Financial Markets and Economy
Earnings expectations are setting up the stock market for a major surprise (Business Insider)
Expectations for future earnings are the most important driver of stock prices.
U.S. oil production is declining, but how fast will it fall? (Market Watch)
Like Wile E. Coyote briefly floating midair after running off a cliff, U.S. shale output has been amazingly resilient as oil prices plunged.
Hedge Funds Are Least Bullish on Dollar in More Than One Year (Bloomberg)
Hedge funds reduced wagers on dollar strength to the least since July 2014 as traders pushed back expectations for interest-rate increases, sending the currency heading toward its worst month since April.
What Hedge Funds Get Right? (A Wealth of Common Sense)
Hedge funds have come under a lot of criticism in the past few years because of their poor performance, headline risk and high fees.
'Flash Boys' Exchange Isn't About the Little Guy (Bloomberg View)
Citadel is, of course, one of those "market makers that execute most retail orders," so it has a dog in this fight: Retail brokers send most of their customers' orders to "wholesale" market makers like Citadel,unless the customers specifically direct the brokers to send the orders elsewhere. Citadel's comment letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission on IEX's application to become a public stock exchange goes on in that vein, for five pages. "IEX behaves as though it is entitled to special treatment because its owners were lionized in a popular book by a celebrity writer," says Citadel. It is a fun read!
Bank of America is preparing big layoffs in investment banking and trading (Business Insider)
Bank of America is preparing for significant job cuts across its global banking and markets business, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Senior executives in the division were tasked with identifying potential job cuts a few weeks ago, and this week were asked to increase their size, according to people familiar with the situation.
Lowest Number Of Bulls In 23 Years! (Joe Fahmy)
My friend Ryan Detrick posted a chart recently showing that bullish sentiment among individual investors dropped to its lowest level in 23 years! There are fewer bulls now than in March 2009 and March 2003. For those who don’t remember, the low in March 2003 was after a brutal 3-year Bear Market that started with the dot com collapse and extended past 9/11. March 2009 was after a -50% decline that crushed the housing market and almost brought down the entire financial sector.
Gold falls 1.5% to wipe out weekly gain (Market Watch)
Gold futures settled sharply lower Friday, with strength in the U.S. dollar and recent gains in oil prices prompting prices to more than erase what would have been a gain for the week.
Something weird is happening in the stock market (Business Insider)
But it's not working out that way. In fact, the stocks with the largest bets against them have been on a tear lately. Here's why.
In other news, America beat expectations, with the US economy growing in the fourth quarter even more than previously thought. It looks like inflation pressures are picking up too, with the latest report on personal income and spending beating expectations all around.
Why Stock Market Declines are Good (Pragcap)
James Bullard, the St Louis Fed President, gave an interview today discussing how the stock correction has been good because it has helped to prevent a bubble. He’s inferring that lower prices are bad in the short-term and good in the long-term. And he’s totally right. I’ll show you why.
Gold prices are at their highest in a year, but Deutsche Bank still says “buy” (Quartz)
To your bunkers!
China is finally facing reality (Business Insider)
It is rare that Governor Zhou Xiaochuan, the head of the People's Bank of China, makes public statements.
Q4 GDP Revised to 1.0% (Crossing Wall Street)
This morning, the government revised its forecast for real fourth-quarter GDP growth to 1.0%. The original report was 0.7%. Wall Street had been expecting a lower revision, down to 0.4%.
Investors might want to wait before jumping back on the dollar bandwagon (Market Watch)
With the dollar on track to post its first weekly gain against the yen since January, some investors are asking themselves: could the dollar be on the verge of breaking higher?
The short answer: Not yet.
Bond Vigilantes Push $258 Billion of Oil Debt Past Junk (Bloomberg)
They have sold off hundreds of oil fields, eliminated thousands of jobs and slashed millions of dollars from capital spending and dividends.
Politics
Rubio's Responsible Rebuttal to Trumpcare (Bloomberg View)
None of the remaining Republican presidential candidates has a detailed health-care plan. The one who has done the most to outline an agenda, Senator Marco Rubio, is still a bit lighter on those details even than Barack Obama was when he ran in 2008. But Rubio is at least on the right track, while the other candidates are wandering aimlessly, refusing to say where they would go, or headed in the wrong direction.
Disproportional Elections (The Atlantic)
Four years ago, the Republican National Committee was frustrated. The 2012 primary had dragged on for months. The states couldn’t make up their minds. And the party ended up with Mitt Romney, bruised by attack ads even before the Democrats got their first swing.
Technology
If your Mac’s battery life is struggling, do this one thing to your Chrome browser (Quartz)
There’s no denying that Chrome, Google’s web browser, is a bit of aresource hog. If you keep a lot of tabs open over the course of the work day, Chrome will invariably take up a massive amount of your Mac’s memory, making your computer feel slower, and shortening how long the battery seems to last on a single charge.
Sony’s new VR control patent looks like something out of ‘Tron’ (The Next Web)
Ready to feel like you’re in the future? If a new patent from Sony comes to fruition, you might be able to strap on your VR goggles and manipulate virtual space while looking like you’re living in The Grid from ‘Tron.’
The patent, spotted by Ars Technica, is for a ‘Glove Interface Object’ presumably designed to work with the PlayStation VR (or perhaps a future successor).
Health and Life Sciences
The New Old Age: An Easy Fix for Vertigo (NY Times)
The first time it happened, in 2011, Bob Amberger thought he might be having a stroke.
A retired real estate agent and contractor in Modesto, Calif., he awoke one morning, started to climb out of bed, and felt the room whirling around him. “It was the most disconcerting experience imaginable,” said Mr. Amberger, 71.
Why humans evolved to feel shame (Futurity)
Feelings of shame are universal in all cultures, and new research could explain why. Studies in the US, India, and Israel suggest that shame—like pain—evolved as a defense.
“The function of pain is to prevent us from damaging our own tissue,” says Daniel Sznycer, lead author of the paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The function of shame is to prevent us from damaging our social relationships, or to motivate us to repair them.”
Life on the Home Planet
The Weird Global Appeal of Heavy Metal (Wall Street Journal)
Today’s “world music” isn’t Peruvian pan flutes or African talking drums. It’s loud guitars, growling vocals and ultrafast “blast” beats. Heavy metal has become the unlikely soundtrack of globalization.
Indonesia is a metal hotbed: Its president, Joko Widodo, wears Metallica and Napalm Death T-shirts. Metal scenes flourish in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Russia and Scandinavia.
What Happens At The International UFO Conference? (Popular Science)
The 25th annual International UFO Congress, held last week in Scottsdale, Arizona, brings together a myriad of individuals from doctors to scientists to alien hunters to abductees to crop circle researchers. Open Minds, a media group dedicated to tracking reported UFO sightings, runs the event. It's comprised of lectures, vendor areas, workshops and plenty of time to get mingle with other attendees and get a selfie on the epic alien step and repeat.
