19 Incredible Apple Secrets Revealed in Court

After a contentious three-week patent trial between Apple and Samsung, jurors awarded Apple $1.05 billion and concluded that Samsung “willfully” infringed several Apple patents. The legal battle was significant for the normally clandestine company. Lawyers managed to get Apple talking in ways it never had, from telling emails between executives to weird and wonderful iPhone prototypes. Here are the juiciest revelations.

Read the rest here.

Gold traders are the most bullish in nine months after investors’ bullion holdings expanded to a record on mounting speculation that central banks will do more to bolster economic growth.

In the months following the 2008–09 economic crisis, emerging-market economies robustly rebounded. Output in China and India expanded more than 10 percent in 2010, and Brazil’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 7.5 percent was its best performance in 25 years. Emerging-market economies retraced their precrisis level of industrial production by 2009, while advanced economies remained below their precrisis levels in 2012 (Chart 1).

Enlarge

But the strong emerging-market rebound—most significantly in China—hasn’t endured. When China’s average GDP growth remained above 9 percent in 2011, hopes rose that a sustained recovery would prop up the world economy amid the European sovereign debt crisis and subpar growth in the U.S. However, China’s economy deteriorated rapidly in 2012, with GDP growth slowing to 8.1 percent in the first quarter from 8.9 percent at year-end 2011. Second quarter GDP growth slid further, to 7.6 percent, the lowest reading since the height of the global financial crisis in early 2009.

Even with the decline, there is speculation that these figures may still understate economic slowing. Economists have long doubted the credibility of Chinese output data. For example, some studies indicate that GDP growth was overstated during the 1998–99 Asian financial crisis, when official figures reported that China’s GDP grew on average 7.7 percent annually. Alternative estimates using economic activity measures such as energy production, air travel and trade data ranged from 2 percent to 5 percent.[1]

The dubious character of the official figures is no secret in China. Senior government officials, including Vice Premier Li Keqiang, dismiss official GDP data as “man-made” and “for reference only” because of political influence, particularly at the local level, on data reporting.[2]

Read the rest here.

…I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.

When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.

As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.

Read the rest here.

In addition to trying to shut down bridges to prevent delegates from reaching the convention center next week, Brandon has learned that a subgroup of Occupy is looking to shut down EMS communications throughout the city.

Read the rest here.

See the satellite here.

Is there a trade here?

THE hottest new material in town is light, strong and conducts electricity. What’s more, it’s been around a long, long time.

Nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC), which is produced by processing wood pulp, is being hailed as the latest wonder material. Japan-based Pioneer Electronics is applying it to the next generation of flexible electronic displays. IBM is using it to create components for computers. Even the US army is getting in on the act, using it to make lightweight body armour and ballistic glass.

To ramp up production, the US opened its first NCC factory in Madison, Wisconsin, on 26 July, marking the rise of what the US National Science Foundation predicts will become a $600 billion industry by 2020.

Read the rest here.

Health care companies are clearly in play, so it’s time to dissect various ETFs that canvass the space.

Read the rest here.

Rob Arnott’s Research Affiliates can now boast about $60 billion in assets that use “fundamental” indexes from his Newport Beach, Calif.-based company that screens stocks based on book value, cash flow, sales and dividends. One wonders if the future of indexing will feature Arnott more and more. When IndexUniverse.com Managing Editor Olly Ludwig sat down with Arnott in his office, they talked about his disagreement with indexing legend John Bogle, the state of the ETF industry and the allure of investing in relatively debt-free emerging markets countries.

Read the rest here.

It is a good question as to why this is so….

urrounded as we are these days by financial malfeasance on such an epic scale, the amount of time and money spent hunting down the facts as to whether former Major League pitcher Roger Clemens and seven-­time Tour de France cycling champ Lance Armstrong took performance-­enhancing drugs to gain an edge is something of a mystery. When an actor gives a cocaine-fueled, Oscar-winning performance, do we take his award away? Do we reclaim a singer’s Grammy, or put an asterisk after it in the record books, when we discover that he was ramped up on illegal substances? Why all the outrage over athletes? The recent Clemens trial involved his alleged perjury before a 2008 congressional committee, when he denied using performance-enhancing drugs. The case consumed more than two years of federal prosecutors’ time, cost the government an estimated $2 million to $3 million, and resulted in an acquittal.

Let’s face it, who among us wouldn’t take a pill or potion that would make us better at our job? Goodness knows, we abuse substances for just about everything in our personal lives; why not in our professional lives as well? Writers, artists, composers, and other practitioners of the lonely arts have historically relied on a trio of little helpers: booze, coffee, and cigarettes. They’re not illegal, but the first one, used in quantity, can certainly kill you. And the last one, if the anti-smoking lobby is to be believed, can kill not just you but those around you as well.

The government’s attitude toward different professions is striking. With sports scandals, it zeros in on individuals. But when it comes to banks, federal authorities go after the institutions—when they go after anything at all. The people at the center of a financial scandal are almost never touched, and most walk away with compensation packages that would make a cable-news anchor or a talk-show host blush.

Read the rest here.

When I was a promising young mathematician in college, I met someone from the NSA who tried to recruit me to work for the spooks in the summer. Actually, “met someone” is misleading- he located me after I had won a prize.

I didn’t know what to think, so I accepted his invitation to visit the institute, which was in La Jolla, in Southern California (I went to UC Berkeley so it wasn’t a big trip).

When I got to the building, since I didn’t have clearance, everybody had to stop working the whole time I was there. It wasn’t enough to clean their whiteboards, one of them explained, they had to wash them down with that whiteboard spray stuff, because if you look at a just-erased whiteboard in a certain way you can decipher what had been written on it.

Read the rest here.

But the Empire State Building shooting — two dead, nine others wounded — wasn’t really a mass shooting. Or, if it was, it was mostly perpetrated by two police officers.

Read the rest of the article here.

It is indeud worth the wait for the interactive chart.

I have been digging into the details of President Obama’s budget plan vs. Paul Ryan’s budget plan. What I found was so sickening that I asked my friend Ross Perez at Tableau Software for a display.

The interactive map below may take a few seconds. It will be worth your wait.

Read the rest here.

Ritholtz is out with 10 reasons the typical investor has been driven away from equities.

Read the article here.

Former professional cyclist Lance Armstrong said Thursday he won’t fight doping charges brought against him, a move expected to result in the stripping of Mr. Armstrong’s seven Tour de France titles.

Read the rest here.

VIX five-year pattern suggests a complacent equity market

See the chart and read more analysis here.

A great article on defeating your worst trading enemy: yourself.

I always seem to screw up the first day trading a new method.  It’s a weird thing.  It’s as though my whole internal being spontaneously rebels and shrieks and twist and turns and doesn’t want to go through with it.

It seems I have a freakishly noisy anti-trading persona residing in my head that makes itself heard at particularly inopportune moments.  Either that, or I might be possessed by Satan.

Read the rest here.

Is it just me, or does the Left hold all the patents on hypocrisy?

Gawker has an interesting headline up: “Inside Mitt Romney’s Tax-Dodging Cayman Schemes.” The gossip site also has released some 950 pages of material related to Mitt Romney’s investments, mostly having to do with Bain Capital. In Gawker’s own words: “Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his $250 million fortune.”

Most respectable publications maintain a fairly strict church/state division between the editorial side and the business side, and Gawker, a not very respectable publication, seems to do the same. Apparently, nobody thought to tell the boys on the Romney beat that Gawker Media is part of a shell company incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Gawker’s money lives in the same neighborhood as Romney’s money. Call it bipartisanship.

Read the rest here.

Because when one thinks of Tim Sykes, “classy” instantly comes to mind…

Timothy Sykes, millionaire trader and investment teacher, has created a beauty pageant, Miss Penny Stock, to “inspire students” (or perhaps an excuse to peruse attractive women). “It’s going to be a classy competition,” Sykes insists.

Read the rest here.

The gold standard has returned to mainstream U.S. politics for the first time in 30 years, with a “gold commission” set to become part of official Republican party policy.

Read the rest here.