(via NY TIMES)

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Big Sports Spenders

“Fools trade everyday while professionals look for exhaustion or exuberance.” That’s mine, by the way.

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By Jason Zweig

In a speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in Milwaukee on Sept. 30, 1859, Abraham Lincoln told this anecdote:

“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride!—how consoling in the depths of affliction! ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’  And yet let us hope it is not quite true.”

I was recently reminded of Lincoln’s wonderful speech when someone asked me if I could summarize my investing beliefs in no more than 10 words. I laughed and said, “Of course not!”

But right afterward, I realized to my surprise that I could. I banged this out almost instantly:

Anything is possible, and the unexpected is inevitable. Proceed accordingly.

I asked some leading investors and financial thinkers for their own contributions.  Here are a few:

Read the rest here.

Full Article

Carry on.

(via NYT DealBook)

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg NewsRay Dalio, the head of Bridgewater Associates, at Davos this week. Bridgewater is bullish this year on gold as a hedge against inflation.

The world’s biggest hedge fund is also one of the best performers.

Bridgewater Associates, which manages nearly $120 billion, posted returns of 23 percent in 2011 — a year when the average hedge fund portfolio lost 5 percent.

Against the backdrop of fear over European debt and stagnant global growth, the hedge fund, led by one of Wall Street’s more enigmatic titans, Ray Dalio, sidestepped the mess. The fund did it with bets on United States Treasuries, German bonds and the Japanese yen, according to people familiar with the firm’s investment strategy, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is private.

Such performance adds up. Over the last 20 years, Bridgewater had annualized returns of 14.7 percent, amounting to $50 billion of gains for investors. Over the same period, the Standard & Poor’s index of 500 stocks returned about 8.7 percent a year.

A big chunk of Bridgewater’s gains came in recent years, a volatile period that felled many funds. As the financial crisis wreaked havoc, Bridgewater notched positive, albeit modest, returns in 2008 and 2009. The next year, the firm had gains of 45 percent versus about 10 percent for the average hedge fund.

The firm has managed to post big numbers even as assets have swollen, defying conventional wisdom and industry experience. Investors poured money into Paulson & Company in recent years, after the founder, John A. Paulson, earned billions of dollars betting against subprime mortgages. Assets at Paulson topped $38 billion at the beginning of 2011, but many of his portfolios suffered last year, with one of the main funds losing 50 percent.

Bridgewater has been able to avoid that fate, in part, because it follows a go-anywhere strategy. The fund’s managers assess the political, economic and regulatory environments around the world, and then make bets using commodities, currencies and other assets.

“It’s become a more macro world,” said Charles T. Cassidy of Cambridge Associates, a consulting firm that advises more than 900 investors with more than $3 trillion in overall assets.

This year, Bridgewater is bullish on gold as a hedge against inflation. The managers are said to believe that governments will need to print more money to help reduce mounting sovereign debt, which could hurt the dollar but help gold. Bridgewater is also betting against the Australian dollar and several emerging-market currencies.

The success comes as Bridgewater finds itself under the microscope for its peculiar culture and odd rules. Mr. Dalio, a graduate of Harvard Business School, is a fervent disciple of radical transparency, a set of beliefs that preaches the pursuit of truth at all costs. For instance, midlevel employees can criticize top management if they think a certain market position is foolish.

In an embodiment of his principles, Mr. Dalio wrote a roughly 120-page treatise, called “Principles,” that is part diary, part philosophical musing and part self-help guide. New employees are required to read it, and it is available to the public online. Mr. Dalio, the son of a homemaker and a jazz musician, writes of his poor grades in high school and a subpar ability to remember names or grasp foreign languages.

Bridgewater’s office in Westport, Conn., has a Big Brother vibe, employees say. Overhead videocameras tape employees throughout the day. To root out problematic behavior, employees are subjected to withering critiques from co-workers. These sessions are recorded and, in the interest of transparency, anyone can pull a copy of the video from the hedge fund’s library.

Former employees say that while it can be an intense and unpleasant place to work, the intellectual environment is invigorating. Ideas are tested vigorously for their soundness. And employees are constantly pushed to improve their investment skills, even if that can be painful at times.

In the wake of some negative publicity that portrayed the firm as strange and inflexible, Bridgewater has begun an unofficial image campaign. Last year, Mr. Dalio appeared on CNBC, where he called the reports “a misunderstanding” and said they had “affected employment.”

Bridgewater also began conducting focus groups at Ivy League schools with students bound for Wall Street. Participants in the 90-minute sessions received $100 gift certificates for voicing their opinions on the firm. In true Bridgewater spirit, they were asked to be as honest as possible.

“Bridgewater has done an extremely good job with its culture, where they challenge each other openly to come up with the truth,” said Dick Del Bello, a senior partner at Conifer Group, a brokerage firm and hedge fund administrator. “Their track record over 20 years is pretty compelling.”

Kevin Roose contributed reporting.

Currently down 23%

Bloomberg LP employees are riled that the financial data giant is doling out lower-than-expected pay for 2011 despite a 10.5 percent jump in overall revenue, sources said.

The company, founded by Mayor Mike Bloomberg, said revenue rose $720 million, or 10.5 percent, to $7.59 billion during a tough year for its biggest Wall Street clients, according to an internal memo obtained by The Post.

The company, known for its ubiquitous financial terminals on trading floors, said it fell short of its own internal sales targets, to which employee pay is tied.

Read MORE http://trade.cc/advh

Great…fun times to come

$14, 460 per

This gives Eastman some exposure in the Asia Pacific region…

(via NY TIMES)

In November, a terrified 13-year-old girl pounded on an apartment door in Brooklyn. When a surprised woman answered, the girl pleaded for a phone. She called her mother, and then dialed 911.

The girl, whom I’ll call Baby Face because of her looks, frantically told police that a violent pimp was selling her for sex. He had taken her to the building and ordered her to go to an apartment where a customer was waiting, she said, and now he was waiting downstairs to make sure she did not escape. She had followed the pimp’s directions and gone upstairs, but then had pounded randomly on this door in hopes of getting help.

Baby Face said she hurt too much to endure yet another rape by a john. She told prosecutors later that she was bleeding vaginally and that her pimp had recently kicked her down a stairwell for trying to flee.

That 911 call set in motion the arrest of Kendale Judge, then 21. Judge has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking, kidnapping, rape and compelling prostitution. He is in jail, and we haven’t heard his side of the events yet.

The episode also shines a spotlight on how the girl was marketed — in ads on Backpage.com, a major national Web site where people place ads to sell all kinds of things, including sex. It is a godsend to pimps, allowing customers to order a girl online as if she were a pizza.

Lauren Hersh, the ace prosecutor in Brooklyn who leads the sex-trafficking unit there, says that of the 32 people she and her team have prosecuted in the last year and a half — typically involving victims aged 12 to 25 — a vast majority of the cases included girls marketed through Backpage ads.

“Pimps are turning to the Internet,” said Hersh. “They’re not putting the girls on the street so much. Backpage is a great vehicle for pimps trying to sell girls.”

Craigslist backed out of this sector after public protests. Pimps then moved toBackpage.com, which is owned by Village Voice Media, owners of The Village Voice weekly newspaper.

Attorneys general from 48 states wrote a joint letter to Backpage, warning that it had become “a hub” for sex trafficking and calling on it to stop running adult services ads. The attorneys general said that they had identified cases in 22 different states in which pimps peddled underage girls through Backpage.

The attorneys general cited a 15-year-old girl who was being forced to have sex with men last year in Dorchester, Mass. The pimp marketed the girl through Backpage.

But Backpage isn’t budging. Indeed, it has fought back with personal attacks on those,such as Ashton Kutcher, who have linked it to human trafficking.

Steve Suskin, legal counsel to Village Voice Media, gave me a lengthy statement in which he argued that the company is already cooperating closely with law-enforcement authorities. He cited a 16-year-old girl in Seattle who was rescued as a result of a tip the company had made.

“Censorship will not rid the world of exploitation,” Suskin asserted.

It’s true that there’s some risk that pimps will migrate to new Web sites, possibly based overseas, that are less cooperative. But, on balance, that’s a risk worth taking. The present system is failing. Pimps aren’t the shrewdest marketers, and eliminating a hub for trafficking should at least chip away at the problem.

Backpage suggests that it is battling censors and prudes. In fact, what drives it seems to be greed. In their letter, the attorneys general said that Backpage earns more than $22 million annually from prostitution advertising.

On Backpage, the pimps claim adult ages for the girls they market, but Hersh scoffs. “I see 19,” she said, “and I immediately think 13.”

“I’m not seeing a lot of cases where there’s not coercion,” she added. “The average age where a girl is forced into prostitution is 12 to 14. And most of these 16- or 17 year-olds are being run by pretty vicious pimps.”

While there are no reliable figures for human trafficking, the more we look, the more we find. The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, says that in the year before he set up a sex-trafficking unit in June 2010, his office prosecuted no trafficking cases. Since then, the office has become a national model, indicting 32 people, with 10 convictions and no acquittals so far.

Among those rescued was Baby Face, who had run away from home in September. Judge allegedly found her on the street, bought food for her and told her that she was beautiful. Within a few days, he had posted her photo on Backpage and was selling her five to nine times a day, prosecutors say. When she didn’t earn enough money, he beat her with a belt, they add.

When Baby Face ran away from her pimp and desperately knocked on that apartment door in Brooklyn, she was also in effect pounding on the door of the executive suites of Backpage and Village Voice Media. Those executives should listen to her pleas.

(via TMZ)

Celebs piling into Super Bowl XLVI (46 to non-Romans) luxury suites better bring their own grub if they want fancy finger foods … because TMZ has learned this year’s stadium menu is loaded with home-style comforts.

While the Giants and Patriots do battle at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis —Centerplate catering will dish up some Midwest favorites:

— Braised Buffalo Short Ribs featuring natural buffalo in a classic French braise
— Heartland Farm Table platter with local veggie selections
— Chef designed Chicken Pot Pie

Basically, sushi lovers … stay home.

However, average joes in run-of-the-mill super expensive SB seats can get Indianapolis Shrimp Cocktails … which we’re told is legendary — despite Indy being landlocked.

Oh, and there’s a sweet consolation for the NFL teams that didn’t make it to the big game. All team owners get a giant jar of mixed M&Ms in their team’s colors.

Feel better now, Baltimore and San Fran?

(via NY POST)

For anybody who’s ever been annoyed by some idiot texting near them in a dark theater, seeing justice done is sweet. But never more colorfully or symbolically so than at a recent performance of the off-Broadway play “Freud’s Last Session,” in which one transgressor was reprimanded by the father of modern psychology himself.

“There was a lady texting in the front row,” says actor Martin Rayner, who plays Sigmund Freud in the show, which is at New World Stages.

“It’s very distracting, especially in such a small theater. I decided at some point I had had enough of it, and I turned to her and said, ‘Stop texting!’ and carried on. She was stunned. I think my partner onstage was stunned, too, because I stuck it in the middle of a line!

WIREIMAGE

Hugh Jackman, “A Steady Rain,” September 2009: “You wanna get that? Come on, just turn it off. Don’t be embarrassed, just grab it. You got it? All right, great.”

It got a cheer,” Rayner recalls.

“I think a lot of audiences hate those people sitting next to them texting.”

That moment of triumph seems indicative of a growing resentment of the boorish, entitled smartphone addicts who seem to pop up at every movie or live performance these days. The common wisdom in years past has been to simply ignore such bad behavior, or accept it as an unfortunate side effect of our perma-online culture.

Lately, though, fed-up patrons and performers are pushing back — such as conductor Alan Gilbert of the New York Philharmonic, who recently stopped the orchestra in the midst of a climactic moment in a Mahler symphony when an iPhone marimba ringtone sounded in the front row.

“Are you finished?” he asked. The tone went on. “Fine, we’ll wait.” When it finally stopped, Gilbert apologized to the rest of the audience, saying he usually ignores such things, but that “this was so egregious that I could not allow it.”

And a recent viral video from a violin concert in Prague shows another way of fighting back: When a cellphone rings, the annoyed violinist deftly picks up the tune and plays a few bars of it before switching back to the concerto.

Most of the time, though, we must content ourselves with an impotent whispered request — often ignored — or else face the daunting challenge of causing an even bigger public disruption than the phone hog.

“One of the great ironies of manners is that the people who enforce them often have worse manners than the initial violators,” says Henry Alford, author of the new etiquette book “Would It Kill You To Stop Doing That?”

Nevertheless, Alford is all in favor of combating the scourge of smartphone rudeness sweeping the nation. For inspiration, look to high-profile stage performers such as Hugh Jackman, Patti LuPone and Kevin Spacey, all of whom have stopped mid-show to chastise techno-rudeness. In May, Frances McDormand was at a pivotal moment in her Tony-winning performance in “Good People” when a cellphone rang — and its owner answered it. McDormand reportedly stopped, put her arm around her co-star and said, “Let’s wait.” Which she did, until the oblivious patron realized what she’d done and stashed the phone.

Occasionally, someone will take it to the next level. When hairdresser Wyatt Raymond took his visiting niece to a movie in Times Square, he says, “about five minutes into the movie, you hear someone talking on her cellphone. The guy in front of me stands up, looks for the person, sees her, and reaches over and closes her phone. She gets up and starts shouting, ‘You don’t do that! You don’t touch someone’s phone!’

“He waves her away and she picks up her very large soda and throws it at him. It didn’t actually hit him — it hit the guy next to him. Who grabs his soda and throws it at her!”

When all involved parties had been escorted into the lobby, the rest of the audience simply laughed it off, Raymond reports. But not all moviegoers are so forgiving.

“I think it’s really the theater’s responsibility. They should warn people on the first offense, and then on the second offense they should pull the person out by the ear and kick them in the ass, hard!” says one Manhattan movie publicist, who asked to remain anonymous.

The likelihood of having to deal with these disruptions in a movie for which you’ve paid upwards of $14, he suggests, is largely to blame for this year’s plummeting ticket sales ($500 million less than the previous year, and a 16-year low for the industry, reports Hollywood.com). “Why pay all that money to go to the movies when you can wait a couple of months to watch in the comfort of your own home?” says the publicist, whose livelihood depends on people not doing that.

So why aren’t more movie theaters following the example of the Alamo Drafthouse theaters in Texas, which famously boot patrons for texting or talking? This summer, they made one indignant woman’s angry voice mail into a public service announcement for the chain: “I’ve texted in all the other theaters in Austin, and no one ever gave a f - - k!” she rants in the spot, which concludes with a message: “Thanks for not coming back to the Alamo, texter!”

The viral video has obviously struck a chord with the public: it’s got nearly 2.5 million hits on YouTube. “We probably kick out about 100 people a year from our 10 locations,” says Alamo owner Tim League.

A spokesman for the AMC chain assures The Post that New York cinema managers “do periodically check auditoriums to make sure there’s no distracting texting going on,” though anyone who’s been to a show in Times Square lately may take issue with that assertion.

A spokeswoman for the Clearview Cinemas chain in New York, meanwhile, didn’t respond to our request for comment.

Broadway theaters and fine arts performance spaces always make announcements asking patrons to turn off their phones, but even this explicit instruction doesn’t seem to get through to everyone. At Lincoln Center Theater, “before the show begins and during intermission the ushers walk up and down the aisles asking everyone to be sure to turn off their electronic devices,” says spokesman Philip Rinaldi.

But many theater owners seem oblivious to just how deeply most patrons despise those little lap-lights. Exhibit A: the plan to have a block of “tweet seats” in select Broadway shows. The director of promotions for the current revival of “Godspell” has said the production intends to try out this idea.

The very thought makes Stephen Bienskie’s blood run cold.

The actor, who plays Buffalo Bill in the off-Broadway show “Silence! The Musical,” says he’s always stunned when patrons whip out their phones mid-performance, whether to text, talk or take pics.

Although Bienskie says he’s been known to stop mid-line and wait for a phone to stop ringing, there are some moments when it’s simply not possible to break character and yell at violators.

“I get to the end of the number and I reveal myself,” says Bienskie, who is seminude for a few seconds during the show, “and I see about 10 cellphones come up in the audience. How do you combat that?”

Still, Bienskie thinks the tide may be turning.

“People are starting to speak up,” he says.

“Audience members get as outraged as we do, and think nothing of turning to someone and saying, in so many words, to turn their phone off and have some respect. People will actually jump on them pretty quickly.”

Read more: http://trade.cc/adjj

• Stacey Irvine has breathing problems and anaemia
• Only other food she eats regularly are fries
  
• But despite warnings cannot resist McDonald’s treats

(via GroundFloor Media)

It’s a new year and time to dust off your social media crisis plan. Need motivation? Just check out how Papa John’s is mired in the damage caused this week when a single tweet started a media firestorm.

An unofficial count found nearly 500 news hits covering the Papa John’s story. It began with a 10-word tweet from a customer, accompanied by a twitpic of her Papa John’s receipt that referred to her as “lady chinky eyes.”

The customer is the communications manager for ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism outlet.

Now there are calls for boycotts, and phone lines at this particular upper Manhattan franchise are overloaded with prank calls from people ordering Chinese food.

Papa John’s Twitter account went from ebullient tweets about reaching 2 million Facebook fans and giving away free pizzas to posting hundreds of responses about the incident, saying over and over: “We are very upset by recent receipt issue in New York & sincerely apologize to our customer. Franchise employee involved is being terminated.”

The issue was compounded when an employee was quoted in the media as saying, “I think the lady put it out there just to get some attention—some people like that type of attention. I truly don’t think it’s fair. It’s been taking up all our time. It’s been very disruptive.”

I bet it has.

Using this particular incident as a jumping-off point, here are several tips that should be included in any social media crisis plan:

Take immediate action. The speed at which bad news spreads on social media is mind-boggling. Companies need to have a response plan that cuts through the red tape and offers an immediate and appropriate response.

Show sympathy. On social media, an apology goes a long way. No company can manage what every employee does, but it can have policies in place to keep crises from happening. Linking to the policy and getting rid of the employee who breached it are good first steps.

Have one official spokesperson. Route all calls to an official spokesperson, one who knows the messaging. Front-line employees are busy with their jobs and may not be aware of the potential repercussions of their comments.

Ensure it won’t reoccur. Learn from the crisis, and put measures in place to minimize the chances of its happening again.

Think bigger picture. A reputation takes a long time to heal, but grand gestures can help. In the case of Papa John’s, maybe a generous donation to a relevant charity might be on point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Nct34hSkIPQ

(via TMZ)

DMX – Busted by Bad ShellfishRushes to Hospital

story developing

The Japanese govt is in discussions to privatize Tepco for $13 billion. Shares of Tepco are up 4% on that news.

Pimco is launching an ETF to track the biggest mutual fund, its Total Return Fund. Will this portend the end for mutual funds? We looked into the future to find out, and this 2022 story tells it all.

By Joshua Morgan Brown, contributor

March 1, 2022

FORTUNE — Ten years ago, in March of 2012, the world’s largest mutual fund cloned itself as an ETF. It occasioned a small amount of business media attention at the time, but in hindsight, it was the event that changed everything.

Read the rest here.