Financial Markets and Economy
There are 2 tribes on Wall Street, and they could be about to go to war (Business Insider)
Stock trading specialists on Wall Street are being asked to give their colleagues in the fixed-income markets a hand.
The bond-trading veterans aren't so sure they want the help.
More Americans Should Be Working (Bloomberg View)
Here's a fun chart, from the detailed estimate of the impact of Bernie Sanders' economic plans prepared by University of Massachusetts at Amherst economist Gerald Friedman.
Don't Give Stocks 100% of Yourself (Bloomberg)
Go ahead, invest 100 percent of everything you have in stocks. Or, even better, please don't.
The huge, hidden upside to low oil prices (Quartz)
Oil prices just keep falling and crashing into things on their way down. It seems like every day another country gets a bill for damages: Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Russia, the UK. While the global economy’s biggest players are reeling, there is a less visible group of people who stand to benefit tremendously: those without enough to eat.
Why Carriers Want to Delete WhatsApp (Bloomberg)
Two years ago, Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the Mobile World Congress, an annual industry gathering held in Barcelona, to reassure phone companies that Facebook is their natural ally. He’d just announced the $22 billion purchase of the WhatsApp messaging service and was touting an initiative called Internet.org, a low-bandwidth suite of basic services carriers would offer in conjunction with Facebook to get hundreds of millions of people online for the first time. He pledged to “build what is going to be a more profitable model with more subscribers for carriers.”
The World's Biggest Miner May Be About to Toast Its Oil Drillers (Bloomberg)
BHP Billiton Ltd.’s shares began tracking oil prices more closely last year as they headed into the worst energy market downturn in a generation. It may not seem like it, but that could be good news for the world’s biggest miner.
Do Strong Returns Follow Strong Returns? (Irrelevant Investor)
Cliff Asness describes momentum as “the phenomenon that securities which have performed well relative to peers (winners) on average continue to outperform, and securities that have performed relatively poorly (losers) tend to continue to underperform.”
Will You Be a Gambler or the House In the Stock Market? (Investor Field Guide)
Blackjack odds are as good as you’ll get at most casinos. In most cases, the casino has just a 1% edge versus the gambler. So in a given night, you can go on a great run and win a lot of money playing blackjack.
Goldman Sachs to Turn Its Hedge Fund Research Into an ETF (Bloomberg)
Is Wall Street research the next frontier for ETFs?
Get "Real" on Gold Fever (Market Anthropology)
As the yellow metal surged more than 5 percent last week, gold fever quickly broke out and captured the emotions of both speculators and spectators alike.
A Crisis In Ponzi-Land (Adventures in Capitalism)
Until early this summer, certain promoters seemed to believe that they could do a magic trick that no one would catch. A larger entity would “drop down” an asset at twice what it cost to purchase or build, add a bit more leverage and call it a “yield vehicle” that would then be sold to retail investors. Adding hubris to this whole charade of financial engineering, the “sponsor” would keep an IDR so that in addition to a huge gain-on-sale, it would also get a healthy chunk of the cash flow from this “yield vehicle.”
The Hedge Fund Myth (Pension Partners)
Reading through some of the mandates for hedge funds via Bloomberg can provide instant comedic relief…
The Tower of Babel (Value Pays)
The comment about markets being ‘broken’ has been echoed by many. History indicates that this type of extreme has been repeated numerous times and the turn comes as common sense recognizes that it is extreme. Putting a price on when extreme market psychology turns or any market price prediction misperceives the unpredictable nature of investor psychology. When Momentum Investors shift to extreme positions not supported fundamentally, Value Investors see opportunities.
Politics
Trump Smirks As Beltway GOP Crumbles (The Daily Beast)
When Donald Trump speaks, he has a habit of gripping the lectern with all but the middle finger of his left hand. The middle finger wriggles about, curling up and down with the rhythm of his words. On Saturday night, as he addressed the crowd after winning the primary here by a ten-point margin, it seemed to be wriggling at all of us.
Trump has completely upended the Republican Party’s nominating process, and he couldn’t be more satisfied.
Jeb Bush’s Path To Defeat Began A Year Ago (Five Thirty Eight)
The Jeb Bush campaign for president is over. After a disappointing finish in South Carolina on Saturday, he suspended his campaign shortly before 9 p.m., before it was even clear whether he would place fourth or fifth.
Technology
Facebook massively boosts 360 virutal reality video resolution (Mashable)
Facebook's big plans for the future of social VR are finally coming into focus.
In the two years since Facebook bought Oculus Rift for $2 billion, the company has been busy. It collaborated with Samsung on the popular Gear VR headset (which needs a Samsung Galaxy Phone to work) and ported 360 videos to the Gear VR.
Samsung’s Gear 360 camera looks like an eyeball and shoots 360-degree video (The Verge)
Samsung is entering the nascent 360-degree imaging market with a new camera called the Gear 360. The camera was announced alongside the reveal of the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge this evening at the company's Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, and it will be available in the second quarter of this year.
Health and Life Sciences
Your Waistline Changes How You See The World (Forbes)
As anyone who’s ever tried knows, losing weight is hard. The more, the harder. It’s not just that the process of dieting and exercising is difficult, the weight itself can feel insurmountable – particularly if you’ve tried and failed to lose it before. It’s a big physical and perceptual challenge.
A recent study probes another dimension of the perception part of the challenge: our body weight changes how we see distance.
Get Relief From Dry Skin (Medicine Net Daily)
Dry, itchy skin can be annoying and even painful. Fortunately, it's mostly preventable.
Life on the Home Planet
Mount St. Helens Has Nothing on Its Little-Known Neighbors (Wired)
Most people, when asked what area in the Cascade Range has spit the most lava and ash out over the past 5,000 years, would answer Mount St. Helens. It is the Cascade volcano that has had the most well-known eruption in US history (its 1980 blast) and is the only volcano in the entire range to have erupted in the past 100 years. So, as this leading question might imply, you’d likely be surprised to find out that Mount St. Helens isn’t the leader in volcanic eruptions. In fact, neither is Rainier or Lassen or Hood.
Drowning in Blood: Kalamazoo and the Other 41 Mass Shootings This Year (The Huffington Post)
Blood is running through American streets, drowning our people and our freedom to move without fear through our homes and neighborhoods.
The mass shooting in Kalamazoo, Michigan that killed six and seriously wounded two others is the 42nd in 2016 according to the Washington Post on February 21, 2016.
