Okay, I’m just kidding. I have a take on this morning’s revelations that Facebook has been employing user data as a strategic asset since 2012. Duh.
It’s me, it’s Stephanie Ruhle, it’s Anthony Scaramucci – let’s go!
Source:
Cord-Cutting Is Quickly Picking Up Pace
by Zero Hedge - April 19th, 2019 11:55 pm
Courtesy of Felix Richter, Statista
Over the past couple of weeks, things went from bad to worse for pay-TV providers in the United States, after both Apple and Disney announced their own subscription-based video streaming services to launch this year. Already struggling to hold on to subscribers lured away by the likes of Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime, the last thing the pay-TV industry needs is two new heavyweight competitors with deep pockets and plenty of ambition.
According to Leichtman Research Group, the largest pay-TV providers in the United States, accounting for 95 percent of all subscribers, lost more than 2.85 million subscribers, collectively, in 2018, with satellite services seeing the biggest drop in customers (-2.4 million) and cable companies also losing 0.9 million subs. Part of the decline was offset by a rise in internet-delivered services such as Sling TV, but overall things are looking increasingly bleak for the pay-TV industry.
As the following chart shows, cord-cutting is really picking up pace, with net subscriber losses of the largest pay-TV providers growing from 125,000 in 2014 to 2.85 million last year, with total subscriber losses amounting to more than 5.5 million over the five-year period. At the same time, household penetration of SVOD services has grown from 47 percent to 69 percent between 2014 and 2018, indicating who is likely to blame for pay-TV’s losses.
You will find more infographics at Statista.
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Why political meddling with central banks is a terrible idea – and the Federal Reserve is no exception
by ilene - April 19th, 2019 7:46 pm
Why political meddling with central banks is a terrible idea – and the Federal Reserve is no exception
Nixon convinced Fed Chair Arthur Burns, seated left, to lower interest rates, helping him win re-election in 1972. AP Photo
Courtesy of Andreas Kern, Georgetown University
Central bank independence is increasingly at risk around the world.
In the U.S., President Donald Trump said he may nominate two close political allies to the Federal Reserve, following months of criticism over the bank’s interest rate policy. In Italy, the government proposed seizing control of Banca Italia’s approximately US$100 billion in gold reserves – which it reportedly would use to fund spending plans – and has threatened the central bank’s independence in other ways.
They’re not alone. Governments and lawmakers in Turkey, the U.K., India and elsewhere have been steadily eroding the bedrock idea that a central bank should be left alone to manage the economy based on evidence and data – not political goals. This is motivating numerous commentators to write farewell notes for the concept of central bank independence.
I agree with their concern and find government interference deeply troubling. That’s because a large body of economic research makes it quite clear: Placing monetary policy into the hands of an independent central banker, who bases decisions on evidence and data instead of populist ideals, leads to lower inflation and greater economic stability – key ingredients of a strong economy.
And as I know from research I’ve done with a variety of colleagues, political meddling comes with a hefty price tag. While it is incredibly hard to build a sound central bank that is trusted by investors and citizens, it is even harder to do so after its credibility has been corroded.
The promise of easy credit
There’s a reason politicians like to gain control over a central bank.
It’s a powerful institution that literally supplies constituents with cheap money via lower interest rates, creating jobs and boosting growth in the process – at least in the short term.
To underscore the kind of weaponry central banks bring…
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The PhilStockWorld.com Weekly Webinar – 04-17-19
by clarisezoleta - April 18th, 2019 7:54 pm
For LIVE access on Wednesday afternoons, join us at Phil's Stock World – click here.
Major Topics:
00:00:59 Checking on the Markets
00:02:05 Natural Gas
00:04:15 Petroleum Status Report
00:09:16 AAPL
00:12:35 FB, GOOGL, INTC
00:17:47 CSCO, CMCSA
00:23:00 PEP
00:28:40 NMM
00:33:57 Levels 4/16/2019
00:36:19 News
00:40:13 SQQQ
00:43:16 COMPQ
00:49:01 Long Term Portfolio
01:01:07 Portfolios
01:07:36 Checking on the Markets
01:10:07 Trade Ideas
Phil's Weekly Trading Webinars provide a great opportunity to learn what we do at PSW. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and view past webinars here. For LIVE access to PSW's Weekly Webinars – demonstrating trading strategies in real time – click here to join us at PSW!
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$300,000 Thursday – Our Options Opportunity Portfolio Goes up 200%
by phil - April 18th, 2019 8:20 am
There's not much news and it's a silly pre-holiday trading day so I'm going to reveiw the OOP instead.
The Options Opportunity Portfolio was initiated last year in Seeking Alpha's Marketplace and, since the Summer, it's been on quite a tear and we just crossed $300,000 – up 200.7% from our $100,000 initial set-up back on Jan 3rd of 2018. You can follow our progress and changes under the Virtual Porfolio Tab on Philstockworld's main page and, unlike our Long-Term/Short-Term paird portfolios, the Options Opportunity Portfolio is self-hedged – so it's just the one, balanced portfolio.
Our goal in the OOP is to take advantage of OPPORTUNITIES in the maket – usually we jump on stocks that have been unfairly sold off on news we don't consider as bad as the traders who are running out of the stock. That's why you see a lot of stocks in here with erratic charts – usually they've had some kind of mishap which drew our attention to them.
In our March Review, on the 7th, we were at $283,465 and now $300,689 is up $17,224 for the month and that's 17.2% of our original $100,000 – so pretty good for a month – too good really and we're going to look carefully for places we can take some money off the table, as we don't REALLY trust this rally.
- FTR – This has been a bad trade for us this year and we're just waiting to see what happens on 4/30 earnings.
- HMNY – I think we own most of the company at this point – not that it's worth anything…
- HOV – This one we're expecting to recover nicely over time.
- TZA – One of our hedges, no adjustments. TZA is a 3x Ultra-Short so a 20% drop in the Russell should give us a 60% bounce to about $14.50, which would make the 50 calls worth $6.50 so $32,500 less the current value of $10,275 means we have $22,225 worth of protection here.
- LB – An aggressive put but we like LB.
- PLAY – Not worried about these.
- SIG – Retail
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Faster, more accurate diagnoses: Healthcare applications of AI research
by ilene - April 17th, 2019 5:21 pm
Faster, more accurate diagnoses: Healthcare applications of AI research
As machine learning progresses, its applications include faster, more accurate medical diagnoses. Shutterstock
Courtesy of Seokbum Ko, University of Saskatchewan
When Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo shockingly defeated legendary Go player Lee Sedol in 2016, the terms artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and deep learning were propelled into the technological mainstream.
BBC Newsnight: AlphaGo and the future of Artificial Intelligence.
AI is generally defined as the capacity for a computer or machine to exhibit or simulate intelligent behaviour such as Tesla’s self-driving car and Apple’s digital assistant Siri. It is a thriving field and the focus of much research and investment. Machine learning is the ability of an AI system to extract information from raw data and learn to make predictions from new data.
Deep learning combines artificial intelligence with machine learning. It is concerned with algorithms inspired by the structure and function of the brain called artificial neural networks. Deep learning has received much attention lately both in the consumer world and throughout the medical community.
Interest in deep learning surged with the success of AlexNet, a neural network designed by Alex Krizhevsky that won the 2012 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, an annual image classification competition.
Another relatively recent advancement is the use of graphical processing units (GPUs) to power deep learning algorithms. GPUs excel at computations (multiplications and additions) needed for deep learning applications, thereby lowering application processing time.
In our lab at the University of Saskatchewan we are doing interesting deep learning research related to healthcare applications — and as a professor of electrical and computer engineering, I lead the research team. When it comes to health care, using AI or machine learning to make diagnoses is new, and there has been exciting and promising progress.
Extracting blood vessels in the eye
Detecting abnormal retinal blood vessels is useful for diagnosing diabetes and heart disease. In order to provide reliable and meaningful medical interpretations, the retinal vessel must be extracted from a retinal image for reliable and meaningful interpretations. Although…
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Will We Hold It Wednesday – Nasdaq 8,000 Edition
by phil - April 17th, 2019 8:22 am
8,000 on the Nasdaq Composite!
5,150 was the top in 2,000 before the great crash took it back to 1,200, a 76% drop which took many years to recover from. In fact, we only got back to 5,000 in 2016 but here we are, less than 3 years later, up another 3,000 (60%) and no, I don't think this time is like 1999 when people were throwing money at terrible stocks but there are still plenty of stocks people are throwing unrealistic amounts of money at and there WILL be a reckoning – one day.
We did consolidate for about a year at the 5,000 line, which means roughly half the people trading thought stocks should be higher and half thought they should be lower but then Trump got elected and promises were made (not kept, just made) and we've been off to the races ever since.
If we want to determine whether 8,000 is too much for the Composite, we should look at the top 10 holdings, which make up a whopping 40% of the indexes weight while the other 2,629 components fight for the other 60%. The simple question we can ask here is are these companies worth 60% more than they were in 2016 and, to do that, we can simply look at earnings and revenues because we should expect some real changes, right?
- While Apple (AAPL) gets a lot of attention as it nears $1Tn in valuation, Microsoft (MSFT) has quietely gotten there without the drama and is "worth" $927Bn at $120. Revenues have gone from $92Bn to $118Bn (up 28%) while profits in 2016 were $20.5Bn and, last year, they were $16.5Bn but that was due to write-offs and they should do better than $34Bn in 2019 and that's up 70% so yes, MSFT is worth much more than in 2016 but I'm not sure I want to pay $1,000Bn for "just" $34Bn in earnings (p/e 29.5) so I would give this one a B- grade.
- AAPL, of course, is my favorite company on the planet and $200/share is $943Bn in market cap but AAPL earned $59.5Bn last year (tax advantaged) and should make $53Bn this year for a p/e of 17.8 –
…
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Facebook is Harvesting Your Organs!
by ilene - April 16th, 2019 10:03 pm
Facebook is Harvesting Your Organs!
Courtesy of Joshua M Brown
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Terrific Tuesday – Futures Blast Higher Just Because
by phil - April 16th, 2019 8:29 am
Wheee, up 180!
Why? Literally, there is no reason that the Dow is up 0.666% this morning in the Futures. The other indexes are up 0.4% and mostly we popped higher at the EU open (3am). There are no reasons for this and we don't need any reasons – there were no reasons in 1999 or 2007 as the market plowed higher – even as some were warning of dire macro events that were clearly visible just around the corner. The markets tend to march on until the changes are long past undeniable, kind of like our President…
All eyes were on France yesterday as Notre Dame had a tragic fire, destroying a large part of one of the World's greatest architectural wonders. Victor Hugo said Notre Dame is a work of art authored by humanity itself, with no individual artist. It surpasses anything an individual can do and therefore becomes the best of what all of us can do – it's loss is a great tragedy and already hundreds of Millions of Dollars have been pledged to rebuild it.
When Hugo Wrote "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" the church had already been destroyed during the French revolution and his novel called enough attention to it that it underwent a great rebuilding program in the mid-1800s so, almost 200 years later – we're just repeating the cycle – hopefully with less wood this time! In truth, there's not all that much left of the original, built in 1163.
So, while we may see it rebuilt and think "it's not the same" – our great, great, great grandchildren will probably see it as an achitechtural classic once again – providing we do something about Global Warming, which came within 3 feet of breaking over the embankments during the 2016 Paris Flood.
As there is not much news today, it's a good time to kick off our Portfolio Reviews with a look at our public portfolio called the Money Talk Portfolio, which we only trade live on BNN's (Bloomberg Canada) Money Talk Show once per quarter. I'll be on the show again next Wednesday at 7pm…
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Map: Visualizing 40 Years of Nautical Piracy
by ilene - April 15th, 2019 11:30 pm
Map: Visualizing 40 Years of Nautical Piracy
Courtesy of Jeff Desjardins, Visual Capitalist
View the full-size version of the infographic by clicking here
Map: Visualizing 40 Years of Nautical Piracy
For millennia, voyaging on the open seas has been a dangerous and risky endeavor.
Between the powerful forces of Mother Nature and self-made obstacles stemming from human error, there is no shortage of possible calamities for even the bravest of sailors.
But for most of human history, perhaps the biggest fear that sailors grappled with was that of piracy. A run in with such marauders could lead to the theft of valuable cargo or even possible death, and it’s a threat that carries on even through modern times.
Hotbeds of Modern Piracy
Today’s map comes from Adventures in Mapping and it aggregates instances of piracy over the last 40 years based on the database from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
It should be noted that all individual events can be seen on this interactive map, which is what we will use to look at current hotbeds of piracy in more depth below.
1. The Strait of Malacca
The Strait of Malacca is one of the world’s most important shipping lanes, and also one of the most notorious.
A key chokepoint that sits between Malaysia and Indonesia, the Strait of Malacca is as narrow as 25 miles wide while also seeing a quarter of the world’s traded goods shipped through it every year. As a result, the strait and surrounding area are a frequent target for modern piracy.
Example account: (September 2002)
“The 1,699-ton Malaysian-flag tanker (NAUTICA KLUANG) was hijacked 28 Sep at 0300 local time while underway off Indonesia in the vicinity of Pulau Iyu Kecil at the southern tip of the Strait of Malacca. The pirates, armed with guns and machetes, tied up the crew and locked them in cabins. When the crew freed themselves at 0900, 29 Sep, the thieves had transferred the ship’s cargo of 3,000 tons…
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Monday Market Movement – Earnings Season Finally Begins!
by phil - April 15th, 2019 8:33 am
It's earnings season!
Finally we get to see whether or not these record highs come with record earnings! We got off to a bang on Friday with beats from FRC ($1.26 vs $1.22 expected), INFY ($9.36 vs $8.95), JPM ($2.65 vs $2.35), PNC ($2.61 vs $2.60) and WFC ($1.20 vs $1.10) so so far, so good it seems and, this morning, Citigroup (C) came in at $1.87 vs $1.79 expected and Goldman Sachs (GS) is $5.71 vs $5.02, M&T Bank (MTB) $3.35 vs $3.29 and we're waiting for Schwab (SCHW) and Washington Federal (WAFD) but things are looking good in banking.
Goldman Sachs, of course, gained 2.5% on Friday so today's earnings is giving them no additional lift and that's another sign of a toppy market as the whole banking sector went up on just a few earnings reports so woe unto any of them who fail to deliver going forward. We still have plenty of Banks to hear from but, more interesting, will be the companies who may have been affected by the Government Shut-Down in Q1 – that's where we're expecting to get some resistance.
Earnings Whispers has the above cool charts for earnings and I love the "implied move" into earnings as it can alert you to seriously mis-matches that we can potentially take advantage of like Micro-Vision, where options imply a 50% move but the average move is only 11.3%. MVIS is essentially a penny stock, trading at $1.03 but it does have options abd a fun way to play them is to sell the August $1 calls for 0.40 and sell the August $1 puts for 0.30 so you are collecting 0.70 and anything less than an 0.70 move between now and Aug 16th (expiration day) is your profit.
Sketchers (SKX) on the other hand, usually makes violent moves on earnings yet it's priced for a relatively calm 7.6% move so we can play them to be more violent than that but we can also use our heads and, though we love to be bullish on SKX when they are low (and we are aggressively long in our…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site
