Financial Markets and Economy
World's Most-Battered Currencies See Glimmer of Hope in 2016 (Bloomberg)
The outlook is improving for some of the worlds most-battered currencies after a plunge in raw materials spurred routs from the Colombian peso to Russias ruble in 2015.
The big flop of the US economic recovery (Business Insider)
One of the greatest hopes in the wake of the financial crisis was that there would be a surge in business investment, or capital expenditures (capex).
Why stocks may struggle to end the year with a bang (Market Watch)
The curtain is rapidly falling on 2015. For Wall Street, today is one of the last chances for the bulls to take control of a stock market that’s leaning decidedly bearish. And if this is truly the week the Santa Rally officially is supposed to kick in, as some say it is, the bulls may have their work cut out for them.
Jonathan Krinsky, chief market technician at MKM Partners, notes that 87% of S&P 500 components are now above their 10-day moving averages. He says that’s the highest reading since early October, and while not always a screaming sell signal, it could mean this market is ready for a pause.
Shale's Running Out of Survival Tricks as OPEC Ramps Up Pressure (Bloomberg)
In 2015, the fracking outfits that dot America’s oil-rich plains threw everything they had at $50-a-barrel crude. To cope with the 50 percent price plunge, they laid off thousands of roughnecks, focused their rigs on the biggest gushers only and used cutting-edge technology to squeeze all the oil they could out of every well.
A major investment bank broke down the world's astonishing, warped distribution of wealth (Business Insider)
The distribution of global wealth is getting more unequal every year, according to a huge study by Credit Suisse.
Dollar struggles to make headway as year winds down (Market Watch)
The dollar was a tad higher against the yen during Monday’s trading session in Asia, as the greenback failed to maintain gains from mid-morning buying amid a lack of fresh trading cues.
The greenback USDJPY, +0.16% was at ¥120.43 after hitting as high as ¥120.55. That compares with ¥120.33 in the late afternoon on Friday in Tokyo.
European Stocks Little Changed in Low Volume During Holiday Week (Bloomberg)
European stocks were little changed as low trading persisted in the shortened holiday week.
Trading With Creativity: Finding Chocolate Markets (Trader Feed)
These ABCD themes are not so different from the factors that describe entrepreneurial success. Indeed, I would argue that trading is less like an application of a fixed set of skills and more like running a startup business. In fast-changing environments, the entrepreneurial firm constantly remakes itself. Think of how Apple has changed from the company that made the original Mac personal computers–and how it continues to evolve with the Watch products and even ideas for cars.
In Sweden, a Cash-Free Future Nears (NY Times)
Parishioners content tithes to their churches. Homeless travel vendors lift mobile credit-card readers. Even a Abba Museum, notwithstanding being a tabernacle to a 1970s cocktail organisation that wrote “Money, Money, Money,” considers income so last-century that it does not accept bills and coins.
Few places are sloping toward a cashless destiny as quick as Sweden, that has spin bending on a preference of profitable by app and plastic.
Russia says Saudi Arabia destabilized oil market: TASS (Business Insider)
Saudi Arabia has destabilized the global oil market by increasing production, TASS news agency quoted Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak as saying on Monday.
"Saudi Arabia has this year increased production by 1.5 million barrels per day, thus effectively destabilizing the situation on the market," Novak was quoted as saying.
Gold falls to start final week of 2015 (Market Watch)
Gold futures were in negative territory Monday, mirroring a broader slump in the commodity complex that saw oil and copper prices lower in the final trading week of 2015.
February gold GCG6, -0.53% lost $5.20, or 0.5%, to trade at $1,070.70 an ounce and is down 9.6% year to date.
The Year Nothing Worked: Stocks, Bonds, Cash Go Nowhere in 2015 (Bloomberg)
The idea behind asset allocation is simple: when one market struggles, its OK because an investor can jump into another that is thriving. Not so in 2015.
China central bank says to keep reasonable credit growth, stable yuan (Business Insider)
China's central bank said on Monday that it would use various policy tools to maintain appropriate liquidity and reasonable growth in credit and social financing.
The People's Bank of China would keep the yuan <CNY=CFXS> basically stable, it said in a statement summarizing the fourth-quarter monetary policy committee meeting.
U.S. holiday retail sales grow a 'solid' 7.9 percent: MasterCard (Yahoo! Finance)
U.S. retail sales, excluding automobiles and gas, had grown 5.5 percent in the period between Black Friday and Christmas Eve last year. Online sales grew 20 percent in the holiday season this year, MasterCard Advisors, which tracks customer spending, said in a report on Monday. "The double-digit growth in furniture sales … shows that consumers are willing and able to splurge on big ticket items," Sarah Quinlan, senior vice president of Market Insights at MasterCard Advisors, said in the report.
2-year Treasury yields rise ahead of auction (Market Watch)
Two-year Treasury prices fell Monday, pushing up yields, as investors prepared for an auction of fresh supply in thin, end-of-year trading.
The yield on the two-year Treasury note TMUBMUSD02Y, +2.49% rose 1.25 basis point to 1.0108% ahead of the sale of $26 billion in two-year notes. Yields rise as prices fall.
Top Asia Junk Bond Funds All Bought China Builders After Default (Bloomberg)
The best-performing emerging Asia junk bond funds this year all navigated a landmark default to profit from Chinas property debt. They see more opportunities as the nation prevents rising delinquencies from sparking a crisis.
Oil prices weaken post-Christmas, U.S. crude defends premium over Brent (Business Insider)
Oil prices fell on Monday after the long Christmas weekend, with U.S. crudes defending a newly gained premium over internationally traded Brent contracts.
Front-month U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures
were trading at $37.91 per tonne at 0015 GMT, down 19 cents from their last settlement.
Perhaps the biggest financial story of 2015 has been the continued collapse of oil prices (New York Mercantile Exchange: @CL16H), which has been a noticeable drag on the stock market. And some argue that the oil market will continue to drive stock movements in the year ahead.
"Oil is the meat of the volatility sandwich here, and I don't think that changes," Max Wolff of Manhattan Venture Partners said Wednesday on CNBC's "Trading Nation ."
Stock futures fall as oil prices tumble (Market Watch)
Stock futures fell ahead of the opening bell on Monday as oil prices pulled back from last week’s rally in a holiday-shortened week that is expected to be characterized by low trading volumes.
Dow Jones Industrial Average YMH6, -0.42% futures dropped 81 points, or 0.46%, to 17,368, while those for the S&P 500 index ESH6, -0.33% eased 8.45 points, or 0.4%, to 2,042.75. Nasdaq-100 futures NQH6, -0.16% dropped 11 points, or 0.24%, to 4,600.
Won Leads Emerging-Market Gains as Stocks Mixed in Holiday Trade (Bloomberg)
Emerging-market currencies dropped from a two-week high and stocks retreated as declining industrial profits in China and falling oil prices weighed on the outlook for economic growth.
10 economic questions for 2016 (Business Insider)
Here is a review of the Ten Economic Questions for 2015.
There are always some international economic issues, especially with Europe, China and other areas of the world struggling. However, my focus is on the US economy, with an emphasis on housing.
Oil gives back chunk of last week’s rally (Market Watch)
Crude-oil prices fell in thin trading on Monday as 2015 began to wind down, ending a brief rally last week ignited by a drop in U.S. oil stockpiles.
On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in February CLG6, -2.20% traded at $37.24 a barrel, down 86 cents, or 2.3%. February Brent crude LCOG6, -2.06% on London’s ICE Futures exchange fell 78 cents, or 2.1%, to $37.10 a barrel.
Hedge Funds Abandon Bearish Treasury Market Bets From a Year Ago (Bloomberg)
Hedge-fund managers and other large speculators spent December 2014 setting the biggest bets against Treasuries in four years. Fast forward 12 months and they’ve abandoned those positions.
The Fed's Next Moves (Bloomberg View)
For most of the past year, investors were asking when the U.S. Federal Reserve would start raising interest rates. With that questionanswered, attention has turned to the likely pattern of increases over the coming months and years: How high will rates rise, and how quickly?
The answer, one hopes, is that the Fed doesn't know — because the policy should depend on how the economy behaves over the coming months, which is itself uncertain. Communicating this policy, however, is a problem.
The new 'Star Wars' just crossed the $1 billion mark — and it has only been out 12 days (Business Insider)
The force is with them. And now, so is a ton of money.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens has cracked the $1 billion mark after just 12 days in theaters.
In part thanks to the star power of returning actors Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" took in more than $238 million over its opening weekend and posted the best Christmas Day opening with $49.3 million in sales.
Oil Halts Gains Near 3-Week High as Iran Says Exports `Priority' (Bloomberg)
Oil slid from the highest level in three weeks, snapping the longest run of gains since April, as Iran repeated its goal of boosting exports after sanctions on the country are lifted.
Here is what a trader learned from putting together his bank's most profitable trade ever (Business Insider)
In 2008, during the nadir of the financial crisis, one Barclays trader was already $200 million in the hole and staring at a deal he called an "unavoidable abyss."
But miraculously, Bob Henderson, then Barclays' managing director and head of commodity index, hybrids and exotics trading, said he helped steer the firm away from enormous losses and into the bank's "best trade ever."
Politics
2015: The Year in Presidential Politics (The Atlantic)
Every December, The Atlantic looks back on the previous year—to highlight not just the “big moments,” but the progression of “big ideas.” Below, the first of three installments looks at the year in presidential-politics coverage.
A year ago, many thought Hillary Clinton’s ascendancy to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket was a foregone conclusion. But no one predicted that 2015 would start with 17 Republican candidates and end with Donald Trump as the front-runner—except perhaps the mogul himself. In 2015, all bets were off, and sometimes, all hell broke loose.
Big Money in Politics Was a Bust in 2015 (Bloomberg View)
Throughout 2015, we kept hearing warnings that wealthy individuals would dominate the presidential election, and perhaps even influence the outcome, all because of court-made changes in campaign-finance law that allowed unlimited contributions and spending.
So why did Big Money in politics end up to be a big bust in 2015?
Donald Trump changes tune on wages after Bernie Sanders broadside (Business Insider)
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump appeared to take a sharply different position on US wages Sunday and Monday.
After previously saying that wages are "too high," Trump instead stressed that they are actually "too low."
"Wages in are country are too low, good jobs are too few, and people have lost faith in our leaders. We need smart and strong leadership now!" Trump tweeted Monday morning.
Technology
2015 was the year big tech companies all started to look the same (The Verge)
This year, in lieu of the traditional Best Of Lists, we thought it would be fun to throw our editors into a draft together and just have a conversation. For our kick-off chat, Lauren Goode and Dieter Bohn discuss how tech's biggest companies have essentially been copying each other's strategies. Google is making hardware, Apple is launching products faster than we can keep up, Microsoft is going all in on mobile. If this is the year everybody wants to be everybody else, does that make things more interesting or more boring than all-out war?
Here's what we learned in 2015.
Best of 2015: Trouble Will Be None the Wiser to a Cute Owl Security Camera (PSFK)
PSFK counts down our 10 most popular posts of 2015. The Best of 2015, above all else, illustrate lessons that other innovators, thinkers, and change-makers can pull from when constructing the next wave of businesses and explorations. Sex tech, all-encompassing security, and goodwill mobilizations are just some of the themes that drew in swarms of readers and that should permeate into the new year. 2016 and beyond await.
The Ulo is a connected surveillance camera that stands out with an interesting, toy-like design. Adorable isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when talking about security footage but this little device takes it there.
Health and Life Sciences
Breakthroughs galore: A transformative year in medicine (BBC)
Meet Layla Richards, the baby who marked a new era of medicine.
On the day before her first birthday, Layla's parents were told that all treatments for her leukaemia had failed and she was going to die.
The determination of her family, doctors and a biotechnology company led to her being given an experimental therapy that had previously been tried only in mice.
The fine line between quality improvement and medical research (Science-Based Medicine)
As I’ve mentioned before, the single biggest difference between science-based medicine (SBM) and what I like to call pseudoscience-based medicine, namely the vast majority of what passes for “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine” is that SBM makes an active effort to improve. It seeks to improve efficacy of care by doing basic and clinical research. Then it seeks to improve the quality of care by applying the results of that research to patient care. Yes, the process is complicated and messy, and it frequently doesn’t progress as fast as we would like it to. Sometimes it goes down blind alleys or takes wrong turns, such as when a treatment is adopted too rapidly and determined later to be ineffective. Overall, however, improvement does occur, and it continues to occur. New treatments that work better are discovered. Old treatments that don’t work as well (or that don’t work at all) are abandoned.
Life on the Home Planet
Tornadoes, floods and blizzard conditions threaten post-Christmas travel (Mashable)
The same storm that spawned multiple tornadoes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area on Saturday, killing 11, is likely to cause flooding and even blizzard conditions from New Mexico to the Northeast on Sunday. The post-Christmas travel rush makes Sunday one of the busiest travel days of the year in the United States.
Air travel is likely to be affected by heavy rain, thunderstorms and low clouds from Dallas to Houston, northeast to St. Louis and Chicago, and eastward to the Ohio Valley and northeast. Severe thunderstorms, including the threat of tornadoes, will be greatest on Sunday from Dallas southeast to Houston, Austin, east to New Orleans and northward to Little Rock.
Fewer hurricanes in Atlantic thanks to El Niño (Futurity)
An El Niño in the Pacific Ocean almost always hampers hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean–sometimes by as much as 50 percent–a new study shows.
An El Niño occurs when warm waters in the Pacific Ocean influences weather patterns around the world. Researchers considered two distinct types of El Niño: a Central Pacific (also known as “warm pool” El Niño) and East Pacific or “cold tongue” El Niño.
