Expect a light-volume, last-week-of-the-year, half-the-Street-on-vacation sort of action, as the thinly traded market is easily pushed around. From an undisclosed Caribbean location, my morning train beach reads:
• What if saving the economy was the easy part? (Washington Post)
• The Year Nothing Worked: Stocks, Bonds, Cash Go Nowhere (Bloomberg)
• Housel: The Past Decade in 50 Headlines (Fool)
• Two Business Lessons From Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• Why YouTube Is Twice as Valuable as Netflix (Barron’s)
• In 2015, Shattering Records in New York City Real Estate (NYT)
• Where Your Unwanted Christmas Gifts Get a Second Life: The underbelly of e-commerce is a booming business in which little-known companies collect, process and often resell piles of returned presents (WSJ)
• Mossberg: Seven Tech Trends From 2015 (Re/code)
• Why the Movie ‘Concussion’ Spells Trouble for the NFL (Nation)
• The world’s most breathtaking drone photography in 2015 (Quartz)
What are you reading?
Hedge fund liquidations rose to 257 in Q3 vs 200 in Q2
Source: Bloomberg
The dark side: The secret world of sports doping
Al Jazeera investigation raises questions about whether sports heroes are linked to performance-enhancing drugs
December 27, 2015 7:24AM ET Updated 12:15PM ET
by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit
Inside a hotel room in Austin, Texas, a pharmacist advises a professional athlete on taking performance-enhancing drugs.
“One anabolic, and I can give you something to use right now, is this Delta 2 stuff. It’s a steroid. There’s a bunch of football players who take this,” he tells Liam Collins, a British hurdler reporting undercover.
In another conversation, a Vancouver pharmacist poses a question to the same athlete.
“Have I doped people? Oh yeah. And no one’s got caught because the system is so easy to beat. That’s the sad fact.”
Later, a Naturopath doctor explains how he would destroy medical records if investigators came looking for them.
…
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/12/27/al-jazeera-investigates-secret-world-of-sports-doping.html
Stratfor has 11 chilling predictions for what the world will look like in 10 years
Armin Rosen
24 Dec 2015
http://www.businessinsider.com/stratfor-has-11-chilling-predictions-for-what-the-world-will-look-like-in-10-years-2015-6
Kazakhstan Looks to Private Equity for Help With Its $93 Billion Cash Pile
“…The $64 billion National Fund has struggled to achieve an average of 2 percent annually for the past five years…”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-28/cash-pile-on-menu-at-kravis-and-schwarzman-s-kazakhstan-dinner
Good thing the “smart” dictator with his people in mind didn’t look at the data and invite Vanguard.
Goofy War-Mongering American Engineer knows more about finance than the entire nation of Kazakhstan.
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-you-have-to-save-to-retire-early-2015-7
Yep, the trick is to get rid of all unnecessary expenses. For example, don’t have kids. Those damn things will cost you about $200,000 a piece over your lifetime.
Negril? ;)
Database configuration issues expose 191 million voter records
Massive database exposed to public, major political data managers deny ownership
CSO | Dec 28, 2015 4:00 AM PT
A misconfigured database has led to the disclosure of 191 million voter records. The database, discovered by researcher Chris Vickery, doesn’t seem to have an owner; it’s just sitting in the public – waiting to be discovered by anyone who happens to be looking.
….
http://www.csoonline.com/article/3018592/security/database-configuration-issues-expose-191-million-voter-records.html