Financial Markets and Economy
Trading Your Best Decision Making (Trader Feed)
Why is it that I have valuable intuitive hunches about markets and not about fracking hydraulics or fly fishing? Not a hard question: I have no experience with fracking or fly fishing, but spend easily an hour or two each day reviewing recent markets and researching past markets. The accumulated experience of the review and research creates an extensive database for noticing patterns that would otherwise be hidden. It's that real time pattern recognition that manifests itself as intuition.
The New York Fed to Banks: Clean Up Wall Street (The Atlantic)
It’s now seven years since the subprime mortgage crisis, but both regulators and the public are still concerned about Wall Street’s ethics. And they have good reason to be: One of the largest surveys ever done on the financial-services industry showed that ethical breaches are abound.
Euro-Area Bond Investors Await Growth Data After U.S. Jobs Jolt (Bloomberg)
With some European Central Bank officials already expressing skepticism about the need of additional stimulus, bond investors get an opportunity to assess the state of the euro-area economy next week.
Microsoft’s Stock Math: Fewer Shares, Pricier Shares (NY Times)
Microsoft has been on a roll. Late last month, it did something it hadn’t pulled off since Bill Gates was chief: Its share price reached a new high.
The achievement was so long in coming — the last peak was on Dec. 27, 1999 — that it seemed to elicit more snide comments than outright celebration: “If you’ve stuck with it over the last 16 years, congratulations on finally getting back into the black!” the Bespoke Investment Group wrote to its clients.
The market has spoken: The Fed will raise rates in December (Business Insider)
An interest-rate hike in December is clearly in sight.
Why the U.S. economy could still use some stimulus (Market Watch)
After October’s great jobs report, it’s all but accepted that the Federal Reserve will finally begin to raise interest rates next month.
But don’t forget: Just a few days ago, even very smart people who get to vote on such things were still harping on data showing that manufacturing is flirting with a renewed recession even in the U.S., and that trade partners from China to Canada are trying to shake off slow growth and market stress (China) or even a new downturn (Canada).
Boeing eyes new partnerships (Yahoo! Finance)
Boeing (BA.N) expects to announce new industrial partnerships with an emphasis on defense at the Dubai Airshow, expanding on tie-ups in commercial aerospace, executives said on Saturday. Gulf-based sources have told Reuters they expect Boeing to expand its ties with both companies at the Nov 8-12 air show. "There will be a couple of announcements at the show related to increased partnerships and I'll leave it at that," Bernard Dunn, president of Boeing Middle East, North Africa and Turkey told a news conference, declining to elaborate.
How this company earns millions with Instagram (CNN)
Skincare company Frank Body has made a business out of selling the stuff as a body scrub and expects to make over $19 million this year.
The Australia-based company was launched in March 2013 by five friends. They put up a total of $3,000 — and recouped it in one week.
British green tech millionaire: The Tory government is rigging the energy markets (Business Insider)
Britain's government is putting an abrupt end to renewable energy subsidies and in turn the move could potentially kill off the sector.
Dale Vince, the boss of the world's first green energy company Ecotricity, told Business Insider exactly why he is not only not surprised that the Conservative-led government decided pull out of one of the most burgeoning developing sectors for Britain and the rest of the world but also how the country is now "embarrassing" for its lack of renewable energy support.
Valeant investors divided on fate of CEO Pearson (Business Insider)
Large investors holding stock in Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc <VRX.TO> <VRX.N> are split over whether to support the embattled drug company's chief executive or to advocate for new leadership, as the company struggles to recover from a stock plunge sparked by allegations of faulty accounting.
Politics
Myanmar Voters Head to Polls in Landmark Vote 25 Years in Making (Bloomberg)
More than 30 million Myanmar citizens began casting their votes early Sunday in the nation’s most important election in 25 years. What comes next will test the military’s willingness to share power and determine the pace of economic and political reforms.
China’s Xi Jinping, Taiwan’s Ma Ying-jeou meet for first time in 66 years (Market Watch)
The leaders of China and Taiwan met for the first time in more than six decades, capping a robust but far from stable engagement between the historical antagonists.
Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan shook hands and waved before the media and then met in a function room of a hotel in the Southeast Asian island nation of Singapore, chosen as neutral ground. Both men spoke of the historic moment after 66 years of separation and the need to preserve the stable ties of recent years.
Technology
Lasers, fire and robots: Tech's next-gen carnival (CNN)
Just outside a cavernous pier in San Francisco, someone wearing a full-body suit stands inside a glass tank and calmly waits to be set on fire.
The setup looks like a classic "dunk tank," complete with a pile of balls near a big target. But instead of dropping a clown into cold water, a hit unleashes a torrent of flames on the person in the fire-retardant suit (who may or may not also be a clown, depending on the shift).
Health and Life Sciences
Early Warning Sign for Kidney Disease Identified in Study (Medicine Net)
They found that levels of a common protein in the blood rise in the months or years before the disease develops.
Levels of the protein suPAR (soluble urokinase-type plasminogen activator receptor) can be checked using a simple blood test. And the results can reliably predict a person's risk of developing chronic kidney disease up to five years before it begins causing damage, the researchers report.
Life on the Home Planet
World's Largest Fusion Reactor is About to Switch On (Gizmodo)
If “The Stellarator” sounds like an energy source of comic book legend to you, you’re not that far off. It’s the largest nuclear fusion reactor in the world, and it’s set to turn on later this month.
Housed at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator looks more like a psychotic giant’s art project than the future of energy. Especially when you compare it with the reactor’s symmetrical, donut-shaped cousin, the tokamak. But stellarators and tokamaks work according to similar principles: In both cases, coiled superconductors are used to create a powerful magnetic cage, which serves to contain a gas as it’s heated to the ungodly temperatures needed for hydrogen atoms to fuse.
Peru creates huge national park in Amazon basin (Phys)
Peru is creating a national park to protect a vast territory in the Amazon basin that is vulnerable to drug trafficking and illegal logging and mining, the country's environment minister said Saturday.
Called the Sierra del Divisor National Park, it covers an area of about 14,170 square kilometers (5,470 square miles) in a region inhabited by a variety of indigenous communities living in self-imposed isolation.
