Comments »NEW YORK (Reuters) – Portfolio managers will be doing some last-minute shopping for winners from the big stock market rally as they take part next week in the quarter-end ritual of window dressing.
The activity could help stocks resume their upward course in the week ahead and keep a long-expected pullback at bay.
The benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 index (MXP:SPX) is up 11.1 percent so far for the first quarter and the year. That would follow a gain of 11.2 percent for the fourth quarter.
If the trend holds, the S&P 500 will book its best back-to-back quarters since the second and third quarters of 2009.
The S&P 500 lost some ground in the past week, ending down 0.5 percent after five straight weeks of gains, but that’s only its second negative week for the year.
Much of the quarter’s gains have been driven by signs of improvement in the economy, particularly a pickup in jobs, which has been lagging other areas in the recovery.
Window dressing typically involves investors grabbing some of the quarter’s best performers to dress up their portfolio listings.
Some of the last-minute buying is likely to come from the hedge fund community, said Phil Orlando, chief equity strategist and senior portfolio manager for Federal Global Investment Management Corp in New York.
Hedge funds “by and large have not been believers about the improvement in the domestic economy … so they’ve been very much out of the market. Yet here we are with the first quarter looking like the best first quarter since 1998,” he said. “They’ve got a huge gain to catch up.”
But retail investors, he said, have probably also noticed that they’ve missed a lot by having kept their money in Treasuries and other fixed-income assets over the quarter.
“They have woken up to the realization that the surge in yields has resulted in a significant loss of capital for them,” Orlando said.
If the S&P 500 manages to end the first quarter with an 11.1 percent gain, that would be its best quarterly performance since the second quarter of 2009.
Monthly Archives: March 2012
Gasoline consumption dropped every week for past year
Comments »(AP) – Americans have pumped less gas every week for the past year.
During those 52 weeks, gasoline consumption dropped by 4.2 billion gallons, or 3 percent, according to MasterCard SpendingPulse. The decline is longer than a 51-week slide during the recession.
The main reason: higher gas prices. The national average for a gallon of gas is $3.89, the highest ever for this time of year, and experts say it could be $4.25 by late April. As a result, Americans are taking fewer trips to restaurants and shopping malls. When they take a vacation, they’re staying closer to home.
But the decline in gas consumption is also a sign that efforts to push carmakers to produce vehicles with better gas mileage are paying off. The average new car now gets nearly 24 miles to the gallon, compared with about 20 mpg just four years ago, according to the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.
“I’d expect to see lower gasoline consumption for several years to come,” Rice University energy expert Ken Medlock says.
Americans have cut back on fill-ups for extended periods before. In 2008, gas spiked from $3.04 to $4.11 per gallon in seven months. It wasn’t until January 2009, when the national average for gas had dropped to $1.86 that consumption increased. Drivers bought more gasoline for 23 weeks in a row.
“The spike in 2008 was a real shock to the system,” Medlock says. “There’s still a residual impact on people’s driving behavior.”
There were other stretches of reduced gas use, notably two into the 1970’s and one in the early 1980’s. But in those cases, Americans eventually went back to driving big cars and trucks that guzzled gas.
This time may be different. Medlock thinks economic growth will be too modest and gas prices will stay too high for Americans to start driving more anytime soon. Economists expect the U.S. economy to grow 2.5 percent in 2012. The government estimates that gas will average a record $3.79 per gallon for the year.
What The *!@#$% Happened to the VIX ETFs? (TVIX)
Andrew Horowitz
March 23, 2012 7:35 am
Yowser. Was that something or what? Due t0 its popularity, the Velocity Shares VIX product (TVIX) had halted creation of new shares a few weeks back. That is where the trouble started. With that move, there was an ever growing premium as investors continued to buy shares in an attempt to hedge out some portfolio risk. Needless to say, that plan did not work out so well.
Even with 30% drop today, there continues to be whopping premium still embedded this particular ETF.
To read some great analysis and see some nice chart porn, go here.
Comments »The (Many) Things Macroeconomists Don’t Know
Justin Fox
Jean-Claude Trichet, now a few months into retirement, has no regrets about his eight-year tenure as president of the European Central Bank. At least, that’s what he said at Harvard’s Kennedy School Thursday night when a student asked him point blank. “I don’t regret anything,” was the response.
But listening to the full talk (when there’s video, it will be available here), it was clear that Trichet did regret something about the last few years. He regrets that economists didn’t give him better advice.
What Trichet said was that state-of-the-art macroeconomic theory was almost entirely useless in dealing with the crisis that began in 2007. Yeah, he tried to be polite about it: “This doesn’t mean we have to abandon DSGE,” he said, referring to the dynamic-stochastic general equilibrium models — in which an economy of rational, far-seeing actors struggles with the occasional friction or shock, but generally gets along okay — that dominated the work of economists at central banks. Buuut “atomistic rational agents [the figures that populate DSGE models] don’t capture behavior during a crisis.” Another quote: “Rational expectations theory has brought macroeconomics a long way … but there is a clear case to reexamine the assumptions.” And neither of these approaches leaves room for the possibility that financial market fluctuations could be the source of problems for the real economy.
Trichet finally reached for the last refuge of the frustrated economic policymaker: John Maynard Keynes. He quoted (at length) a famous story from Keynes’ General Theory. It describes a beauty contest in a newspaper where the goal is to pick the face that the most readers will vote for.
It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.
“It captures what’s happening when a systemic crisis is unfolding,” Trichet said. At the height of the 2008 crisis, he went on, “it was clear that an immensely large number of [market] participants were thinking that if there was not a game change, the system would collapse.”
Now, none of this is exactly news. Lots of people have said similar things over the past couple of years. But it was very interesting hearing them from someone who until recently was one of the most powerful economic policymakers on the planet — and one who has been criticized mainly (at least among English-speakers; the Germans have their own unique view) for being too conservative, and too unwilling to jettison faulty models of how the world works. Not that he has any regrets or anything.
Trichet’s analysis nicely parallels the chapter on postwar macroeconomics in a fascinating new book I’ve been reading, The Assumptions Economists Make, by Jonathan Schlefer. Schlefer is a former alt-weekly columnist and editor of MIT’s Technology Review who quit journalism to get a Ph.D in political science, and is now a research associate at Harvard Business School. His book is a tough critique of economics, but a deeply informed and sympathetic one. And his basic attitude is pretty much the same as Milton Friedman’s in the famous essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” It’s okay if an economic theory is unrealistic and oversimplified. All that matters is whether it delivers useful predictions.
By that standard, here are Schlefer’s judgments on the succession of theories that have dominated academic macroeconomics since the 1970s:
Read the rest here.
Comments »Tacocopter Aims To Deliver Tacos Using Unmanned Drone Helicopters
Jason Gilbert
Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!
It’s an unmanned drone helicopter shooting a taco from space down at you and your colleagues during lunchtime!
The Internet is going wild for Tacocopter, perhaps the next great startup out of Silicon Valley, which boasts a business plan that combines four of the most prominent touchstones of modern America: tacos, helicopters, robots and laziness.
Indeed, the concept behind Tacocopter is very simple, and very American: You order tacos on your smartphone and also beam in your GPS location information. Your order — and your location — are transmitted to an unmanned drone helicopter (grounded, near the kitchen where the tacos are made), and the tacocopter is then sent out with your food to find you and deliver your tacos to wherever you’re standing.
You pay online, so the tacos are simply dropped off at your feet by the drone helicopter, which then flies back to the restaurant to pick up its next order.
Read the rest here.
Comments »New iPad Battery Indicator Lies, Research Shows
Peter Pachal
The battery indicator on the iPad is a liar. Research from a display research company says Apple‘s new tablet continues to charge for a long time after the onscreen indicator shows it’s full.
Ray Soneira of DisplayMate– whose research also showed that the new iPad’s retina display drains significantly more power than previous models — conducted a test that showed the iPad kept drawing power at the full recharging rate of about 10 watts for two hours after it initially reported having a 100% charge. Only at 2:10 did the recharging “fully terminate” with a sudden drop in power.
Soneira says he wasn’t setting out to test the battery, and that he only looked at the iPad’s power usage to see how much is going to the screen. However, when he noticed his equipment told him his iPad was charging even though the screen said “100%,” he decided to study the issue further. That’s when he discovered the extended charge time.
Why would the iPad say it has a full charge when it doesn’t? Apple isn’t saying (a spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment), but Soneira has a theory.
“The charge indicator on all mobile devices is based on a mathematical model of the charge rates, discharge rates, and recent discharge history of the battery,” he told Mashable in an email. “It’s actually rather difficult to do because most batteries degrade slowly and then tend to surprise with a precipitous decline near the end. So there is something wrong with the battery charge mathematical model on the iPad.”
Read the rest here.
Comments »The Bats Affair: When Machines Humiliate Their Masters
Brian Bremner
The spectacularly botched initial public offering of Bats Global Markets on March 23 is so rich in irony that it’s difficult to know where to begin. What’s far less amusing is the prospect that the current era of high-frequency trading, in which powerful computers sift through massive information flows in search of price discrepancies and split-second trades, will bring even more episodes of market mayhem far more costly to investors and the broader economy.
In the annals of business screw-ups, Bats has certainly made its mark. Bats stands for Better Alternative Trading System and the company runs two exchanges that collectively rank third in terms of U.S. share trading, behind New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. The Bats exchanges account for 11 percent to 12 percent of daily U.S. equity trading, according to its website. The company came of age with the expansion of high-frequency trading over the last decade and the proliferation of quant-jock-driven electronic firms that dominate the buying and selling of U.S. equities. Bats founder Dave Cummings is chairman and owner of high-frequency trading firm Tradebot Systems.
Today was supposed to be the Lenexa (Kan.)-based company’s moment in the limelight as it tried to sell about 6.3 million shares in the $16 to $18 dollar per share range. Instead, something went terribly wrong. The company’s shares somehow ended up trading for pennies per share early in the trading day on both the Bats bourse and Nasdaq, according to data reviewed in this Bloomberg story. Then tech investors and Apple (AAPL) fanboys the world over were dismayed when a single trade for 100 shares executed on the Bats market sent Apple’s shares to $542 per share, down sharply from recent levels. (The company set a new 52-week high of $609 per share on March 21.) The stock temporarily halted trading and recovered.
It’s far too early to know what went wrong, though Bats took the unusual step of withdrawing its IPO late in the trading day. “In the wake of today’s technical issues, which affected the trading of certain stocks, including that of Bats, we believe withdrawing the IPO is the appropriate action to take for our company and our shareholders,” said Joe Ratterman, chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Bats.
Read the rest here.
Comments »Natural Gas Wells Proliferation Poisoning Children’s Air, Research Suggests
Lynne Peeples
If everything goes as planned, Angie Nordstrum’s son may look out the window of his second-grade classroom at Red Hawk Elementary this fall and see a full-scale natural gas drilling operation.
He and his classmates, Nordstrum noted, will then have no choice but to breathe emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), benzene and other toxic pollutants — even while they tend to a 1,500-square-foot organic garden at their LEED-certified school.
“This is so disturbing on so many levels,” said Nordstrum, of Erie, Colo.
Natural gas production is rapidly increasing across the country — from Pennsylvania to Colorado. According to many public health experts, the natural and manmade chemicals released during drilling, hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) and reinjection steps are making more and more people sick. Adding to the concern are new findings showing the associated air pollution, and the dangers of exposure to very small doses of certain chemicals. Developing fetuses and young children can be the most vulnerable to these effects.
In addition to the pollutants, and the intense noise, a natural gas operation looks like a “Christmas tree on steroids,” noted Nordstrum, a member of the grassroots group of parents, Erie Rising, which is battling the gas wells.
“So much is being said in news about how this is the new clean fuel,” she said. “It’s not.”
Water pollution has been the focus of the fracking debate on the East Coast, however, air pollution may be the main source of exposure in many areas. According to a new study in Colorado that sampled air quality over the course of three years, people living within a half-mile of an oil or gas well were exposed to a number of toxic chemicals including benzene, a known carcinogen. VOC levels measured five times the safety limit set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“For children, the potential cancer risk is a serious consideration. They are more sensitive, exposed at younger ages and for longer periods of time,” said Lisa McKenzie, lead researcher on the study at the Colorado School of Public Health.
McKenzie said the results also pointed to potentially significant respiratory and neurological effects. For children, this could mean more headaches, sore throats and asthma. “Children are more sensitive to all of these pollutants, whether traditional ozone, dust or particulates caused by hydrocarbons leaking out of the wells or the diesel trucks carrying the materials,” added Sonya Lunder, a senior analyst at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, whose goal is to protect public health and the environment.
Lunder called the new findings “sobering” and emphasized the need for further study. “There are an incredible number of other industrial chemicals involved,” she said. But research is complicated by the fact that these chemicals tend to vary from well to well, with names and quantities not always disclosed by the fracking company.
But, not everyone is convinced of the associated airborne risks. “It is important to put this paper into context,” said Tom Amontree, executive vice president of the America’s Natural Gas Alliance. “Not a single human being’s health was evaluated here.”
“Natural gas companies take seriously the health and safety of their workers and the communities in which they operate,” he added.
Read the rest here.
Comments »Putting ‘Pink Slime’ to Taste Test
J.M. Hirsch
All this angst over “pink slime” has made one thing clear: We don’t always know what we’re getting when we bite into a burger.
Which leaves unanswered some of the most basic questions in the debate over what the meat industry calls lean ”finely textured beef,” a processed meat filler that experts say has found its way into much of the ground beef consumed in the United States.
But as a professional eater, I wondered: What does this stuff do to the taste and texture of ground beef? And how can consumers know when they’re eating it?
Neither answer came easily, the former because of the sheer volume of beef I needed to eat, the latter because of the rather opaque way ground beef is made.
For schools, that opacity began to clear last week, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that as of the fall the National School Lunch Program will allow districts to choose ground beef that does not contain the product. Previously, it was difficult for schools to know whether the beef they bought from the feds had it or not.
That’s because pink slime really is made from beef and therefore doesn’t need to be listed as a separate ingredient.
But the change doesn’t do much for the average consumer.
At the grocer, a steak is a steak, and it is nearly always labeled by the cut of beef it’s from. There was a time when ground beef was similarly labeled and you knew at least roughly what part of the animal you were getting. And though some packages still indicate “ground chuck” or “ground sirloin,” today most is labeled simply as “ground beef.”
Most consumers don’t care. They’d rather focus on another part of the label — the fat percentage. And producers don’t care. It makes it easier for them to use whatever cuts they want without worrying about spelling it out.
Now, introduce lean finely textured beef, and the meat picture is further muddied.
The product is made from bits of meat left over from other cuts. It’s heated and spun to remove the fat, then compressed into blocks for mixing into conventional ground beef. Because it’s so lean and inexpensive, producers often mix it into fattier meat to produce an overall leaner product.
That means two packages labeled “ground beef 80 percent lean” may look and sound the same, but be composed of different meats. One could be unadulterated ground beef made from cuts of meat containing 20 percent fat. The other could be made from poorer quality — much fattier — meat but cut with and made leaner by pink slime, a term coined by a federal microbiologist grossed out by it and now widely used by critics and food activists.
How do you tell the difference? For the most part, you don’t.
“You can’t differentiate beef from beef,” said Jeremy Russell, a spokesman for the National Meat Association. “Talking to your retailer would be the only way.”
So that’s what I did. But it got me only partial answers.
At grocer No. 1, the folks behind the butcher counter were able to show me one brand, a pricy “all-natural” ground beef that did not contain the meat filler. But for the many other and far less expensive varieties of ground beef? They had no way of knowing.
Grocer No. 2 presented the opposite problem. The workers there found one brand that definitely did have the pink stuff, but they couldn’t say whether any others did or didn’t.
The term “all-natural” used at store No. 1 is unregulated and doesn’t really mean anything. At another store, another brand of ground beef could be similarly labeled and contain the meat filler.
But the term “organic” is regulated, and that provides a clue. If you can find it — and are willing to pay the price — ground beef labeled organic cannot contain lean finely textured beef.
Despite the odds, I had lucked out. Between the two grocers, I’d managed to identify two packages of 85 percent lean ground beef, one with pink slime and one without. Time to taste.
Read the rest here.
What Happens When A 35-Year-Old Man Retakes The SAT?
I took the SAT a grand total of one time when I was in dipshit prep school. This was 1993. Like any other kid, I wanted to do well on the test, primarily so that I would NEVER have to take it again, but also because kids at my school were real dicks about their SAT scores. You’d hear through the grapevine about other kids who aced the test, and all that test gossip resulted in an great deal of fear and paranoia about your own performance. It was horrible. If you can, avoid going to high school altogether.
They administered the test at a nearby public high school and herded us into the classrooms. Every classroom had a test monitor, a stack of test booklets, and a large box of sharpened No. 2 pencils. My friend Darren sat in front of me. Thirty minutes into the test, he had to go pee. The monitor denied him a trip to the bathroom. Darren ended up getting a 900 out of 1600. That monitor was a dick.
Shockingly, little about the SAT has changed since I set foot in that classroom. Most students still have to take the test using bubble sheets and a No. 2 pencil, which is insane to me. They’ve managed to digitize VOTING, for shit’s sake. And yet here’s the SAT, still feeding test sheets into the Scantron machine like it’s 1982. Maybe the only differences with today’s SAT are the essay question (barf), the higher maximum score (2400), and the hugely metastasized frenzy over the test. Wired reports that as recently as 2009, the test-preparation industry had earnings of over $4 billion. Private tutoring from a Kaplan expert to study for the test can cost you close to $5,000, an expense plenty of nutjob helicopter parents are happy to throw down.
There are many shitty things about being a grownup. You have to make money. You have to do taxes. You have to show up for your bail hearings. It’s all really fucking annoying. But one of the few upsides of being an adult is that you NEVER have to take the SAT again. You never have to worry about it. You don’t have to give a shit what’ll happen if have to pee during the test. You don’t have to look at another analogy ever again. It’s not bad tradeoff for all the other piddling crap you have to deal with. I know I was happy with the arrangement. But recently, I got this question from reader Brendan:
If you had to take one of the standardized college acceptance tests today, how do you think you’d fare? I did pretty well when I took it in high school, but I’m almost certain these days I’d score like, a 12 on the math section of the ACT. Me no make numbers good.
Me no make numbers good either, Brendan. But there was only one way to find out if I truly am dumber than I was 18 years ago. I had to take the SAT one more time, cold. With no preparation of any sort. And I had to do it under the exact same conditions as before: using bubble sheets, a No. 2 pencil, a standard calculator (I sold my TI-81 graphing calculator after I graduated. OOPS!). And I had to do it in the time allotted. So that’s exactly what I did. I went to the College Board and printed out a sample test, then sat down and took it from beginning to end. Here now is what transpired.
Read the rest here.
Comments »A Low Down Dirty Shame: Corzine Authorizes Transfer of $200 Million Days Before Collapse; This Means He Lied Under Oath Too
Former MF Global head Jon Corzine directly authorized the transfer of $200 million of customer funds to fill a gap in one of the firm’s accounts, according to congressional investigators.
A memo released Friday by investigators on the House Financial Services Committee quotes an email from a treasurer for the firm sent days before the investment company collapsed, saying the transfer was “Per JC’s direct instructions.” The transfer was intended to cover a $175 million overdraft in one of the firm’s accounts with JPMorgan.
The revelation comes just days before that panel’s investigatory subcommittee is set to hold its third probe into the high-profile collapse of the firm, and what role the former New Jersey governor and Democratic senator played in its implosion. The memo was first reported on by Bloomberg News.
It also appears to directly contradict testimony Corzine gave under oath to lawmakers, where he repeatedly maintained he had no idea what could have happened to supposedly segregated customer funds that went missing as the firm went under. The trustee handling the firm’s bankruptcy estimates there is an up to $1.6 billion gap between customer claims and the assets available to meet those claims.
“I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date,” Corzine told the House Agriculture Committee in December, adding later, “I certainly would never intend to direct or have segregated funds moved.”
Lawmakers are set to hear from a number of MF Global executives Wednesday, including Edith O’Brien, an assistant treasurer from the company who had refused to testify voluntarily and worked at the Chicago office responsible for handling customer accounts.
O’Brien was the author of the email, sent three days before MF Global went bankrupt, that indicates Corzine ordered the transfer of funds.
“After reviewing thousands of documents and interviewing former MF Global executives and regulators as part of our investigation, the subcommittee has concluded that Ms. O’Brien has unique, personal knowledge regarding how and why customer funds went missing,” said subcommittee Chairman Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas) after lawmakers approved the subpoena. “We owe it to the thousands of customers of MF Global — the ranchers, farmers and investors who lost money — to get to the bottom of how this could have happened.”
That email also appears to support a claim made by an executive of a financial exchange monitoring MF Global that Corzine knew of an unauthorized transfer of customer funds.
“One [MF Global] employee indicated that Mr. Corzine knew about the loans that had been made from the customer segregated accounts,” said Terrence Duffy, executive chairman of CME Group. Duffy’s comments before the Senate Agriculture Committee came just minutes after Corzine wrapped up his testimony, where he reiterated he did not know where the funds went.
Comments »Breaking: Bloomberg reports Corzine memo, personally ordered fund transfers
Cited by the Congressional Panel. Developing…
Comments »Documentary: War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death
Always ask questions !
Complicit behavior, being spun, or acting indifferent has only allowed the best of us to have blood on our hands.
Keep in mind 90% when you watch this……
[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTK6sUiUBr4 450 300] Comments »Big Boy: One Description of America
[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UygAne-Uiuo&feature=related 450 300]
Comments »Hilarious Video on Greece Saving the World
[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zvl9N9GdraQ 450 300]
Comments »
Embarrassment for BATS: BATS IPO Halted
Markets Get a Lift on Red Bull Energy
Hedgers Get De-Balled Again for 30% In Full Retard Broken Robot TVIX Trading
I had a piece of $TVIX last week, but got out of it when the market was not responding to my trade….a lesson learned never to be perma anything!
Control Freak America
New Study Finds Blood Tests Could Predict Heart Attacks
“US researchers have found oddly-shaped blood cells in heart attack patients, indicating that a blood test could help predict whether a patient is at risk of an imminent cardiac emergency.
The study by the Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) found that the endothelial blood cells from heart attack patients are abnormally large and misshapen, sometimes appearing with multiple nuclei.
That could make them reliable indicators of an impending heart attack, according to the study published this week in Science Translational Medicine….”
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