Baltic Dry Index. 1385 +14 Brent Crude 68.14
“October:
This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The
others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June,
December, August and February.”
Mark
Twain
We live in the age of
central bankster generated manias, and stock mania is now sweeping the world.
Like all manias before it, this one too will end badly, we just don’t yet know
when or why. But when the end comes be prepared for a massive swing to the hard
left and far right. What we’ve seen so far from voters in Europe and the USA, was
merely the product of disillusion with the system. What follows once the stock
and everything mania dies in distress, is revulsion with the system and
political parties deemed to have brought the calamity about.
But all that’s for
another day. For now all news is good news once again. Party on like it’s 2007.
The “fear of missing out” rules the day. “Manias are us,” forever, right?
Asia Stocks Build on Record High, Yen Strengthens: Markets Wrap
By Adam Haigh
Updated on 9 January 2018, 06:01 GMT
Asian equities built on the best start to a year since 2006 as Japanese
traders returned from a holiday following new all-time highs for U.S. shares.
The yen climbed in an apparent reaction to the Bank of Japan trimming bond
purchases in one of its regular operations.
Japanese shares pared their gains after the yen’s advance in wake of the
announcement by the BOJ, which made a small tweak to its buying of longer-dated
debt. While a number of analysts do anticipate the central bank to tweak its
stimulus program this year, Governor Haruhiko Kuroda has repeatedly emphasized
there’s no shift on the immediate horizon.
Shares
from Sydney to Hong Kong were modestly higher after the S&P 500 Index eked
out a fresh closing high. Declines at Samsung Electronics Co. in wake of
its profit announcement weighed on South Korea’s equity index. Earnings will
continue to be a focus as the week goes on, with financial firms including
JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. on the schedule. The
dollar’s softness last year may reverberate for some, as it did negatively for
Samsung.
----Signs
of financial-market stress continue to abate at the start of 2018 amid optimism
that lower U.S. taxes and a broadening global economic recovery justify record
high prices for global equities. In Europe, data showed confidence in the euro
area continued its advance at the end of 2017. At the same time, the euro has
been restrained by concerns about Germany’s continued struggle to form a
government.
"This environment of strong global growth and contained inflation
is actually a great environment for Asian equities, including tech," said Ajay
Kapur, head of Asia Pacific and global emerging market strategy at Bank of
America Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong, in an interview with Bloomberg TV. "On
the margin you will get hurt a little bit on the currency," as seen with
Samsung, but demand for tech companies’ products remains good, he said.
Here are some of the other main events to watch for this week:
- Australian retails sales numbers are due on Thursday.
- U.S. inflation data are forecast to show price pressures remain muted, giving hawks little reason to argue for faster tightening.
- St. Louis Fed bank President James Bullard and head of the New York Fed Bill Dudley are among central bankers scheduled to speak.
- China producer and consumer prices data come Wednesday, while a reading on the country’s money supply is expected in coming days.
- Talks between South Korea and North Korea are set to take place Tuesday.
More
Equity Euphoria Grips the Entire World
By Luke Kawa
8 January 2018, 13:25 GMT
The most hated rally this is not.
Equity euphoria has gripped most of the world to kick off 2018, with the
14-day relative strength index for major stock markets surging to overbought
levels.
The S&P 500 Index, MSCI Asia Pacific Index, MSCI World Index, Nikkei
225 Index, and MSCI Emerging Markets Index are all in overbought territory,
while the Euro Stoxx 600 Index lingers just shy of such a level.
The average reading for this collection of gauges soared to a weekly
record as of Jan. 5, according to data compiled by Bloomberg going back to
1988.
The relative strength index is a technical indicator that tracks the
magnitude and speed of price fluctuations. Typically, a security with an RSI
above 70 is considered to be overbought, while those below 30 are viewed as
oversold.
Trade and Central Banks Will Make Life Painful for Investors
You want to be bullish
when monetary policy is loose and bearish when it's getting less accommodative.
by Jared Dillian
This “economic nationalism” stuff is not just talk. Trump is a true believer in protectionism, and I suspect we will soon see tweets about tariffs.
Let’s assume that most people in finance are in agreement about the benefits of globalization and free trade, which have led to a disinflationary boom and an increase in the standard of living of pretty much everyone, except manufacturing workers in developed countries, who stand out as the biggest losers. In a global market for labor, they were simply uncompetitive. That’s not their fault. But the tragedy here is that some people have begun to oppose free trade under the principle that it is unfair, a view that emerging-market nations surely oppose.
And yet, financial markets have started 2018 the same way they ended 2017, with broad strength across a wide range of asset classes. I can’t be the first to notice that 2018 could be the year that we get an honest-to-goodness trade war and central banks pull back from emergency monetary policy measures. What I mean is that there has been speculation the European Central Bank will start to taper its asset purchases in a meaningful way. There’s little doubt that the ECB’s commitment to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the European Monetary Union has been the single most distortive policy in the modern history of central banks, driving yields on even low-quality junk bonds to negligible levels.
I would characterize an ECB exit from quantitative easing measures as probable, and I would also say people are underestimating the likelihood of monetary tightening in Japan, where there is a high risk of a financial accident. The Bank of Japan owns about 70 percent of the nation’s market for exchange-traded funds, which translates into a big chunk of the stock market. They’ve bought so much sovereign debt that the government bond market has effectively ceased to function. There has even been open discussion among analysts of the BOJ actually cancelling government debt, leading to trillions in printed yen remaining in circulation.
More
“If you
aren't thinking about owning a stock for ten years, don't even think about
owning it for ten minutes.”
Warren Buffett
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, so who’s reading your emails, bank statements, corporate secrets?
The massive security hole sinking Silicon Valley. What did the “Five Eyes” know
and when did they know it? And what did they do with it too? Intel promises to
close the stable door. So much for blockchain security.
"They don't make bugs
like Bunny anymore."
Olav Mjelde.
Triple Meltdown: How So Many Researchers Found a 20-Year-Old Chip Flaw At the Same Time
On cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services, where multiple
virtual machines coexist in the same physical server, one malicious virtual
machine could peer deeply into the secrets of its neighbors. The Graz team's
discovery, an attack that would come to be known as Meltdown, proved a critical
crack in one of computing's most basic safeguards. And perhaps most troubling of
all, the feature they had exploited was introduced into Intel chips in the
mid-1990s. The attack had somehow remained possible, without any apparent
public discovery, for decades.
Yet when Intel responded to the trio's warning—after a long week of
silence—the company gave them a surprising response. Though Intel was indeed
working on a fix, the Graz team wasn't the first to tell the chip giant about
the vulnerability. In fact, two other research teams had beaten them to it.
Counting another, related technique that would come to be known as Spectre,
Intel told the researchers they were actually the fourth to report the
new class of attack, all within a period of just months.
----In fact, the bizarre confluence of so many disparate researchers making the same discovery of two-decade-old vulnerabilities raises the question of who else might have found the attacks before them—and who might have secretly used them for spying, potentially for years, before this week's revelations and the flood of software fixes from practically every major tech firm that have rushed to contain the threat.
The synchronicity of those processor attack findings, argues security
researcher and Harvard Belfer Center fellow Bruce Schneier, represents not just
an isolated mystery but a policy lesson: When intelligence agencies like the
NSA discover hackable vulnerabilities and exploit them in secret, they can't
assume those bugs won't be rediscovered by other hackers in what the security
industry calls a "bug collision."
----So
when the NSA finds a so-called zero-day vulnerability—a previously unknown
hackable flaw in software or hardware—Schneier argues that tendency for
rediscovery needs to factor into whether the agency stealthily exploits the bug
for espionage, or instead reports it to whatever party can fix it. Schneier
argues bug collisions like Spectre and Meltdown mean they should err on the
side of disclosure: According to rough estimates in the
Harvard study he co-authored , as many as one third of all zero-days used
in a given year may have first been discovered by the NSA.
"If
I discover something lying dormant for 10 years, something made me discover it,
and something more than randomly will make someone else discover it too,"
Schneier says. "If the NSA discovered it, it’s likely some other
intelligence agency likely discovered it, too—or at least more likely than
random chance."
More
‘It Can’t Be True.’ Inside the Semiconductor Industry’s Meltdown
By Ian King, Jeremy Kahn, Alex Webb, and Giles Turner
8 January 2018, 11:00 GMT
It was late November and former Intel Corp. engineer Thomas Prescher was
enjoying beers and burgers with friends in Dresden, Germany, when the
conversation turned, ominously, to semiconductors.Months earlier, cybersecurity researcher Anders Fogh had posted a blog suggesting a possible way to hack into chips powering most of the world’s computers, and the friends spent part of the evening trying to make sense of it. The idea nagged at Prescher, so when he got home he fired up his desktop computer and set about putting the theory into practice. At 2 a.m., a breakthrough: he’d strung together code that reinforced Fogh’s idea and suggested there was something seriously wrong.
“My immediate reaction was, ‘It can’t be true, it can’t be true,’” Prescher said.
Last week, his worst fears were proved right when Intel, one of the world’s largest chipmakers, said all modern processors can be attacked by techniques dubbed Meltdown and Spectre, exposing crucial data, such as passwords and encryption keys. The biggest technology companies, including Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc., Google and Amazon.com Inc. are rushing out fixes for PCs, smartphones and the servers that power the internet, and some have warned that their solutions may dent performance in some cases.
Prescher was one of at least 10 researchers and engineers working around the globe -- sometimes independently, sometimes together -- who uncovered Meltdown and Spectre. Interviews with several of these experts reveal a chip industry that, while talking up efforts to secure computers, failed to spot that a common feature of their products had made machines so vulnerable.
"It makes you shudder," said Paul Kocher, who helped find Spectre and started studying trade-offs between security and performance after leaving chip company Rambus Inc. last year. "The processor people were looking at performance and not looking at security."
All processor makers have tried to speed up the way chips crunch data and run programs by making them guess. Using speculative execution, the microprocessor fetches data it predicts it’s going to need next.
Spectre fools the processor into running speculative operations -- ones it wouldn’t normally perform -- and then uses information about how long the hardware takes to retrieve the data to infer the details of that information. Meltdown exposes data directly by undermining the way information in different applications is kept separate by what’s known as a kernel, the key software at the core of every computer.
Researchers began writing about the potential for security weaknesses at the heart of central processing units, or CPUs, at least as early as 2005. Yuval Yarom, at the University of Adelaide in Australia, credited with helping discover Spectre last week, penned some of this early work.
QuickTake Q&A: All About That Big Chip Security Weakness
By 2013, other research papers showed that CPUs let unauthorized users see the layout of the kernel, a set of instructions that guide how computers perform key tasks like managing files and security and allocating resources. This vulnerability became known as a KASLR break and was the foundation for some of last week’s revelations.
More
January 9, 2018 / 2:20 AM
Intel to form new cybersecurity group amid chip flaw - report
(Reuters)
- Intel Corp (INTC.O) will create a new internal
cybersecurity group in the wake of recently disclosed flaws in its microchips,
the Oregonian newspaper reported on Monday, citing a memo sent to company
employees.
The new group would be run by Intel human resources chief Leslie Culberstone
who has worked in the chipmaker since 1979 and would be called, "Intel
Product Assurance and Security," according to the report. ( bit.ly/2qGymPl ) “It is critical that we continue to work with the industry, to excel at customer satisfaction, to act with uncompromising integrity, and to achieve the highest standards of excellences,” the Oregonian quoted Intel Chief Executive Brian Krzanich as saying in the memo.
Intel declined to comment on the report.
The largest chipmaker confirmed earlier this week that the security
issues reported by researchers in the company’s widely used microprocessors
could allow hackers to steal sensitive information from computers, phones and
other devices.
Krzanich also appointed Intel Vice President Steve Smith to the newly
formed group and reassigned several top executives to the new organization, the
newspaper reported. The changes would be immediately effective.
“For a long time it puzzled me
how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it
occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do
incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the
ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.”
Bill Bryson
Technology Update.
With events happening fast in the
development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section. Updates as
they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC energy
mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards?
Alternative to silicon offers cheaper solar power
Scientists believe perovskite cells would get costs down to
pennies per watt
8
January 2018
The ability to transform the energy of the sun into electricity has already changed energy markets around the world. Last year more than 90 gigawatts of solar power were installed globally — equivalent to the energy generating capacity of Turkey. However, researchers believe that in coming years solar power could become even more efficient and cheaper than it is now.
While
most solar cells today are made from silicon, a key area to watch is the
development of new materials for solar cells. One of the most promising of
these is a family of crystals known as perovskites (named after the Russian
geologist Lev Perovski). Certain perovskites are very good at absorbing light,
and have been shown to have a power conversion efficiency of 22 per cent, on
par with traditional silicon cells. Perovskites have so far outperformed other
new solar materials — such as dye-sensitised solar cells or organic
photovoltaics — in their ability to absorb the sun’s power efficiently. The
rapid pace of improvement of perovskite solar cells since they were first
tested less than a decade ago has left many scientists optimistic for their
progress.
There
are still some significant hurdles to overcome before perovskites are suitable
for commercial deployment. Because the crystals dissolve easily, they are
unable to handle humid conditions and must be protected from moisture with
sealed glass plates. Also, while scientists have achieved high efficiency with
very small perovskite cells, they have not been able to replicate the effect
with larger cell areas. “The perovskites are certainly not as stable as
silicon,” says Michael McGehee, professor of materials science at Stanford
University. “So that’s the main challenge. The other is just that it is so new
— it hasn’t been scaled yet, and factories haven’t been built. It will take
some time.”
No
company manufactures commercial perovskite solar cells at large scale yet,
although one, Oxford PV, an offshoot of Oxford university, has a pilot
production facility for perovskite solar cells in Germany.
More
“Speculation
is an effort, probably unsuccessful, to turn a little money into a lot.
Investment is an effort, which should be successful, to prevent a lot of money
from becoming a little.”
Fred Schwed Jr., Where Are the Customers' Yachts?: Or a Good Hard Look at Wall Street
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished December
DJIA: 24,719 +265 Up. NASDAQ: 6,903 +297 Up. SP500: 2,674 +199 Up.
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