David Fuller and Eoin Treacy's Comment of the Day
Category - Autonomies

    For Counterfeit Fighters on Social Media, Fake Profiles Are a Real Ally

    This article by Kathy Chu for the Wall Street Journal may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

    Globally, sales of fake goods amount to between $250 billion and $600 billion each year, as products made mostly in China are dispersed through brick-and-mortar shops as well as online platforms from the Philippines to the U.S., government and industry groups say.

    More than half of counterfeiters now use social media to sell their products, up from about 10% three years ago, estimates Ken Gamble, who tracks fake goods for global brands. Brands now want monitoring of counterfeit sales extended to social media, he said.

    Ugg, the maker of sheepskin boots, created anticounterfeiting pageson Facebook and Twitter last year to alert consumers to the growing problem.

    “You hear these stories about how they’re being duped and losing their money,” said Graham Thatcher, brand protection associate at Deckers Outdoor Corp., Ugg’s parent company.

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    Record VIX Bets Keep Surging Amid Wall Street Mixed Signals

    This article by Joseph Ciolli and Inyoung Hwang for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

    To Rocky Fishmanof Deutsche Bank, the recent lack of equity volatility has convinced some investors that price swings may return. With the volatility on the VIX itself likely to remain high, he recommends investors buy Standard & Poor’s 500 Index put spreads -- a strategy that involves purchasing and selling bearish contracts on the measure simultaneously.

    “Investors don’t believe this low-volatility environment will continue,” said Fishman, an equity derivatives strategist at Deutsche Bank. “Seeing how low the VIX is, it’s an opportunity to buy inexpensive S&P 500 options.”

    The CBOE VVIX Index has climbed 5 percent this quarter, and its average this year is about 8 percent higher than its historical average, data going back to 2006 show.

    There may be another reason that call activity has continued to swell amid the stock rally, according to Deshpande.

    Credit investors may be looking to protect recent gains delivered by a 29 percent contraction in the credit spread for investment-grade bonds since Feb. 11. That’s pushed more investors into fixed income trading.

    “Credit spreads have rebounded and people are investing in the space again,” Deshpande said. “So they need hedging.”

     

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    Morgan Stanley Quarterly Profit Beats Estimates on Cost Cuts

    This article by Hugh Son for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

    First-quarter net income fell 53 percent to $1.13 billion, or 55 cents a share, from $2.39 billion, or $1.18, a year earlier, the New York-based company said Monday in a statement.

    Profit surpassed the 47-cent average estimate of 22 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. The decline in trading revenue was smaller than some analysts predicted.

    While Chief Executive Officer James Gorman has been shrinking the fixed-income trading division to emphasize the less-volatile wealth-management business, Morgan Stanley is still exposed to slumping markets that hurt results across Wall Street. The firm follows JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. in lowering expenses to compensate for falling revenue. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which reports results Tuesday, is embarking on its biggest cost-cutting push in years, people with knowledge of the effort said last week.

    “If these markets were to continue as is, our goals will be extremely difficult to achieve, and we would therefore take additional appropriate actions,” Gorman said in a conference call with analysts. The company is reviewing every product and business to “convince ourselves that we need our footprint as it’s currently configured,” he said.

     

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    The World Is Getting Fatter and No One Knows How to Stop It

    This article by John Tozzi may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

    Researchers estimate that excess weight caused 3.4 million deaths worldwide in 2010. Being overweight or obese is a risk factor for chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Those are rising worldwide, too. There were an estimated 422 million adults with diabetes in 2014, a rate of 8.5 percent, compared to 4.7 percent in 1980, according to new estimates published by the World Health Organization April 6.

    Diabetes is rising fastest in low- and middle-income countries. It’s most common in the region that includes the Middle East and North Africa, where levels of physical inactivity are high.

    The number of people who are overweight or obese is going up pretty much everywhere. The world has made progress against health threats from smoking and malnutrition to malaria and waterborne illnesses. No country has yet reversed the obesity epidemic. “Not only is obesity increasing, but no national success stories have been reported in the past 33 years,” researchers in the Lancet wrote in a 2014 report funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    A United Nations plan published in 2013 calls for halting the rise in diabetes and obesity by 2025. Though the pace of increase has slowed in some places, Lancet researchers recently called the chances of the world meeting that target “virtually zero.”

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    In JPMorgan Fintech Bunker, Coders Are Too Focused for Foosball

    This article by Hugh Son for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

    The bank has overhauled its website -- an unveiling is planned for Wednesday -- to make it easier and more intuitive to use. It consolidates about 300 pages from the old site so a visitor doesn’t have to hunt around to get things done. It also features a newsfeed with articles about personal finance. JPMorgan is slowly adding users to the new platform to gauge their reactions. It expects to add the rest starting this month and later release a new small-business banking website.

    Tech competitors such as LendingClub Corp., On Deck Capital Inc. and Wealthfront Inc. threaten to disrupt banks’ relationships with clients by making transactions easier or cheaper. Traditional financial firms are responding by building their own technology in-house, including robo-advisers that give automated investment advice, partnering with the financial technology companies or purchasing them outright. New York-based JPMorgan will spend $3 billion on technology investments this year.

    “All the startups, all the fintech guys are pushing very hard because they see opportunity,” said Parsey. “We have to take the banking world up to the same level as the rest of the digital industry. Beyond that, there are exciting ways to innovate how people feel about their finances.”

     

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    Tesla's Getting More Rivals as VW Scandal Clouds Diesel Outlook

    This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

    Volkswagen, meanwhile, has made electric vehicles a linchpin of its plan for recovering from the crisis, accelerating a push to add 20 additional plug-in hybrid and battery-powered cars to its lineup by 2020. That includes the first battery-powered vehicle for the Porsche sports-car brand as well as an electric Audi crossover. And it’s promising new leaps in technology, including ranges of more than 500 kilometers (310 miles) by the end of the decade.

    “Charging will only take as long as a coffee break,” instead of hours, Volkswagen CEO Matthias Mueller said in Geneva. “And in the long term, an electric car will cost less than a car with an internal combustion engine.”

    Such technology advances will help electric cars eventually. But in the meantime, demand is tepid, with the clean-running vehicles accounting for just 0.68 percent of sales in western Europe, according to Automotive Industry Data Ltd. Much of that demand comes from Norway, where electric cars enjoy generous perks such as tax exemptions and free charging. In Germany, where there are limited benefits, just over 30,000 have been sold to date. Cheap oil prices provide little incentive for consumers to take the leap.

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    Boston Dynamics' Atlas The Next Generation

    This video is worth watching because it gives us an idea of just how much progress robotics companies have made. 

    Inside the New Microsoft, Where Lie Detection Is a Killer App

    This article by Dina Bass for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers,. Here is a section:

    Microsoft truly embraced the technology when it started Bing in an attempt to catch up with Google. Satya Nadella ran engineering and technical strategy for the search division before becoming chief executive officer two years ago and has been sprinkling machine learning like fairy dust on everything his company touches. "Microsoft is now in this place where they have machine learning very deeply embedded," Domingos says. "They’re investing a lot in making machine learning less Wild West."

    Like Google and Amazon, which have both used the technology to improve their own products, Microsoft is weaving machine learning into its own operations. This isn't simply about helping the company save money and function better; the more Microsoft uses the technology itself, the easier it is to explain and sell. "Customers are confused," says Joseph Sirosh, lured from Amazon in 2013 to oversee engineering for Microsoft’s machine learning efforts. "Cutting through that noise has been a bit of a challenge. It has been also hard for our own field and sales people to go talk to customers and educate them about all the use cases."

    CFO Amy Hood’s finance department has come to rely on algorithms—using them to help forecast sales and how many licenses the company will sell in a given period. "It turns out to be very, very accurate for that application," Sirosh says. "Amy Hood is a big fan of this. She can sleep nicer knowing that a machine learning model predicted her quarter."

     

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    Another Sign of Rough Sledding Ahead: Dividend Cuts Surpass 2008

    This article by Luke Kawa for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Bespoke suggested that spreads in the high-yield debt market could signal whether more companies will be under pressure to cut or eliminate their dividends.

    "Based on the trends of the last decade, when the credit markets are willing to lend, companies have jumped at the opportunity to borrow and increase their payouts," the analysts wrote. "The flipside is what we are seeing now, and when the credit markets start to turn off the spigot, some companies find they don’t have the cashflows to support their payouts."

     

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    Alphabet becomes the world's largest listed company

    This article from The Economist may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    ON FEBRUARY 1st, the day that Ted Cruz defeated Donald Trump in the Republican caucus in Iowa, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, won a contest of its own, vaulting past its longtime rival, Apple, to become the most valuable listed company in the world by market capitalisation. Alphabet supporters are chuffed with the firm’s strong quarterly earnings and new corporate structure, announced last August. This was the first time Alphabet has shared more information about the performance of the firm’s “moonshot” projects, such as self-driving cars and Nest smart thermostats. In 2015, these projects (i.e., not including the core advertising business, Google) had an operating loss of around $3.6 billion—a hefty figure but less than some analysts had feared.

    Alphabet is now predominantly an advertising firm, but it is selling a story about its ability to change and become more things to more people. Its believers think the firm will turn at least one of its moonshot projects into a significant earner of profits. The firm has a history of adeptly repositioning itself: it purchased Android in 2005 and YouTube in 2006, which helped it profit from the rise of smartphones and online video. It is also a leader in artificial intelligence, an important area of investment for internet firms today, with applications in everything from autonomous cars to photo-recognition, as well as in Google’s original internet-search business.

     

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