Something to read

• The Fuzzy, Insane Math That’s Creating So Many Billion-Dollar Tech Companies (Bloomberg) see also Mind Games That Can Kill Investors (Stock Charts)
• Stock Performance Before, During & After Recessions (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• Commodities two-fer: Gold Futures Fall to Four-Month Low Ahead of FOMC Meeting (WSJ) and U.S. Oil Prices at Six-Year Low on Storage Concerns (WSJ)
• 86% of active managers failed to beat market in 2014 (CNN Money)
• The dollar is rising faster than any time in the last 40 years (Washington Post) see also Rising Dollar Is Creating Trouble for Emerging Economies (Upshot)
• Cheap or expensive? The one thing about equity valuation that few talk about (Humble Student of the Markets)
• For Sale: Chinese Investment Properties (The Financialist)
• Across the Globe, Big Economies Are Falling Out of Love With Coal (Slate)
• The Steve Jobs You Didn’t Know: Kind, Patient, and Human (Fast Company)
• What Cockroaches With Backpacks Can Do. Ah-mazing (NPR)

What are you reading?

This week opens quietly, with most of Europe and the Western world on holiday, with the exception of the U.S.A. and Canada. Following the holiday, it should be a fairly significant week as it opens the month, as usual, with central bank statements and actions for the USD, JPY, GBP and AUD. The major political area of interest that is likely to result in unscheduled, market-moving breaking news remains the European Greek crisis. Additional political focus is beginning to fall on the U.K. as next month’s election approaches and opinion polls continue to forecast a parliamentary balance that would make it almost impossible for any plausible government to be formed.

U.S. Dollar
This will be a big week for the U.S. Dollar as following last week’s disappointing Non-Farm Payroll numbers, all eyes will be on the FOMC Minutes that will be released on Wednesday. There will actually be a data release earlier on Monday with the ISM Non-Manufacturing PMI numbers. On Thursday, the day following the FOMC release, there will be additional economic data given with the Unemployment Claims numbers.

Japanese Yen
This will be a significant week for the Japanese Yen with the Bank of Japan’s Monetary Policy Statement being given plus a press conference on Wednesday.

British Pound
On Tuesday there will be a release of Services PMI data. Thursday will see the release of the Bank of England’s MPC Rate Statement and Official Bank Rate, followed on Friday by Manufacturing Production data.

Australian Dollar
Tuesday is going to be a big day for the Australian Dollar, with the RBA Rate Statement, Cash Rate, and Retail Sales data all due for release within a three-hour window before the London open.

Euro
Although most countries in Europe will be enjoying public holidays this Monday, Spain will be at work as usual, and will be releasing Spanish Unemployment Change data this day. This is the only high-impact news scheduled for the Euro this week.

Canadian Dollar
There will be a release of Ivey PMI data on Monday followed by further releases at the end of the week. On Thursday there will be Building Permits data followed on Friday by Unemployment Change and Unemployment Rate data.


the source

• Fed’s John Williams: Timing of Rate Rise Is Overrated (Upshot)
• Big Oil Is About to Lose Control of the Auto Industry (Bloomberg) see also Low Prices Cool Boom in U.S. Oil Production (WSJ)
• Shilling: Where Have All the Consumers Gone? (BV)
• Did macro theory fail us in the crisis? (Noahpinion) see also Forecasting vs. Explaining (Stumbling and Mumbling)
• Actual words my coworkers have said to me, a woman in tech (Quartz)
• Volcker: Meaningful financial reform (Washington Post)
• Binge Reading Disorder: When everybody’s reading, but nobody’s smarter, what value has the written word? (The Morning News)
• Buyer Still Beware: Libertarians Think Amazon Reviews and Uber Ratings Will Make Regulation Obsolete. They Are So, So Wrong. (Slate)
• Mansions Owned by White-Collar Criminals: Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, and other mansions built or bought with corporate fraud (WSJ)
• This Magic Moment: Eight years after it aired, the finale of The Sopranos continues to be hotly debated. David Chase explains how he created the excruciating tension of the last scene. (Directors Guild of America)

the source

The Australian financial regulator ASIC launched an investigation into the 'suspicious trading" responsible for the jump in the AUDUSD just prior to the release of the Reserve bank of Australia surprise decision to hold interest rates in March 3. On April 7 the Reserve Bank of Australia again surprised the market by holding rates. In the minute prior to the report release the market also reacted strongly. The financial regulator ASIC suggested this was evidence of inside trading. But is it really?

Closer examination of the charts casts a better light on this so-called inside trading activity.

The pair in focus is the AUDUSD. Here's the chart for March 3. Quite clearly there is a sharp move before the release of the report. The release time is shown as 13.00 on the 2 minute chart because we use local time on our computer system.





Ok, the major pairs often move together but note the move is not exactly the same as the AUDUSD pair. What happens with the smaller crosses? These CAD and HKD pairs show similar reactions, although the correction following the release is much greater than in the previous charts. Also there is more volume increase in the AUDCAD pair than the AUDHKD pair in the lead-up to the report release.



By now it's going to come as no surprise when the minor currencies like the AUDSGD cross behave in much the same way. However the doji candle pattern with AUDNZD is quite different from the AUDUSD pair and this shows the charts are created in response to completed trades.

Compare the March 3 charts to the release of Australian Reserve bank reports on April 7. The one minute charts from Oanda use our local time, so the official release of the Reserve bank decision is at 14:00. On every one minute chart the market moves dramatically at 13.59 in the minute before the official release of the decision.



AUDUSD

The Oanda 5 second chart for AUDUSD shows the move started at 13:59:50. The move is duplicated on all AUD pairs. By 14:00 all that was left was for the market to digest what had already happened and price activity moved sideways.

The same pattern is repeated on the 5 second chart for the AUDJPY, AUDCAD and AUDSGD pairs.



EUR/AUD

The EURAUD 5 second chart shows exactly the same pattern. The pattern is repeated on the GBPAUD chart

For inside trading to be present we would have to see a significant move in one or two crosses prior to 14:00 AND prior to the broad market move at 13:59. This does not happen.

Australia must have the world's best FX inside traders to be able to take such large positions in every AUD pair at exactly the same time! We take our hats are off to these traders because they have achieved the impossible.

Of course that explanation is plain garbage. A single inside trader might trade one pair, but it is highly unlikely they would have the inclination or the resources to trade EVERY AUD pair.

The exact replication of the fast up move in all AUD pairs in the 2 minutes or 10 seconds prior to the official release of the information is not best explained by inside trading. It is more reasonably explained by the early loading of Reserve Bank information to servers prior to the official release of the data. This is a global market reacting instantly to information as it becomes available to ALL PARTICIPANTS.

The charts clearly show that the Reserve bank information became available to many participants in the minute prior to the official release time. These moves are captured across all pairs by High Frequency Quantitative Trading Algorithms. They have algorithms running in the Dark Pools. These are on the institutional side, not the mums and dads.

The charts clearly suggest that the problem is in the way the Reserve bank loads this data to the web in preparation for its official release. The duplication of behaviour across all AUD pairs shows this information is available to many, if not all, participants at the same time. It's time to call of the FX witch hunt.

The FX market is the deepest and most liquid market in the world. It is arguably the most closely watched and monitored. This intense scrutiny makes it difficult to conduct inside trading. The real concern in the markets associated with the FX market is the manipulation of benchmark interest rates. That task is best left to the banks and other institutions who manipulated LIBOR interest rates and other benchmarks in 2008 and onwards.

Dary Guppy
Founder and Director
guppytraders.com

Source

1. How Wall Street captured Washington’s effort to rein in banks (Reuters) see also Can Bankers Behave?Government regulators begin to question whether financial institutions can be reformed at all. (The Atlantic)
2. Apple Watch: An Overnight Multi-Billion Dollar Business (Carl Howe)
3. Payday at the mill: How sophisticated financiers used a Maine investment program they devised to wring millions of dollars in risk-free returns at taxpayer expense (Portland Press Herald)
4. Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith and Jonah Peretti: The Gawker Interview (Gawker)
5. FBI admits flaws in hair analysis over decades (Washington Post)
6. The United States of Legal Weed Here’s where pot is legal and semi-legal—and the next places it could go legit. (MoJo)
7. Why the FDA doesn’t really know what’s in your food (Public Integrity)
8. It’s Time for a Conversation: Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans (National Geographic)
9. Bill Withers: The Soul Man Who Walked Away (Rolling Stone)
10. The Alphabet of Satire: Rube Goldberg was a laugh machine for seven decades. (City Journal)

the source

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader
by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli and George Newbern

There have been many books - on a large and small scale - about Steve Jobs, one of the most famous CEOs in history. But this book is different from all the others.

Becoming Steve Jobs takes on and breaks down the existing myth and stereotypes about Steve Jobs. The conventional, one-dimensional view of Jobs is that he was half genius, half jerk from youth, an irascible and selfish leader who slighted friends and family alike. Becoming Steve Jobs answers the central question about the life and career of the Apple cofounder and CEO: How did a young man so reckless and arrogant that he was exiled from the company he founded become the most effective visionary business leader of our time, ultimately transforming the daily lives of billions of people?

Drawing on incredible and sometimes exclusive access, Schlender and Tetzeli tell a different story of a real human being who wrestled with his failings and learned to maximize his strengths over time. Their rich, compelling narrative is filled with stories never told before from the people who knew Jobs best and who decided to open up to the authors, including his family, former inner circle executives, and top people at Apple, Pixar, and Disney. In addition Brent knew Jobs personally for 25 years and drew upon his many interviews with him, on and off the record, in writing the book. He and Rick humanize the man and explain, rather than simply describe, his behavior. Along the way the book provides rich context about the technology revolution we all have lived through and the ways in which Jobs changed our world.

Schlender and Tetzeli make clear that Jobs' astounding success at Apple was far more complicated than simply picking the right products: he became more patient, he learned to trust his inner circle, and he discovered the importance of growing the company incrementally rather than only shooting for dazzling, game-changing products.

Recently I found out quite an interesting thing about CAD. It started from the story when I failed to make right decisions about trading with the USD/CAD pair and lost about $1000, trying to find some patterns, which would help me to trade succesfully. I did’n catch why the supportive and resistant levels didn’t help…. I thought there had to be something else to mark, so I started to search this topic and found a pretty easy answer in this article.

To sum all the things of the article up, I should say that CAD is a resource-based currency and successful trading with this currency depends not on the chart's behaviour but on the oil prices. So if we want to trade with a pair that includes CAD, we'd better follow the news everyday, not the basic chart analyses rules.

That was quite an interesting fact for me!

How does the Zurich-based multi-million-pound organisation make its money and what does it spend it on?

the source

• PepsiCo’s CEO Indra Nooyi was right. Now what? An audacious strategy shift beyond unhealthy snacks and drinks was prescient, but the challenges are still daunting. (Fortune)
• The Science of Scarcity: A behavioral economist’s fresh perspectives on poverty (Harvard Magazine)
• Pharma Execs Don’t Know Why Anyone Is Upset by a $94,500 Miracle Cure (Bloomberg)
• After Water (Longreads) see also California Has No Idea How Much Water It Has Left. NASA Can Help. (New Republic)
• Iran’s ‘Generation Normal’: Iranian youth — curious, wired and desperate for normality — are forcing change that horrifies their rulers (FT)
• Cheap Wine Sucks: A Manifesto (Jezebel)
• Reining in the NSA (New York Review of Books)
• The Rise of Partisanship and Super-Cooperators in the U.S. House of Representatives (PLOS One)
• This Is the Story of the Hamburger: Its rise from a lowly patty of chopped meat to the aristocracy of foods and Silicon Valley’s attempt to replace it with a meat that is not meat at all. (Grub Street)
• Big League Chew: An Oral History (Fox Sports)

What are you reading?

the source

The Fundamental Rules of Risk Management, Nigel Da Costa Lewis



The consequences of taking on risk can be ruinous to personal finances, professional careers, corporate survivability, and even nation states. Yet many risk managers do not have a clear understanding of the basics. Requiring no statistical or mathematical background, The Fundamental Rules of Risk Management gives you the knowledge to successfully handle risk in your organization.

The book begins with a deep investigation into the behavioral roots of risk. Using both historical and contemporary contexts, author Nigel Da Costa Lewis carefully details the indisputable truths surrounding many of the behavioral biases that induce risk. He exposes the fallacy of the wisdom of experts, explains why you cannot rely on regulators, outlines the characteristics of the "glad game," and demonstrates how high intelligence or lack thereof can lead to loss of hard-earned wealth. He also discusses the weaknesses and failures of modern risk management.


Moving on to elements often overlooked by risk managers, Dr. Lewis traces the link between corporate governance and risk management. He then covers core lessons surrounding the role of risk managers as well as the difficult subject of integrated, single lens analysis of risk. The book also explores aspects of spreadsheet risk and draws on lessons learned in the information systems and software engineering communities to provide guidance on selecting the right risk management system. It concludes with a discussion on the most dominant of risk measures—value at risk.


Having a clear understanding about risk separates successful professionals, companies, and economies from history’s forgotten failures. Through examples and case studies, this thought-provoking book shows how the rules of risk can work to protect and enhance investor value.