, describing a man in a North Face jacket. Some garbled chatter and another woman joins in, relaying a witness’s account of a hooded man trying to break into a closed school.
Health and Life Sciences
Why do we fear narcissism? (Financial Times)
The word might occur to you at dinner, at around minute 15 or so of a monologue that began the minute your companion arrived. There wasn’t a discernible difference between her arrival and the commencing of the monologue; barely a greeting, in fact, just wave after wave of language, stories whose subject is the same (how she’s been maligned or overlooked, perhaps), and she is not even pausing to breathe, and your breath shortens, as if it’s physically possible for a human being to suck the air out of another human being’s lungs from across the table.
Volunteers needed to get infected with Zika for science (Engadget)
While the Zika virus spreads into the US and the CDC has advised pregnant women to avoid the area of another recent outbreak in Miami Beach, Florida, scientists continue to race toward prevention options.
Life on the Home Planet
U.S. Army fudged its accounts by trillions of dollars, auditor finds (Reuters)
The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.
