Bloomberg Technology – Could Robots Take Away This Classic Wall Street… For a decade, Ken Sena has had a classic Wall Street job as an equity analyst, which means he researches companies to help investors decide which stocks to buy and sell. Last year, he met developer Bryan Healey, who helped build the AI assistant Alexa… Continue reading Are Machines Taking The Mystery Out Of Markets?
Summary The post above discusses the rapid changes brought about by AI/robots in finance. Should we fear for our jobs? History actually argues rapid technology is a net creator of jobs. Comment When reading the post above, the natural reaction is to fear our jobs will be replaced by robots/AI. Northwestern economics Professor Robert J.… Continue reading Should We Fear AI/Robots?
Treasury curve flattening has not rattle U.S. bank ETFs. Financial sector total returns suggest a steeper curve is expected in 2018.
Barron’s – How to Play Emerging Markets Now America first? Not when it comes to world stocks. In a year full of political and economic drama, emerging markets have outpaced an aging bull market in the U.S. over the last 12 months. Still, the prospect of Beijing wielding a heavier hand in Chinese companies and economic… Continue reading BRICs and G10 Economic Surprise Indices Expected to Converge
Barron’s – Jim O’Neill: A Bullish Case for Oil Prices But I would argue that the decline in volatility in currency, bond, and equity markets largely reflects low inflation in many parts of the world, and the lack of significant monetary-policy adjustments by major central banks in recent years. I’m not sure that these factors apply to… Continue reading Making The Case For Higher Crude Prices
The Wall Street Journal – Jerome Powell’s Path to Confirmation May Lack Drama of Recent Fed Nominee Battles Donald Trump’s choice for Federal Reserve chairman to appear before Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday Jerome Powell is likely to sail through confirmation to become the next Federal Reserve leader, even though the process of filling Fed positions… Continue reading Jerome Powell
Bloomberg – Index Providers Rule the World—For Now, at Least Today the number of benchmarks outnumbers that of individual stocks. “The problem is that a lot of investors assume that the benchmarks are almost God-given and that they’re problem-free. Most of the time they’re not,” says Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz SE and… Continue reading Active vs. Passive
Barron’s – Randall W. Forsyth: What the Fed Really Might Fear: A Bear Market Central bankers today seem to be equally scared of a chimera—inflation that stubbornly refuses to rise to their desired 2% level. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, for instance, has described persistent, sub-2% inflation as “a mystery,” especially given that the jobless rate… Continue reading The Fed’s Third Mandate: Financial Stability
The Wall Street Journal – Spencer Jakab: Is Your Stockpicker Lucky or Good? Investors pick active funds based on performance, but the long-term success of those managers is no more dependable than a coin flip Victor Haghani, a co-founder of one of the best-known investment firms in history, says the most surprising thing is that… Continue reading It Does Not Pay To Chase Performance When Picking Stock Funds
The Wall Street Journal – Huge TIPS Fund Inflow Bucks Slow-Mo Inflation Consensus Fund investors broke ranks with the market’s consensus last week and plowed money into products that benefit should consumer prices snap out of a years-long funk. Mutual funds and exchange-traded funds targeting inflation-protected Treasurys, known as TIPS, pulled in $1.2 billion in the… Continue reading TIPS Fund Inflows
The Financial Times – John Dizard: Algos know more about us than we do about ourselves Petabytes of internet babble for financial and commodities signals Predata, a three-year-old New York and Washington-based predictive data analytics provider, has a Princeton-intensive crew of engineers and international affairs graduates working on early “signals” of market and political events. Predata… Continue reading Algos Find Alternative Data Sources
The Wall Street Journal – Stocks Around the Globe Stage Most Widely Shared Rally in Years The vast majority of global stock markets in 2017 have surged either to fresh records or multiyear highs, one of the broadest rallies in years that investors say is a result of the increasingly synchronized global economic recovery. Half… Continue reading The Global Stock Market Rally