Financial Markets and Economy
Oil prices fall as U.S. shale shows resilience (Market Watch)
Crude-oil futures fell Friday, with Nymex crude trading at its lowest level in more than two months, dragged lower by concerns over resilient U.S. shale production in the face of low oil prices and high OPEC production.
Light, sweet crude futures for delivery in August CLQ5, -0.61% fell 35 cents, or 0.6%, to $56.58 a barrel in electronic trading. August Brent crude on London’s ICE Futures exchange LCOQ5, -0.56% fell 41 cents, or 0.7%, to $61.66 a barrel.
Greece is having NO effect on Europe's economy (Business Insider)
Despite warnings about the Greek debt crisis spilling over to the rest of Europe and the uncertainty surrounding Greece's fate in the eurozone, the EU is actually in great health.
Markit's latest PMI reading for the eurozone — a measure of whether the bloc's economy is growing or shrinking — shows that its economy is growing at its fastest pace in 4-years.
Hotels: On Pace for Record Occupancy in 2015, RevPAR up almost 50% from 2009 (Calculated Risk)
The U.S. hotel industry recorded positive results in the three key performance measurements during the week of 21-27 June 2015, according to data from STR, Inc.
FTSE 100 lower as bank shares fall; weekly loss in sight (Market Watch)
U.K. stocks slipped Friday, moving toward a weekly loss, with bank stocks under pressure and as Greek-crisis uncertainty weighed on European assets.
The FTSE 100 UKX, -0.21% fell 0.1% to 6,624.11, led by losses among financial, basic-material and industrial issues. The benchmark was looking at a 2% loss for the week, heading toward its worst weekly loss in a month.
RBS faces a $13 billion fine for its pre-financial crisis behaviour (Business Insider)
Royal Bank of Scotland has been warned in a US court that it could face a $13bn (£8.3bn) bill in a case making allegations about its behaviour before the 2008 crisis.
The 79% taxpayer-owned bank is fighting a long-running case in a Connecticut court relating to the way it packaged up mortgage bonds and sold them to government lenders overseen by the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Chinese shares fall 5.8%, leading Asia lower (Market Watch)
Chinese shares tumbled Friday, even as Beijing moves swiftly to try to plug losses, after three weeks of declines left markets sharply lower than highs reached in June.
The Shanghai Composite SHCOMP, -5.77% which ended down 5.8%, has lost more than a quarter of its value since June 12. The smaller Shenzhen market399106, -5.30% fell 5.3% while the ChiNext board 399006, -1.66% composed of small-cap stocks, lost 1.7%. Both are down more than a third from peaks last month, and all are down by double-digits this week.
Chinese Government "Losing Control": Stocks Are Collapsing, Hitting New Bear Market Lows (Zero Hedge)
As one local reporter put it, despite being told not to say anything negative, "the government appeared to have lost its ability to manage the market." Chinese stocks are down 4-5% at the open, pressing new cycle lows with Shenzhen and CHINEXT now down 25% from last week.
Hopeful Start to Greek Debt Negotiations Quickly Soured (NY Times)
Last Friday morning, the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, gathered his closest advisers in a Brussels hotel room for a meeting that was meant to be secret. All the participants had to leave their phones outside the door to prevent leaks.
A week of tense negotiations between Greece and its creditors was coming to an end. And it was becoming increasingly clear to the left-leaning prime minister that he could not accept the tough economic terms that his lenders were demanding in exchange for new loans.
Here comes another mega-merger: Aetna and Humana are reportedly close to a multi-billion deal (Business Insider)
A flurry of merger activity among the nation's largest health insurers appears to be reaching another turning point.
Aetna is reportedly on the verge of a deal to buy Humana, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The deal could be announced as early as this week. Aetna's offer would value Humana at roughly $230 per share, according to Reuters.
Asia shares subdued as U.S. data disappoints, fret over Greece, China (Business Insider)
Asian stocks were little changed on Friday, with investors reluctant to stake out fresh positions after disappointing U.S. employment data and cautious ahead of Greece's weekend referendum which may decide its future in Europe.
China's increasingly volatile markets may upstage Greek concerns in the session, after that country's securities market regulator said it had opened an investigation into suspected market manipulation after a slump of more than 20 percent in Chinese stocks since mid-June.
'Neglected Prophet' of Economics Got It Right (Bloomberg View)
In some parts of Europe, negative interest rates are creating absurd situations. In France, some corporate bonds pay interest to the issuer because they were linked to a benchmark rate that has dropped below zero. In Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland, banks are turning depositors away with threats of negative interest rates. If this goes on much longer, we'll be living in the world of "free money" imagined by the economic dreamer and adventurer Silvio Gesell in the 19th century.
The Catalyst Ridden MGM (Value Walk)
There's a new catalyst on the activist investing front for MGM ($MGM). Recall that Land & Buildings, the REIT activist hedge fund, was on the prowl to get MGM to create a REIT for its owned land. It ultimately backed down earlier this year. But with Kirk Kerkorian's death, Land & Buildings, and its founder John Litt, are kicking up dust again.
European stocks fall ahead of Greek referendum (Market Watch)
European stocks fell Friday, set to lock in sizable losses for the week, as investors stayed cautious ahead of Sunday’s referendum over Greece’s bailout.
The Stoxx Europe 600 SXXP, -0.20% fell 0.3% to 383.93, with no sectors trading higher. The pan-European index is facing a 3.2% drop for the week, on track for its sharpest weekly pullback since early May.
How America's Workforce Has Changed Since 1977 (Atlantic)
As long as you don’t look too far into it, Thursday’s June jobs report looks like good news: The economy added 223,000 jobs, close to expectations, and the unemployment rate fell again, to 5.3 percent. So far, so good—still a slower recovery than anyone might like, but a recovery nonetheless.
Trading
Time series analysis and data gaps (Quantative Trading)
Most time series techniques such as the ADF test for stationarity, Johansen test for cointegration, or ARIMA model for returns prediction, assume that our data points are collected at regular intervals. In traders' parlance, it assumes bar data with fixed bar length. It is easy to see that this mundane requirement immediately presents a problem even if we were just to analyze daily bars: how are we do deal with weekends and holidays?
Here are Wall Street’s best trades from the first half of 2015 (Quartz)
It’s a crazy world out there, we know. Asset prices are always zig-zagging back and forth, volatility spikes and subsides, liquidity is abundant and then suddenly nowhere to be found.
But here at Quartz, we’ve got your back. Now that year is halfway over, here’s a list of a few of the best-performing assets to help you make sense of what just happened.
Republican Governors Signal Their Intent to Thwart Obama’s Climate Rules (NY Times)
As President Obama prepares to complete sweeping regulations aimed at tackling climate change, at least five Republican governors, including two presidential hopefuls, say they may refuse to carry out the rules in their states.
The resistance threatens to ignite a fierce clash between federal and state authorities, miring the climate rules in red tape for years. The fight could also undermine Mr. Obama’s efforts to urge other nations to enact similar plans this year as part of a major United Nations climate change accord.
Jeb Bush Tax Returns Recall Old Days of Shelters (NY Times)
Jeb Bush’s tax returns take us back to the time when it was a point of pride for high-income earners to buy a piece of a Panamanian gold mine, a Hollywood movie, a Texas oil well or a California alpaca farm. The point was not to make money but to use the artificial tax losses from a partnership to shelter one’s true salary from tax.
Mr. Bush released 33 years of returns on Tuesday, and his effective tax rate of 40 percent in 2013 contrasts notably with that of the last Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, who disclosed an effective rate of 13.9 percent in 2010. After releasing his returns, Mr. Bush joked that he “apparently didn’t take full advantage” of deductions.
Technology
Colorful Contraptions Show How Musicians Make Sound Effects (Wired)
A DJ IS a lot like a magician: You can see and hear what’s happening, but you don’t know how it happens. With the push of a button or twist of a knob, a note trembles, a word distorts, a riff blurs. There’s rarely a physical object to explain what you’re hearing—in fact, the process of making music often is hidden within a computer or mixer, where code and chips do all the work.
It’s amazing to hear but boring as hell to watch. “People make up for it with light shows, but it’s all still very stagnant,” says James Boock. Boock is a graduate design student at the Royal College of Art. For his end-of-year project, he set about making sculptures that give a physical presence to sound effects we hear but can’t quite see or understand.
Yup, The Army Is Working On A Hoverbike (Popular Science)
The U.S. Army definitely wants hoverbikes. Infantry are the core of any military–foot-slogging armed grunts ready to bring pain to whoever they may face. But they are, by their nature, constantly outmatched. Tanks have more armor and heavier guns, planes fly well beyond their reach, and even defending ground troops often get bunkers or fortifications to protect themselves. How do troops on the ground overcome that? One way is to put them in the air. On hoverbikes.
(Photo: Tactical Reconnaissance Vehicle, by Malloy Aeronautics, via U.S. Army)
Health and Life Sciences
Gene therapy stabilises lungs of cystic fibrosis patients (BBC)
A gene therapy has stabilised and slightly improved cystic fibrosis in some of 136 patients in a trial.
Their lungs showed no decline, on average, after they inhaled healthy copies of the gene that causes CF once a month for a year, results published in Lancet Respiratory Medicine show.
And the lungs most clogged before the trial showed a 3% improvement.
Team surprised to find water in this HIV protein (Futurity)
Around the world, about 35 million people are living with HIV, which constantly adapts and mutates.
In response to that challenge, scientists are gaining a clearer idea of what a key protein in HIV looks like, which will help explain its vital role in the virus’ life cycle.
Life on the Home Planet
Underwater farmers grow strawberries in balloon gardens (New Scientist)
This is a snapshot of life at one of the world's strangest farms. In the eerie blue light, a diver drifts between underwater greenhouses, where the first seeds of the year – basil, strawberry, lettuce and beans – were planted last week.
The transparent "biospheres" beneath the Bay of Noli, in Savona, Italy, are part of the three-year-old Nemo's Garden project, which aims to find innovative ways of growing crops in places that lack freshwater or fertile soil.
Why insects are marvels of engineering (BBC)
Insects solve some pretty wacky biological problems, says Dr Gregory Sutton.
And he should know. For almost a decade, he has been using high-speed cameras to reveal the secrets of the most acrobatic of the world's invertebrates.
Along with his colleagues at the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge, he is working out how fleas, locusts and even praying mantises take to the air. He presented some of his latest work at the Society for Experimental Biology's annual meeting in Prague on Thursday.
China Completes Airstrip On Reef, Builds Military Facility On Second Island (Zero Hedge)
China has reportedly completed an airstrip on Fiery Cross Reef, one of the islands Beijing has constructed in the South China Sea.
Back in April, satellite images which appeared to show that construction had commenced on the runway set off alarm bells in the US and among Washington’s regional allies in the South Pacific.
