Financial Markets and Economy
Wall Street has finally learned an important lesson about Tesla (Business Insider)
The past month has been horrific for Tesla's shareholders.
After hitting $240 on the last day of 2015, shares have lost one-third of their value. Something close to $10 billion in market cap has been erased.
The World's Biggest Wealth Fund Is Unhappy With Volkswagen's Leadership (Bloomberg)
The world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund criticized Volkswagen AG’s ownership structure, saying it concentrates too much power with the Porsche-Piech family and puts minority shareholders at a disadvantage amid the carmaker’s emissions crisis.
Fining Bankers, Not Shareholders, for Banks’ Misconduct (NY Times)
Ho-hum, another week, another multimillion-dollar settlement between regulators and a behemoth bank acting badly.
The most recent version involves two such financial institutions, Barclaysand Credit Suisse. They agreed last Sunday to pay $154.3 million after regulators contended that their stock trading platforms, advertised as places where investors would not be preyed on by high-frequency traders, were actually precisely the opposite.
China is buying up companies around the world at a record rate — and it's great news for Wall Street (Business Insider)
Chinese companies have been acquiring foreign companies at an unprecedented rate, and we're likely to see a lot more of it this year.
Germany's Bonds Seen Running Out of Reasons to Rally Next Week (Bloomberg)
The stellar performance in German government bonds over the past few weeks may finally run out of steam.
These are the hedge fund strategies everyone wants in on (Business Insider)
Investors have piled into a select few hedge fund strategies lately.
Barclays' capital solutions group analyzed how hedge funds' assets under management have grown in the last two years.
Barclays surveyed 110 funds, collectively managing around $375 billion in assets.
Trading Performance: Getting To That Next Level (Trader Feed)
I recently spoke with the traders at SMB and shared a few best practices that had benefited my trading over the past several months. The idea is not that any traders should mimic my trading; rather, traders need to learn from their successes, identify what they are doing well, and then become more consistent in implementing those strengths.
Treasuries Extend Best Start to Year Since the Financial Crisis (Bloomberg)
Treasuries advanced for a fourth week in five, extending their best start to a year since the financial crisis, as slowing growth in U.S. services and tumbling commodity prices left traders doubting whether the Federal Reserve will raise rates this year.
These 9 charts tell the definitive story of the US labor market (Business Insider)
The US labor market does not indicate that economic activity is about to collapse.
Shanghai Gold Exchange Withdrawals For January 2016 Total 225.8 Tonnes (Jesse's Cafe Americain)
Shanghai Gold Exchange has decided to publish their gold withdrawal figures on a monthly basis rather than weekly.
Politics
Democratic Party Is Pushing Away Its Future (Bloomberg View)
The 2016 McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club Celebration in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Friday night was a surreal event — a cross between a fundraising dinner, a rally and a hockey game. Organized by the state's Democratic establishment, its goal was to demonstrate the party's unity despite a close contest between its two presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. It succeeded to an extent, but showed that the party may be sacrificing its future in a pragmatic quest for immediate results.
Technology
Should NASCAR go electric?? (The Verge)
Last week, Bill Nye started a bit of a storm with this post on Aeon: "If NASCAR embraced electric cars it could change the world." In it, Nye expands on a chapter from his most recent book, where he calls for NASCAR to ditch its internal combustion engines and replace them with electric ones. "We could convert all of our racecars to electricity — right now — and show the public exactly what electrons can do," Nye says.
Predicting the future for a living taught me we have to look backwards to look forward (Quartz)
My knack for thinking about the future started at an early age. About 35 years ago, as a boy in Scotland, I noticed the decaying buildings around me and thought, “Why can’t cement heal itself when it cracks?” Just a few weeks ago, this nascent prediction came true. Henk Jonkers of Deft University of Technology in the Netherlands announced bioconcrete—a new type of self-healing cement that fixes its own cracks using bacteria.
These Gorgeous Buildings Showcase the Surprisingly Innovative Future of Wood (Gizmodo)
Wood is the future. That’s the feeling you get after looking through the 2016 award winners named by WoodWorks, the United States wood building council.
Health and Life Sciences
Multitasking is Killing Your Brain (Medium)
Our brains are designed to focus on one thing at a time, and bombarding them with information only slows them down.
MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller notes that our brains are “not wired to multitask well… when people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost.”
Loneliness grows from individual ache to public health hazard (Washington Post)
It torments the young and terrorizes the old. It carved “caverns” in Emily Dickinson’s soul and left William Blake “bereaved of light.”
Loneliness, long a bane of humanity, is increasingly seen today as a serious public health hazard. Scientists who have identified significant links between loneliness and illness are pursuing the precise biological mechanisms that make it such a menace, digging down to the molecular level and finding that social isolation changes the human genome in profound, long-lasting ways.
Life on the Home Planet
Taiwan Quake Kills at Least 18 as Search for Missing Continues (Bloomberg)
A strong earthquake rocked a region of Taiwan that’s a hub for chipmaking suppliers to the likes of Apple Inc. and Qualcomm Inc., killing at least 18 people and forcing rescuers to pull hundreds from the rubble of collapsed buildings.
If you thought solar was going to hurt utilities, get a load of solar+storage (Vox)
As I wrote in my previous post, power utilities are pushing back against rooftop solar, but by doing so they are only accelerating the development of solar+storage, which may prove to be an even bigger threat.
