Window of Opportunity In Gold

LONDON—Investors with risk appetite may want to look at gold stocks, particularly those of companies ripe for takeover, analysts say.

A gap between the price of bullion and gold-mining stocks has emerged, and history shows that it likely won’t last long. Equities should catch up to gold prices and close the valuation gap.

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12,000 South African gold miners have followed their platinum miner counter-parts by going on strike from Gold Fields. Gold Fields is the world’s 4th largest gold mine, and the strike is costing the firm 1,660 ounces of gold a day in lost production according  to Gold Fields’ spokesman Sven Lunsche.

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Asian stocks rose, reversing earlier losses, as economic reports from China, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand fueled speculation that central banks will boost stimulus measures.

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The irony is refreshing. Requiring photo identification to vote suppresses the minority vote, but at the Democratic National Convention, it is required! Obviously the DNC does not want minorities to participate.

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UStream TV Occupy Eye

By now, many of us are aware of the Leap Motion, a small, $70 gesture control system that simply plugs into any computer and, apparently, just works. If you’ve seen the gesture interfaces in Minority Report, you know what it does. More importantly, if you’re familiar with the touch modality — and at this point, most of us are — the interface is entirely intuitive. It’s touch, except it happens in the space in front of the screen, so you don’t have to cover your window into your tech with all those unsightly smudges.

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Yet, if you read about the tussle between the two great economists, you are struck by two things. First, how pragmatic a man John Maynard Keynes was. And second, how utopian the ideals of Friedrich Hayek are. This is odd, as each man attached himself to a polar opposite political philosophy: Keynes’s ideas were adopted by idealistic lefties, while Hayek’s thoughts were lapped up by conservatism, a philosophy that by definition rejects dogma. It is as if we have gone through the looking glass.

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The full extraordinary story of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden has been revealed for the first time by a member of the elite team that killed the arch terrorist in his secret lair in Pakistan.

What follows is a timeline of how the two numbers in the monthly jobs report — with July’s report coming Friday morning — get gathered and then disseminated in the administration. It’s based on close to a dozen conversations with current and former administration officials.

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Kim Man Lui and Lun Hu

Many technical price patterns in financial time series used as trading strategies are learned by traders’ astute observations on the movement of price vectors. The authors propose data mining techniques to explore relationships between price movements and price vectors automatically. One such relationship, candlestick patterns, was discovered by human observation.The authors studied three years of data from 42 Hong Kong Hang Seng Index composite stocks.By two-level clustering to deal with shape and scale of the daily price vector of a time series of a stock price, a time series is converted into a symbolic price sequence. The previous price trend and the next price trend on each trading day can be converted into two symbolic trend sequences. The authors then looked for correlations between the symbolic price sequence together with the previous trend sequence and the next price trend sequence. The result shows three patterns have statistical significance (p < 0.05) on only two out of 42 stocks and indicates that the discovered patterns for one stock may not be the same kind for others, meaning that there is no generic pattern for the two assets. The authors conclude that price patterns, if any, as reported in technical analysis literatures, should not be equally applicable to any time series of stock prices.

Thanks to real-world data, the keys to your digital kingdom are under assault.

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The federal government has closed a criminal probe of alleged financial misconduct by Arizona lawman Joe Arpaio, who styles himself as “America’s toughest sheriff,” and no charges will be filed, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said on Friday.

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AMPA, Fla. — T. Boone Pickens said natural gas vehicles can survive just fine without Congress approving his so-called Pickens Plan.

“It’s going to happen, and you don’t have to have Washington do it, thank God,” Pickens said at Wednesday’s energy luncheon hosted by POLITICO.

Divided evenly among 300 million Americans, the green tax works out to a burden of $9,270 imposed on every man, woman, and child. While this would be a pittance for the most affluent Americans, it would take away 40 percent of the total income of a family of four supported by two wage earners making the average U.S. salary of $45,000 each, and it would be a virtually fatal burden for the poor.

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Dividend-focused ETFs are tempting when you hold them up against the insanely low yields on benchmark U.S. government debt. But that doesn’t mean dividend ETFs are a good idea.

They might not even be a better idea than buying, say, a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond.

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Calorie restriction confers health benefits to monkeys but doesn’t increase their life span, a new study suggests, undermining some people’s belief that a sharply restricted diet could help them live longer.

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With a shortage of doctors in the U.S. already and millions of new patients set to gain coverage under President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, American medical schools are struggling to close the gap.

One major reason: The residency programs to train new doctors are largely paid for by the federal government, and the number of students accepted into such programs has been capped at the same level for 15 years. Medical schools are holding back on further expansion because the number of applicants for residencies already exceeds the available positions, according to the National Resident Matching Program, a 60-year-old Washington-based nonprofit that oversees the program.

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