Financial Markets and Economy
It looks like the US economy almost shrank in the first quarter (Business Insider)
More economists are forecasting that the US economy nearly shrank in the first quarter.
Worst Week in Two Months Rattles Equity Bulls as Earnings Loom (Bloomberg)
It’s official — the rally in U.S. stocks that erased the worst-ever start to a year has fizzled, with the biggest weekly slide since February depriving the bull market of momentum ahead of what’s forecast to be the steepest earnings slump since the financial crisis.
Oil Prices Surge Above 6% (Fox Business)
Oil prices are surging, one of several big jumps higher this year, as speculators keep betting a stronger global economy and a deal from global exporters to cap production can smooth the path for oil to rebound.
Suffering bank investors search for bright spots (Reuters)
U.S. banks are generally expected to post dismal results when their earnings season gets under way next week, but some analysts say to dig deeper: the fine print in the results, and what bank bosses say, could actually help these long-suffering stocks bounce back.
Four of the S&P 500's top-weighted banks, J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Citigroup, are set to report grim first-quarter revenues and profits starting on Wednesday.
My Oil Price Forecast Shows Why Crude Supplies and Imports Are Rising (Wall Street Examiner)
U.S. crude inventories are sitting at record highs of around 529 million barrels right now.
Morgan Stanley Paints Bleak Outlook for Twitter on Few New Users (Bloomberg)
Morgan Stanley analysts came down hard on Twitter Inc., lowering their forecasts for the social media company’s stock price, on projected slower growth in new users, revenue and earnings.
The Greatest Mistake Traders Make (Trader Feed)
Thanks to Bella at SMB for bringing this video on building your inner coach to my attention. There are quite a few gems in the video, including the idea that your inner voice–how you talk to yourself–needs to become your inner coach. We build that inner coach by maximizing performance in the present: focusing on what we're doing now and how we can do it better. It is the process of self-improvement that yields the outcome of success. Or, as the video emphasizes, winning is not an outcome; it's a process.
Alpha or Assets (Investor Field Guide)
More and more investors are buying “factor” based strategies which invest using measures like valuation and low volatility, but the most popular strategies are applying factors in the wrong way.Strategies should be built for alpha, not scale—but the asset management industry has gone in the opposite direction.
Spain's Largest Bank Likely to Fail U.S. Stress Test, Again (Fortune)
Santander is expected to earn the dubious distinction of being the only bank to fail the Federal Reserve’s annual health check for three years running, despite efforts to improve controls at its U.S. unit, banking sources and analysts say.
Politics
The 2016 Campaign Heads West (The Atlantic)
It’s a good day for the insurgent candidates in both presidential races.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders won his eighth victory out of the last nine Democratic contests in the Wyoming caucuses on Saturday. In the nearby Rocky Mountains, Texas Senator Ted Cruz sought to lock up Colorado’s GOP delegates on Saturday in an effort to slow frontrunner Donald Trump’s march to the Republican nomination.
Inside the most unorthodox campaign in political history (NY Mag)
On the afternoon of March 15, as voters across five states streamed to the polls, Donald Trump’s campaign advisers gathered by the pool at Mar-a-Lago, the billionaire’s private club in Palm Beach. Hope Hicks, Trump’s 27-year-old press secretary, wearing a cover-up over bikini bottoms, her hair still wet from the pool, scanned headlines on her iPhone next to Trump’s square-jawed campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. That morning, Politico had reported that Trump allies wanted Lewandowski to be fired for roughly grabbing a female reporter while she tried to ask Trump a question at a press conference (an incident for which he has since been charged with battery).
Technology
Twisted Light Could Dramatically Boost Internet Speeds (Singularity Hub)
Fiber optics allow for the communication of data at the speed of light.
But the amount of data that can be sent along any optic fiber is limited by how much information you can encode into the light wave traveling through it.
The Future is Without Apps (Medium)
“There’s an App for That.”
It’s the trademarked slogan that defined the mobile world since 2008. Surely, apps seemed to be the way to go. Coding bootcamps that claimed to teach you app development chops within weeks popped up everywhere; products used commercials to go out of their way and show off their new apps; heck, even that family restaurant around the block got its own menu app built.
Robot Waiters Fired For Spilling Food And Drinks, Malfunctioning (Zero Hedge)
It has been a dangerous time for minimum wage waiters and bartenders. While on one hand, never in the history of the US has there been more "food and eating place" workers, and soaring with every month – if only in the BLS' in house statistical models to compensate for the manufacturing recession the US finds itself in…
On the other hand, their corporate employers, alarmed by the recent spread of minimum wage hikes have been taking measures such as these
Health and Life Sciences
This company wants to use toothpaste to treat your peanut allergies (Business Insider)
For the roughly 1.5 million children living with peanut allergies, decreasing sensitivity could one day be as easy as brushing your teeth.
That's the plan for Intrommune, a new New York-based biotechnology company that recently acquired the rights to license the toothpaste technology they intend to apply to food allergies.
The Case Against Low-fat Milk Is Stronger Than Ever (Time)
For years you’ve been told to go for skim over full-fat dairy. Even the latest dietary guidelines for Americans urge people to avoid the full fat, and following this lead, school lunch programs provide only low-fat milk and no whole milk at all, even though they do allow chocolate skim milk with its added sugars. But large population studies that look at possible links between full-fat dairy consumption, weight and disease risk are starting to call that advice into question.
Life on the Home Planet
Global warming is changing the way the Earth spins on its axis (Business Insider)
Global warming is shifting the way the Earth wobbles on its polar axis, a new NASA study finds.
Melting ice sheets — especially in Greenland — are changing the distribution of weight on Earth.
