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Monthly Archives: March 2012

Free Mobile Apps Kill Your Battery

Free mobile apps which use third-party services to display advertising consume considerably more battery life, a new study suggests.

Researchers used a special tool to monitor energy use by several apps on Android and Windows Mobile handsets.

Findings suggested that in one case 75% of an app’s energy consumption was spent on powering advertisements.

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Microsoft Said to Finish Windows 8 in Summer, With October Debut

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) will finish work on Windows 8 this summer, setting the stage for personal computers and tablets with the operating system to go on sale around October, according to people with knowledge of the schedule.

The initial rollout will include devices running Intel Corp. (INTC) and ARM Holdings Plc (ARM) chips, making good on Microsoft’s promise to support both standards, said the people, who declined to be named because the plans are confidential. In embracing ARM technology, Microsoft is using the same kind of processors as Apple Inc.’s iPad. Still, there will be fewer than five ARM devices in the debut, compared with more than 40 Intel machines.

The Microsoft booth at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show on Jan. 7, 2010 in Las Vegas. Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The timing would let Microsoft target Christmas shoppers with the new software, which works with touch-screen devices as well as laptops and desktop PCs.

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Treasury pulls $25 billion profit on MBS’s

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Treasury Department said on Monday it made a $25 billion profit on sales of mortgage-backed securities acquired during the financial crisis, part of its ongoing efforts to wind down taxpayer-financed bailout programs.

The sales were the latest indication the multiple programs the government and Federal Reserve initiated to bail out the financial sector may turn out to be less costly than originally feared.

The Treasury bought $225 billion of MBS in 2008 and 2009 in an effort to keep the mortgage market from freezing up as private investors fled. The $250 billion it reaped from the investment reflected both principal and interest.

“The successful sale of these securities marks another important milestone in the wind-down of the government’s emergency financial crisis response efforts,” Treasury Assistant Secretary Mary Miller said.

The government purchased the mortgage debt as part of a bid to stabilize the housing industry, using funds authorized by the Housing and Recovery Act of 2008. It was one of several programs running in parallel with the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which was set up during the administration of President George W. Bush to buy toxic assets from banks, but that ended up largely as a mechanism to inject capital into financial institutions.

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Gold: $1,525 revisitable?

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Since October, it has been nothing but up for the U.S. stock market, an uptrend that’s been especially unrelenting over the past 3 months. But while this rally has put a lot of money into people’s pockets, it has also served as a painful, relative reminder of how poorly gold has done at the same time.

But if you are thinking gold’s $250 giveback in the past 7 months is enough of a haircut to revisit the yellow metal, Rich Ilcyzsyzn, Founder of iiTrader.com would disagree.

“If we close below $1600 you can probably bank on $1525,” Ilcyzsyzn says, adding that, down there, he would “probably start to get a little bit long.”

As he sees it, the trouble really picked up with Bernanke. “The verbage that he said (a couple weeks ago) that I keyed off of is that he’s gonna keep rates low through 2013-ish,” says Ilczyszyn, adding, “we had all been playing 2014.” It was then, when gold had a chance to break $1800, that it faltered.

Ilczyszyn is also expecting volatility to stick around, arguing that $100 swings will be the norm and not the exception. “This is how the market is going to move from now on. We have such a high price, $100 is going to be the normal.”

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Apple has sold 3 million iPads

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc has sold 3 million units of the new iPad since sales began on Friday, setting a first-weekend record for the iPad, which for the first time came with 4G capability.

The company said in a statement on Monday, hours after it announced it would begin to pay a quarterly dividend and commence share buybacks, that the latest version of the iPad would be sold in 24 more countries by March 23, including Italy and Spain, in addition to the initial 11.

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Fukashima disaster 1 year later: uranium demand mostly unchanged

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After a tsunami caused an accident at a nuclear plant in Fukishima, Japan last year, there was a lot of discussion regarding the future of nuclear power in the world.

Germany, for example, planned a shutdown of all its reactors by 2022. (Whether this was a ploy by the Merkel government to garner populist support, we will never know, but in a time of austerity, mothballing 17% of your energy source is a pretty expensive). Germany accounts for only around 5% of total global nuclear generation, meaning that even if it goes through with its plans, it will not have much effect on the nuclear power industry.

Nevertheless, the anti-nuclear talk brought a lot of discussion regarding the future of nuclear power in the world, and a sharp drop in share prices for uranium mining companies.

One year after Fukushima, not much has changed in the global nuclear industry. We can see the minor effect the accident actually had on the existing, planned and proposed nuclear reactors around the world…

The number of total reactors in operations and in the development chain has not changed; 987 before the incident and 987 presently. This means that the long term demand for uranium has not diminished since last year, although short-term demand may have been affected by the minor decrease in reactors currently operating. Despite supply questions, the price of spot uranium has decreased by approximately 20 per cent since the Fukushima accident…

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Technical Take: Dumb Money Bullish; Smart Money Bearish

For several weeks now, the “dumb money” has been extremely bullish and the “smart money” has been extremely bearish.  These are signs that we are closer to the end of the rally as opposed to the beginning.

Read the rest, and see the very informative graphs, here.

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Why A 10-stock Portfolio is, for all Practical Purposes, Adequately Diversified

By C. Thomas Howard, Ph.D.
March 13, 2012

Investors who avoid concentrated equity miss out on the triple benefits of excess returns, lower risk, and lower correlations. A portfolio concentrated in best-idea stocks has an excellent chance of generating excess returns. In turn, the cumulative excess return to investors lowers the risk of underperformance over time. Finally, a portfolio comprised of a small number of stocks is characterized by a low stock-market correlation. Thus the concentrated equity triple play: higher returns, lower risk, and lower correlations.

I will discuss each of these benefits separately. But first, let me address the widespread misconception that an investor can only properly diversify a portfolio by including a large number of stocks.

The diversification-volatility myth

Many believe that concentrated portfolios are much more volatile than are broadly diversified index portfolios. It turns out the diversification benefit of adding additional stocks to a one-stock portfolio is largely captured within the first few additions, as shown in Figure 1 below.

Read the rest of the article and the explanation, here.

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Market Timing with Moving Averages

A new white paper is here. Abstract is below.

Abstract:
I present evidence that a moving average trading strategy dominates buying and holding the underlying asset in a mean-variance sense using monthly returns of value-weighted decile portfolios sorted by market size, book-to-market cash-flow-to-price, earnings-to-price, dividend-price, short-term reversal, medium-term momentum, long-term reversal and industry. The abnormal returns are largely insensitive to the four Carhart (1997) factors and produce economically and statistically significant alphas of between 10% and 15% per year after transaction costs. This performance is robust to different lags of the moving average and in subperiods while investor sentiment, liquidity risks, business cycles, up and down markets, and the default spread cannot fully account for its performance. The substantial market timing ability of the moving average strategy does not appear to be the main driver of the abnormal returns.

 

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Whistleblower Confirms Long Standing Rumors @ JPM

“Rampant silver manipulation?  Rampant gold manipulation?  Rampant LIBOR manipulation?  Hiding MF Global client assets?  These are all happening at JP Morgan according to an open letter reportedly written by an anonymous employee of the firm.  The whistleblower also warns of a “cascading credit event being triggered” by derivatives related to Greek government debt.  UnlikeGreg Smith at Goldman Sachs, this whistleblower has chosen to remain anonymous for now.  According to the letter, the whistleblower is still an employee of JP Morgan and has not resigned.  But that does make it much more difficult to confirm what he is saying.  With Greg Smith, we know exactly who he is and what he was doing at Goldman.  As far as this anonymous whistleblower is concerned, all we have is this letter.  So we must take it with a grain of salt.  However, the information in this letter does agree with what whistleblowerssuch as Andrew Maguire have said in the past about silver manipulation by JP Morgan.  And this letter does mention Greg Smith’s resignation from Goldman, so we know that it must have been written in the past few days.  Hopefully this letter will cause authorities to take a much closer look at the crazy things that are going on over at JP Morgan and the other big Wall Street banks.

This anonymous letter was addressed to the CFTC, but unfortunately it looks like the CFTC has already chosen to ignore it.

The original letter from this anonymous whistleblower has already been taken down from the CFTC website. When you go there now, all you get is this message….

“The Comment Cannot Be Found. Please Return to the Previous Page and Try Again.”

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Here is the letter:

From: Z A N
Organization(s):
JPMorgan Chase

Comment No: 57019
Date: 3/14/2012

Dear CFTC Staff,

Hello, I am a current JPMorgan Chase employee. This is an open letter to all commissioners and regulators. I am emailing you today b/c I know of insider information that will be damning at best for JPMorgan Chase. I have decided to play the role of whistleblower b/c I no longer have faith and belief that what we are doing for society is bringing value to people. I am now under the opinion that we are actually putting hard working Americans unaware of what lays ahead at extreme market risk. This risk is unnecessary and will lead to wide-scale market collapse if not handled properly. With the release of Mr. Smith’s open letter to Goldman, I too would like to set the record straight for JPM as well. I have seen the disruptive behavior of superiors and no longer can say that I look up to employees at the ED/MD level here at JPM. Their smug exuberance and arrogance permeates the air just as pungently as rotting vegetables. They all know too well of the backdoor crony connections they share intimately with elected officials and with other institutions. It is apparent in everything they do, from the meager attempts to manipulate LIBOR, therefore controlling how almost all derivatives are priced to the inherit and fraudulent commodities manipulation. They too may have one day stood for something in the past in the client-employee relationship. Does anyone in today’s market really care about the protection of their client? From the ruthless and scandalous treatment of MF Global client asset funds to the excessive bonuses paid by companies with burgeoning liabilities. Yes, we at JPMorgan that are in the know are fearful of a cascading credit event being triggered in Greece as they have hidden derivatives in excess of $1 Trillion USD. We at JPMorgan own enough of these through counterparty risk and outright prop trading that our entire IB EDG space could be annihilated within a few short days. The last ten years has been market by inflexion point after inflexion point with the most notable coming in 2008 after the acquisition of Bear.

I wish to remain anonymous as of now as fear of termination mounts from what I am about to reveal. Robert Gottlieb is not my real name; however he is a trader that is involved in a lawsuit for manipulative trading while working with JPMorgan Chase. He was acquired during our Bear Stearns acquisition and is known to be the notorious person shorting in the silver future market from his trading space, along with Blythe Masters, his IB Global boss. However, with that said, we are manipulating the silver futures market and playing a smaller (but still massively manipulative) role in manipulating the gold futures market. We have a little over a 25% (give or take a percentage) position in the short market for silver futures and by your definition this denotes a larger position than for speculative purposes or for hedging and is beyond the line of manipulation.

On a side note, I do not work directly with accounts that would have been directly impacted by the MF Global fiasco but I have heard through other colleagues that we have involvement in the hiding of client assets from MF Global. This is another fraudulent effort on our part and constitutes theft. I urge you to forward that part of the investigation on to the respective authorities.

There is something else that you may find strange. During month-end December, we were all told by our managers that this was going to be a dismal year in terms of earnings and that we should not expect any bonuses or pay raises. Then come mid-late January it is made known that everyone received a pay raise and/or bonus, which is interesting b/c just a few weeks ago we were told that this was not likely and expected to be paid nothing in addition to base salary. January is right around the time we started increasing our short positions quite significantly again and this most recent crash in gold and silver during Bernanke’s speech on February 29th is of notable importance, as we along with 4 other major institutions, orchestrated the violent $100 drop in Gold and subsequent drops in silver.

As regulators of the free people of this country, I ask you to uphold the most important job in the world right now. That job is judge and overseer of all that is justice in the most sensitive of commodity markets. There are many middle-income people that invest in the physical assets of silver, gold, as well as mining stocks that are being financially impacted in a negative way b/c of our unscrupulous shorts in the precious metals commodity sector. If you read the COT with intent you will find that commercials (even though we have no business being in the commercial sector, which should be reserved for companies that truly produce the metal) are net short by a long shot in not only silver, but gold.

It is rather surprising that what should be well known liabilities on our balance sheet have not erupted into wider scale scrutinization. I call all honest and courageous JPMorgan employees to step up and fight the cronyism and wide-scale manipulation by reporting the truth. We are only helping reality come to light therefore allowing a real valuation of our banking industry which will give investors a chance to properly adjust without being totally wiped out. I will be contacting a lawyer shortly about this matter, as I believe no other whistleblower at JPMorgan has come forward yet. Our deepest secrets lie within the hands of honest employees and can be revealed through honest regulators that are willing to take a look inside one of America’s best kept secrets. Please do not allow this to turn into another Enron.

Kind Regards,
-The 1st Whistleblower of Many

Source

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Your Tax Dollars @ Work: Taxpayer Subsidized Solar Makers Sells Solar Panels to Itself

“A heavily subsidized solar company received a U.S. taxpayer loan guarantee to sell solar panels to itself.

First Solar is the company. The subsidy came from the Export-Import Bank, which President Obama and Harry Reid are currently fighting to extend and expand. The underlying issue is how Obama’s insistence on green-energy subsidies and export subsidies manifests itself as rank corporate welfare.

Here’s the road of subsidies these solar panels followed from Perrysburg, Ohio, to St. Clair, Ontario.

First Solar is an Arizona-based manufacturer of solar panels. In 2010, the Obama administration awarded the company $16.3 million to expand its factory in Ohio — a subsidy Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland touted in his failed re-election bid that year.

Five weeks before the 2010 election, Strickland announced more than a million dollars in job training grants to First Solar. The Ohio Department of Development also lent First Solar $5 million, and the state’s Air Quality Development Authority gave the company an additional $10 million loan.

After First Solar pocketed this $17.3 million in government grants and $15 million in government loans, Ex-Im entered the scene.

In September 2011, Ex-Im approved $455.7 million in loan guarantees to subsidize the sale of solar panels to two wind farms in Canada. That means if the wind farm ever defaults, the taxpayers pick up the tab, ensuring First Solar gets paid.

But the buyer, in this case, was First Solar….”

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BARCLAYS: There’s Almost No Way To Avoid A Stock Market Dive Now

Source

“With U.S. economic data continuing to show a strengthening recovery and Europe’s worries temporarily alleviated, it can come as little surprise that the S&P 500 is up +11.65% this year.

But there are a lot of reasons to doubt that this rally will continue, according to Barclays U.S. equities strategists Barry Knapp and Eric Slover in a note out late last week.

They write that this could easily be a “heads I win, tails you lose, scenario.” If past rounds of easing are any indication, then the coming end of the Federal Reserve’s “Operation Twist” will launch a pullback in equities:

 

stocks Federal Reserve no bond buyback

Barclays Capital

 

The only way an end to Operation Twist doesn’t cause such a reaction is if economic data deteriorate and the Fed decides that more easing—likely in the form of sterilized QE—is necessary. This, too, has a downside risk for equities, since it means the economy is not as strong as investors expected it to be.

Knapp and Slover explain this Catch-22:

We believe that a sustainable period of equity market multiple expansion is unlikely until the Fed begins normalizing policy, despite the seemingly inevitable correction that will accompany the early stages of exit strategies. So, if the growth outlook deteriorates, a correction is probable; both of which will likely restart the QE3 debate. Conversely, if the Fed ends Operation Twist without any additional accommodation, we suspect index implied volatility will increase, the term structure will flatten, correlation will rise and downside put skew will remain expensive on a relative basis and richen in absolute terms. Simply put, stocks will pull back. In essence, the setup is the antithesis of August 2010 or August 2011, when following negative benchmark GDP revisions investors had become too bearish on the economic outlook and the Fed was on verge of additional monetary policy easing. In other words, if growth softens, stocks go down; if the Fed doesn’t ease investors will worry about monetary tightening and stocks go down as well. To be clear though, if we make it through 2012 without another round of unconventional monetary policy easing we would view that as an important step out of the post-crisis financial repression deleveraging period, thereby increasing the likelihood of a sustainable period of rising PE multiples. A pullback associated with investor concerns about monetary policy tightening would be a buying opportunity, but it’s a bit premature to consider your options in reaction to a correction that hasn’t occurred yet.”

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