Monthly Archives: April 2014

Trading

No Flash Boys in #China’s Sleepy Over-the-Counter Markets

Shanghai’s over-the-counter equity market was almost deserted on a weekday morning last week. Two cleaning ladies swept the floor of a trading hall devoid of brokers or computers, while a woman at an information desk ate breakfast and talked on her mobile phone.

During four visits this year to the market, set up in 2012 in an industrial park a half-hour’s drive from the city’s main stock exchange, no prospective investors were in evidence. Fewer than one-third of the 150 companies listed on two large screens have ever traded, according to ChinaScope Financial Ltd., a Shanghai-based data provider.

http://www.bloomberg.com/

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  • Yuan’s sharp drop puts investors on alert for end of strengthening trend
    82
    The yuan has recently been something of a safe haven among emerging-market currencies, yet market participants have learned from a bloody lesson over the past week that it is no longer an easy, one-way bet. A sharp fall of both the onshore and offshore yuan against the greenback made the…
    Tags: week, investors, market, china, asian
  • China January lending soars to four-year high
    80
    China's banks disbursed the most loans in any month in four years in January, a surge that suggests the world's second-biggest economy may not be cooling as much as some fear. Chinese banks lent 1.32 trillion yuan ($217.6 billion) worth of new yuan loans in January, beating a 1.1 trillion…
    Tags: china, asian
  • Why Is China’s Economy Still Showing Signs Of Overheating Despite Slower Growth?
    79
    The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) economy has shown signs of overheating despite a sharp slowdown in economic growth, suggesting that, constrained by the supply of labor, its potential growth rate might have fallen significantly from its past level. With the priorities of the PRC’s authorities shifting from raising economic growth…
    Tags: china, asian
  • PBOC Singling Out Industries Fuels Nomura Anxiety: China Credit
    76
    The singling out of three debt types most at risk by the People’s Bank of China has prompted Nomura Holdings Inc. to warn that rising borrowing costs will make it even harder to avoid a default by these issuers. The PBOC will enhance monitoring of local government financing vehicles, industries with overcapacity…
    Tags: china, http://www.bloomberg.com, asian
  • Hedge funds turn to Asia - and airlines
    72
      New York’s hottest young hedge funds are turning their attention towards Asian equities and airlines for the next big trade.   At Sohn Next Wave, held in New York’s Lincoln Centre ahead of the prestigious Sohn Investment conference, Chinese travel agent Ctrip, Indian telco Bharti Infratel, Japanese property company…
    Tags: china, stock, market, companies, asian, trading
NoTrading

@kylebrussell Was Assaulted For Wearing #Google #Glass In The Wrong Part Of San Francisco

Will people get troubles with Google Glass ?

On Friday night, I was assaulted while walking down the sidewalk in the Mission District of San Francisco.
A colleague and I had just finished covering a march in protest of a Google employee who had recently evicted several tenants after buying and moving into a home in the area

 

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/

 

 

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  • Where’s #Google going next? Ask #LarryPage
    77
    Onstage at TED2014, Charlie Rose interviews Google CEO Larry Page about his far-off vision for the company. It includes aerial bikeways and internet balloons … and then it gets even more interesting, as Page talks through the company’s recent acquisition of Deep Mind, an AI that is learning some surprising…
    Tags: google, #google
  • Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
    76
    When Gabriel Weinberg launched a search engine in 2008, plenty of people thought he was insane. How could DuckDuckGo, a tiny, Philadelphia-based startup, go up against Google? One way, he wagered, was by respecting user privacy. Six years later, we're living in the post-Snowden era, and the idea doesn't seem…
    Tags: google, people
  • Google Glass shares much of its electronics and software with the smartphone. #longread
    53
    Google Glass shares much of its electronics and software with the smartphone, but it’s a very different machine. You hold a smartphone in your hand. And we do—at restaurants, at the movies, walking across the street, and even in bed. We use smartphones to check our mail, update Facebook, get…
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  • Larry Page Has A Fascinating View Of The Economy That's Startlingly Similar To What Keynes Once Predicted
    49
    Google CEO Larry Page recently participated in a fireside chat with Khosla Ventures, where among other things he offered his view on the state of the economy and labor. People are endlessly musing on the future of the labor market these days, given the idea that robots can perform more and…
    Tags: will, people, read, google
  • Is Silicon Valley Funding the Wrong Stuff?
    48
    Social networks that allow you to send only the message "Yo" to your contacts. Food-delivery services valued at $400 million. Startups that deliver rolls of quarters to your home (just $27 for $20 in change!). It isn't hard, looking at a lineup like this, to conclude that Silicon Valley has…
    Tags: will, wrong, google, area
Trading

Why the algobots that rule Wall Street are good—and why they’re evil, too. #HFT

The stock market isn’t rigged, but it is taxed.

It always has been. As Justin Fox points out, for as long as people have been trading stocks, there have been middlemen taking a cut of the action. Now, that cut has gotten smaller as markets have gotten bigger and more technologically-advanced, but it’s still there. It’s the implicit fee that intermediaries charge for making sure there’s a buyer for every seller, and a seller for every buyer—for “making markets.”

But there’s a new kind of middleman today. They don’t work at stock exchanges or banks. They work at hedge funds, and trade at whiz-bang speeds. These “high-frequency traders” (HFT) use computer algorithms—a.k.a., algobots—to arbitrage away the most infinitesimal price discrepancies that only exist over the most infinitesimal time horizons. You can see just how small and how fast we’re talking about in the chart below from a new paper by Eric Budish and John Shim of the University of Chicago and Peter Cramton of the University of Maryland. It uses 2011 data to show the price difference between futures (blue) and exchange-traded funds (green) that both track the S&P 500. These should be perfectly correlated, and they are—at minute intervals. But this correlation disappears at 250 millisecond intervals, a little more than half the time it takes to blink your eyes. This is the “inefficiency” that HFT makes less so.

http://www.theatlantic.com/

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  • Confused about high-frequency trading? Here's a guide
    81
    A new book by author Michael Lewis describes how trading algorithms that detect and exploit tiny, fleeting profit opportunities, called high-frequency traders, have transformed the stock market. And not by ripping off middle class investors. But that doesn't mean there are no problems. Read on to understand what high-frequency trading is, and…
    Tags: trading, high-frequency, stock, market, kind, they're, hft
  • High-Speed Trading Isn't About Efficiency—It's About Cheating
    79
    When hedge funds use bots to buy and sell stocks within milliseconds, they're not improving the market. They're rigging the market.   High-frequency trading (HFT) hedge funds. These funds use computer algorithms—a.k.a.: algobots—to buy and sell stocks at incredible speeds. We're talking milliseconds. The idea is to react to any market news or…
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  • How One Whistleblower Turned the Tables on High-Frequency Traders
    76
    A once esoteric corner of the stock market —- “order types” —- has taken center stage the past few years in the debate about the health of the market, the role of high-speed traders in it and how stock exchanges interact with clients. A big reason for the scrutiny: Order…
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  • Are you frightened of high-frequency trading (HFT)?
    76
    Are you frightened of high-frequency trading (HFT)? Are you concerned about what it might do to your stock portfolio? If so, you may have been exposed to Michael Lewis over the past few months. It’s been hard not to be, especially if you watch financial shows on TV or read…
    Tags: rigged, hft, high-frequency, markets, market, stock, trading, banks, traders, making
  • Dark markets may be more harmful than high-frequency trading #HFT
    76
    Fears that high-speed traders have been rigging the U.S. stock market went mainstream last week thanks to allegations in a book by financial author Michael Lewis, but there may be a more serious threat to investors: the increasing amount of trading that happens outside of exchanges. Some former regulators and…
    Tags: trading, exchanges, market, stocks, traders, #hft, markets, high-frequency, stock, hft
BOE, ECB, Trading, USA

Pound Rises Most in Two Months on Recovery Signs, #IMF Forecasts #GBP

The pound rose the most in two months versus the dollar this week as manufacturing and production data signaled the U.K. recovery is on track, boosting bets the Bank of England will raise interest rate and is going to nudge higher throughout the course of this month

The pound gained 1 percent this week, Industrial production increased 0.9 percent in February from the previous month and manufacturing output climbed 1 percent.

Growth Estimates

The IMF raised its forecasts for U.K. growth, predicting the economy will grow 2.9 percent in 2014.

Sterling gained 4.4 percent in the past six months, The euro climbed 1.9 percent, while the dollar slid 1 percent.Policy makers kept the benchmark interest rate unchanged at a record-low 0.5 percent at a meeting this week.

Annualized inflation slowed to 1.6 percent in March, from 1.7 percent the month before. The unemployment rate is estimated to 7.1 percent in the three months through February. This may prompt policy makers to consider to raise the interest rate.

Officials said in February there would be scope to maintain record-low rates even after the threshold is reached.

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  • Two-Speed Recovery: US vs. EU
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  • Kris eller uppgång för världen ?
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    För 10 år sedan verkade den globala ekonomin att vara på bättringsvägen.  Räntorna gick ner till 1 %, Storbritannien var i sitt 12:e år av oavbruten tillväxt, Kina var en del av WTO och alla trodde på att marknaderna själva kunde korrigera sig. Den monetära systemkrasch som kom var oförutsedd…
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  • World turbulences ahead ? #IMF #Forex #Economy
    62
    10 years ago, the global economy seemed to be on the mend. Interests rates down to 1%, UK was in its 12th year of uninterrupted growth, China was a part of WTO and everyone firmly believed in self correcting markets. The monetary system crash was unforeseen and a surprise. IMF…
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  • Who loses from punishing Russia?
    62
    If trade and financial sanctions were imposed on Russia, the cost to the UK might well exceed the cost to Russia. That is presumably why the Foreign Office wrote - in a document carelessly (or deliberately?) displayed yesterday for the lenses of photographers - that "the UK should not support…
    Tags: uk, usa, economy
Trading, USA

Is this the beginning of a crash? @reformedbroker

It certainly could be, but the odds do not favor it. Statistically speaking, it is far more likely that a run-of-the-mill correction is now underway and working its way through each sector of the market, to varying degrees of severity. Counter-trend rallies are sharp and short (think Wednesday), which is fairly characteristic of a defined downtrend. The 200-day moving average is rising up just beneath us and it may offer some solid support, just as it had in December of 2012.

http://www.thereformedbroker.com/

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  • Two-Speed Recovery: US vs. EU
    90
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    Tags: average, fairly, usa, uk, europe, economy
  • Kris eller uppgång för världen ?
    86
    För 10 år sedan verkade den globala ekonomin att vara på bättringsvägen.  Räntorna gick ner till 1 %, Storbritannien var i sitt 12:e år av oavbruten tillväxt, Kina var en del av WTO och alla trodde på att marknaderna själva kunde korrigera sig. Den monetära systemkrasch som kom var oförutsedd…
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  • Who loses from punishing Russia?
    79
    If trade and financial sanctions were imposed on Russia, the cost to the UK might well exceed the cost to Russia. That is presumably why the Foreign Office wrote - in a document carelessly (or deliberately?) displayed yesterday for the lenses of photographers - that "the UK should not support…
    Tags: uk, support, usa, economy
  • Pound Rises Most in Two Months on Recovery Signs, #IMF Forecasts #GBP
    75
    The pound rose the most in two months versus the dollar this week as manufacturing and production data signaled the U.K. recovery is on track, boosting bets the Bank of England will raise interest rate and is going to nudge higher throughout the course of this month The pound gained…
    Tags: uk, usa, europe, economy
  • World turbulences ahead ? #IMF #Forex #Economy
    73
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NoTrading

Russian & #Estonia’s treatment of its large ethnic #Russian minorit

Russian officials last night expressed ‘outrage’ at Estonia’s treatment of its large ethnic Russian minority.Nearly 80 years ago, Germany began its annexation of nearby states with the widely broadcast notion of protecting marginalised German-language speakers.

Russia is now adopting the same line towards ex-members of the Soviet Union.Even as Ukraine surrenders any hope of retaining control of Crimea through ordering withdrawal of all its remaining troops, NATO has ramped up the rhetoric.

President Obama, however, appears to be playing the appeaser. In an interview with NBC News he reiterated that the US would not be taking military action in Ukraine against Russia.Ukraine has offered a hint: It is saying it will soon hold “joint military exercises” with the United States and Britain.

US officials have said they are reviewing a request from Kiev for military support, including arms, ammunition and non-lethal equipment.

Ukraine’s ambassador told the UN human rights council that it had found no credible evidence of mistreatment of its Russian minority

It retorted by asking for assurances against minority groups in Crimea, such as the Muslim Tartars and Ukrainian communities.Given the lack of vigour in the West’s reaction to the invasion of Crimea, many of the smaller former Soviet Union states now feel powerless as Putin begins to invoke the propaganda of history, language and culture (all from his perspective) as ‘cause for concern’ over their affairs.Now, Ukraine is made up of about 30 million Ukrainian speakers and 15 million Russian speakers. The main religion is Orthodox (15 million followers), with a sizeable chunk of Catholics (2.5 million).

Unlike its northern neighbours, it has until recently maintained close and friendly contact with its former Russian overlords.

But the recent overthrow of the corrupt Yanukovych government saw Russia lose the last vestiges of its Soviet Union-era influence over the strategic and beautiful region.

President Putin simply could not put up with that. Thus the Crimean ‘velvet invasion’

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  • Crimea votes to join Russia, accelerating Ukraine crisis
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  • Germany: Putin Accepts Merkel Contact Group Idea
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  • The #Putin Doctrine: Myth, Provocation, Blackmail, or the Real Deal? by @aminterest
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    When it comes to explaining Russia’s Ukrainian adventurism, the West has attempted to hide behind a wall of myths and hope its problems will just go away. There are all sorts of reasons to be stunned and perplexed today. Stunned by the reintroduction of the fears and phobias of the…
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  • As hostilities flare in Crimea, U.S. steps up pressure on Russia
    54
    Hostilities intensified in Crimea on Saturday as Ukrainian officials accused pro-Russian forces of armed aggression and President Barack Obama rounded up world leaders to demand Russia "de-escalate the situation." Obama called British, French and Italian leaders and hosted a conference call with the presidents of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, the…
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NoTrading, USA

Amazon offers employees $5,000 to quit #Amazon #zappo

Amazon is offering its warehouse employees up to $5,000 to quit their jobs, even as the company is in the process of adding workers and locations.

The “Pay to Quit” program, which was announced by CEO Jeff Bezos in his letter to shareholders late Thursday, is an effort to make sure that the Internet retailer’s employees really want to be there.

http://money.cnn.com/

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    Amazon plans to launch Project Kuiper, a network of 3,236 small satellites to create an interconnected network that beams high-speed internet to anywhere on Earth. Morgan Stanley estimates Project Kuiper represents as much as a ”$100 billion opportunity.” The firm’s estimate is based on its expectation that the space economy…
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  • AMAZON: NOT AN E-COMMERCE COMPANY
    56
    Let’s start with the premise that Twitch, the video-game watching network, is the next ESPN – you know, the jewel in Disney’s crown that, by itself, is worth $50.8 billion. Like ESPN, Twitch is about live competition, and, like ESPN, Twitch does exceptionally well in the highly desirable young male demographic.1 Obviously…
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  • Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books? #Longread
    56
    In the era of the Kindle, a book costs the same price as a sandwich. Dennis Johnson, an independent publisher, says that “Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value—it’s a widget.” Construction by Ian Wright. http://www.newyorker.com/
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  • Amazon and Google have been throwing around ideas of new same-day delivery
    54
    FedEx is one of the largest courier services in the US. It benefited hugely by the increasing trend of e-commerce which greatly increased the demand for courier packages. With the expansion it benefits not only with larger sales revenue but also Economies of Scale which result in a greater profit…
    Tags: amazon
  • Jeff Bezos’ stealthy foray into the unsexy world of B2B distribution is likely
    53
    Forget the delivery drones and TV deals. Jeff Bezos’ stealthy foray into the unsexy world of B2B distribution is likely his most disruptive move yet — and it has an $8 trillion swath of the economy running scared. In recent months global Internet retail behemoth Amazon.com   has green-lit six new original TV shows, announced…
    Tags: bezos, jeff, company, amazon, internet, $, ceo, announced
BOE, ECB, Europe, FED, Trading, USA

Dr Faber predict stock market crash #Stockmarket #nasdaq

Dr Faber is predicting a 1987-type stock market crash this year only it will be worse.

The US technology-heavy Nasdaq plummeted by 3.1 per cent on Thursday night (US time), its biggest one-day drop since November 2011.

Dr Faber, the editor of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, has already called for growth stocks to decline this year. He said ridiculous stock valuations were not the crash catalysts, saying the Federal Reserve was also to blame.

“This year, for sure – maybe from a higher diving board – the S&P will drop 20 per cent,” Dr Faber said.

CNBC noted that Dr Faber predicted in August last year a 1987-type crash was looming.

Since then the S&P 500 has risen about 9 per cent.

Mr Grantham said the bust would be particularly painful because “the Fed and other central banks around the world have taken on all this leverage that was out there and put it on their balance sheets.”They will become cheap again. That’s how we will pay for this. It’s going to be very painful for investors,”

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  • The Great Recession--Moving Ahead
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    "The Great Recession--Moving Ahead," a Conference Sponsored by the Swedish Ministry of Finance, Stockholm, Sweden   The Great Recession: Moving Ahead The recession that began in the United States in December 2007 ended in June 2009. But the Great Recession is a near-worldwide phenomenon, with the consequences of which many…
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  • WALL STREET'S BRIGHTEST MINDS REVEAL THE MOST IMPORTANT CHARTS IN THE WORLD
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  • Your Guide To Monitoring The Economy Just Like Janet Yellen
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    On Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen promised the House Financial Services Committee "a great deal of continuity" in monetary policy as she fills the shoes of Ben Bernanke.   However, Yellen is not Bernanke. And depending on her read on the economy, she will use her powers to influence…
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  • Is the Market Efficient? Cliff Asness Says Yes, and No
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    At Morningstar, AQR Capital’s leader presents Fama and Shiller’s arguments and says he’s ‘learned to live with my schizophrenia’ “I’m not a super-hardcore efficient marketer,” says Cliff Asness of AQR Capital. Cliff Asness created a “watershed moment in the hedge fund industry” when he brought his sophisticated hedge fund strategies…
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Europe

Greece back to bond market #greece

Europe’s leaders argue that only deep budget cuts will revive the economy and inspire the necessary confidence among investors.

The deal represents a major milestone for Greece, which was effectively shut out of the markets in 2010 when the debt crisis left it dependent on international bailouts to stay afloat.The bond sale reflects increased optimism that Greece and other wobbly euro zone countries have turned a corner. In recent months, borrowing costs dropped significantly for Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy, as the investors deemed them less risky.

Unemployment in Greece rising at 27 percent. The bonds of both Portugal and Ireland have been in strong demand since those countries returned to the markets earlier

As a result, borrowing costs among the most troubled euro zone economies have been falling fast.fears are gone. The economy is stabilizing, with the International Monetary Fund recently raising its forecast for growth this year, to 0.6 percent. Greece has met a number of fiscal targets, and the government recently announced a primary surplus — a surplus before debt payments — of about €2.5 billion.

But Greece still has numerous economic hurdles to overcome, including a mountain of debt that will take decades to repay. Economists said Greece would need annual economic growth of nearly 5 percent over the next decade to make progress in paying off what it owes creditors. Greece also needs an export-driven recovery.

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    The European Debt Crisis Visualized http://www.bloomberg.com/
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  • MARIO DRAGHI :: Stability and Prosperity in Monetary Union
    79
    Source : http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ecb-eurozone-economic-union-by-mario-draghi-2015-1 There is a common misconception that the euro area is a monetary union without a political union. But this reflects a deep misunderstanding of what monetary union means. Monetary union is possible only because of the substantial integration already achieved among European Union countries – and sharing a…
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  • No reason to again give #France more time to cut deficit - Rehn
    77
    There is no reason to further extend a European Union deadline for France to cut its budget deficit, the EU's top economic official said on Saturday, adding policy-makers should have learnt the lessons of the debt crisis and stuck to agreed rules. In June last year Paris got two more…
    Tags: percent, economy, economic, debt, europe
  • Greek finance minister says euro will collapse if Greece exits
    75
      Feb 8 (Reuters) - If Greece is forced out of the euro zone, other countries will inevitably follow and the currency bloc will collapse, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said on Sunday. Greece's new leftist government is trying to re-negotiate its debt repayments and has begun to roll back…
    Tags: will, euro, greece, debt, zone, europe, economy
  • German bond yields on course for biggest weekly rise in a decade
    74
      German government bond yields jumped on Thursday as a rout in euro zone markets worsened, putting them on course for their biggest weekly rise in over a decade. Yields on 10-year German bonds -- the bloc's benchmark -- rose as much as 20 basis points to hit 0.799 percent,…
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NoTrading

Heartbleed Leads Experts to Recommend #Password Changes

Security experts are urging consumers to change their Web passwords after the recent disclosure of a vulnerability touching wide swaths of the Internet, even as Google Inc. , Facebook Inc. and large banks said they weren’t affected.

The flaw to OpenSSL, an open-source software that runs on as many as two-thirds of all active websites, was reported on April 7, by researchers who pushed out a fix.

Dubbed Heartbleed, the bug could have allowed hackers to access encrypted e-mail messages, banking information, user names and passwords.

The flaw involving a two-year-old programming mistake was discovered by researchers from Google and Codenomicon, a security firm based in Finland, and reported to OpenSSL, according to a blog post from Codenomicon.

Google and Facebook said they addressed the problem before it was made public and saw no signs of vulnerabilities, while Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) made the requisite fixes.

Yahoo’s Patch

“A vulnerability, called Heartbleed, was recently identified impacting many platforms that use OpenSSL, including ours,” Yahoo said in an e-mailed statement.

Before Yahoo issued its fix, security researcher Mark Loman from the Netherlands demonstrated Tuesday on Twitter that he was able to force the site to leak usernames and passwords.

“It wasn’t Yahoo’s fault, yet they’re very slow at installing the critical fix,” Loman wrote on his Twitter Inc. (TWTR) account. “Bug disclosure was flawed too.”

Extra Protection

Many large consumer sites running OpenSSL aren’t vulnerable to being exploited because they use specialized encryption equipment and software.

“The security of our users’ information is a top priority,” Google said in a statement yesterday.

In a statement, Facebook said it “added protections for Facebook’s implementations of OpenSSL before this issue was publicly disclosed, and we haven’t detected any signs of suspicious activity on people’s accounts.”

Tests on the home pages of other large technology, e-commerce and banking companies including Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Bank of America Corp. indicated they weren’t vulnerable.

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