Financial Markets and Economy
Asian Stocks Poised to Extend Rebound as Yuan Maintains Advance (Bloomberg)
The recovery in equities looked set to continue in Asia, with more positive sentiment around China fueling an advance in Australian stocks and index futures from South Korea to Hong Kong signaling gains. U.S. crude oil rose back above $30 a barrel.
If you want to refresh your wardrobe, you're going to love this chart (Business Insider)
If you're looking to refresh your wardrobe anytime soon, you're going to love this chart.
Banks Cutting Most-Experienced Bond Traders in Fixed-Income Cull (Bloomberg)
Banks are taking a hatchet to their bond-trading businesses and the biggest casualties are proving to be the people with the most experience.
About 70 percent of credit traders cut in London last year at the 12 largest investment banks had worked in the financial industry for more than 10 years, according to data compiled by headhunters Michelangelo Search, which specializes in sales, trading and research roles. That’s increasingly leaving trading desks manned by more junior colleagues.
The bond balloon is deflating (Business Insider)
That loud swooshing sound you can hear is the air leaving the credit market.
Investors are trying to make sense of what it all means, and that's put the men and women who track high-yield credit in high demand.
Anglo's 80% Gain Sounds Great Until You Look at the Annual Chart (Bloomberg)
Anglo American Plc’s near 80 percent gain in three weeks sounds spectacular until you see the chart for the past year.
SoftBank Announces Stock Buyback of About $4.4 Billion (NY Times)
The multinational media and telecommunications conglomerate SoftBank said on Monday that it would buy back shares worth 500 billion yen, the biggest share repurchase it has ever made.
Stock in the group, which owns the United States telecom business Sprint, has slipped about 38 percent over the last year, and the company had already announced a share buyback worth about $1 billion in August. Matthew Nicholson, a spokesman for SoftBank, said that with the stock price at its current level, “as a shareholder return, we judge that now is an optimal time” for the new buyback, worth about $4.4 billion.
Why Fund Ratings Could Be Misleading (Wall Street Journal)
How helpful are mutual-fund rankings from research firms such as Morningstar Inc. and S&P Capital IQ? New evidence suggests that for many investors, the answer may be “not very.”
Fund guides such as Morningstar’s popular rating system of one to five stars appeal to fund buyers because they transform complicated data into an easy-to-understand metric: A five-star fund is superior to a four-star fund, which is superior to a three-star fund, and so on.
Is a bottom near? ‘Oversold’ stocks are itching to rebound, analysts say (Market Watch)
How low can you go? Global stocks slumped into bear territory last week, but Wall Street analysts now suggest markets are near a short-term bottom and predict a bounce in the coming month.
The headlines on any given day suggest a world under siege. War. Terrorism. Refugees. Disease. Recession. Famine. Climate change. But beneath these often very real problems, something remarkable has been happening, something on a more epochal level that has gone almost completely unnoticed.
Global poverty has fallen faster during the past 20 years than at any time in history. Around the world hunger, child death, and disease rates have all plummeted. More girls are getting into school. In fact, never before have so many people, in so many poor countries, made so much progress in reducing poverty, increasing incomes, improving health, reducing conflict and war, and spreading democracy.
Why Bear Markets Are So Painful (A Wealth of Common Sense)
Loss aversion tells us that losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good. Myopia deals with the fact that people have a tendency to evaluate outcomes on a frequent basis. Put them together and these two behavioral biases can wreak havoc on your portfolio because the more often you monitor your investment results the more likely it is that you’ll see a loss, and thus, suffer from loss aversion.
Why Currency Hedging Foreign Equities Hurts Diversification (Fortune Finacial Advisors)
Currency-hedged ETFs were extremely popular for much of 2015 as investors sought to win two times over by owning shares from countries such as Japan and Germany (which they expected to do well given a devaluing currency), and also benefit from being short the depreciating currency. However, as many studies have shown, this strategy has been a mixed bag over the very long term as currency movements tend to mean-revert.
The Retracement In the Price of Gold (Jesse's Cafe Americain)
Here is a closer look at the retracement of gold we have seen as of this morning.
Politics
The Gifts of the Presidents (The Atlantic)
In 1880, Queen Victoria gave President Rutherford B. Hayes an ornate desk carved out of timber from the British ship H.M.S Resolute. Years later, that desk is now a fixture in the Oval Office, where generations of presidents have sat behind it. It’s perhaps the most visible symbol of the sometimes extravagant, and frequently bizarre, gifts presented to American presidents.
When Every Letter Becomes Political (Bloomberg View)
There is something obviously preposterous about Anat Berko’s suggestion on the floor of Israel’s Knesset that Palestine can’t exist because the Arabic language doesn’t have the “P” sound. But the use of amateur linguistics in politics isn’t restricted to arguments denying opponents’ legitimacy — it can also be used for salutary purposes. Barack Obama, for example, visiting a U.S. mosque for the first time in his presidency, recently said that “the very word itself, Islam, comes from salam — peace.”
How Bernie Sanders would remake the whole U.S. economy (Yahoo! Finance)
He may not be realistic, but he’s certainly bold.
Sen. Bernie Sanders launched his presidential campaign nine months ago with big ideas about empowering the little guy and ending “the collapse of the American middle class.” He had few detailed proposals, but as his message caught on and his campaign raised millions of dollars, he began to fill in the blanks. With the primaries underway, Sanders now has a thorough list of specific plans that would remake the whole U.S. economy were they to go into effect. Here are the biggest elements of his plan, along with cost estimates.
Technology
The Space Scooter moves without kicking and doesn't require electricity or gas (Mashable)
The Space Scooter is the scooter that keeps going, and you don’t even need to kick. You don’t need to charge it overnight or fill it up with gas either — just pump your feet up and down.
Maybe robots won’t kill us if they read ‘good’ books (Futurity)
The rapid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) has raised some fears that robots could act unethically or soon choose to harm humans. Some are calling for bans on robotics research; others are calling for more research to understand how AI might be constrained.
Robots will steal your job: How AI could increase unemployment and inequality (Business Insider)
The future is supposed to be a glorious place where robot butlers cater to our every need and the four-hour work day is a reality.
But the true picture could be much bleaker.
Top computer scientists in the US warned over the weekend that the rise ofartificial intelligence (AI) and robots in the work place could cause mass unemployment and dislocated economies, rather than simply unlocking productivity gains and freeing us all up to watch TV and play sports.
Health and Life Sciences
The Chemical Rollercoaster Sleep Apnea Triggers In Your Brain (Forbes)
If you suffer from sleep apnea, you’re probably already familiar with at least a few of its unpleasant effects – daytime sleepiness, fatigue, memory lapses, hair trigger emotional responses and, in some cases, depression. Intuitively it makes sense that up to 30 disruptions in sleep per hour (the average apnea stat proffered by sleep researchers) would lead to some psychological tumult in our waking hours, but less clear is exactly what these disruptions are doing chemically in the brain. A new study from UCLA researchers uncovers some answers.
Research Hints at Promise and Difficulty of Helping People With A.D.H.D. Learn (NY Times)
Over the past few decades, cognitive scientists have found that small alterations in how people study can accelerate and deepen learning, improving retention and comprehension in a range of subjects, including math, science and foreign languages.
Life on the Home Planet
Better water management could halve the global food gap (Phys)
Improved agricultural water management could halve the global food gap by 2050 and buffer some of the harmful climate change effects on crop yields. For the first time, scientists investigated systematically the worldwide potential to produce more food with the same amount of water by optimizing rain use and irrigation. They found the potential has previously been underestimated. Investing in crop water management could substantially reduce hunger while at the same time making up for population growth. However, putting the findings into practice would require specific local solutions, which remains a challenge.
Extinct plant discovered in amber (BBC)
Biologists have described a new species of extinct plant, based on two fossil flowers that were trapped in chunks of amber for at least 15 million years.
Strychnos electri belongs to the genus whose tropical shrubs, trees and vines are famous for producing the deadly toxin strychnine.
