Barron's Cover: "Beware 3-D Printing!" (DDD; VJET; XONE; SSYS; AMAVF:

Regardless of the insight of the analysis you can count on a "Barron's effect" on Monday.
For the record we are not fans of DDD, VJET or XONE. Arcam and Stratasys have better technology.
If you want to remain exposed to the group short DDD/long SSYS may be an acceptable dirty hedged pair trade.
From Barron's:

The new technology may hold great promise, but the stocks do not. Why the industry darling could tumble 80%.

It was meant to be the moment science fiction finally met reality. This past January, makers of 3-D printers reserved 7,000 square feet worth of space at the Consumer Electronics Show. At their introductory press briefing, CES organizers described how 3-D printing was driving a new industrial revolution. The Las Vegas show floor was littered with small boxes spitting out plastic figurines and minimalist jewelry. Not exactly the stuff of a new world order in manufacturing, perhaps, but the tech world nevertheless declared 2014 the year of the 3-D printer.

Wall Street has been well ahead of the hype. Shares of 3D Systems (ticker: DDD), the industry's largest pure-play stock, are up 370% over the past two years. Stratasys (SSYS) is up 231%. And since their 2013 initial public offerings, ExOne (XONE) and Voxeljet (VJET), are up 140% and 166%, respectively. Each of the companies has a slightly different focus, with 3D Systems increasingly tied to consumers and Voxeljet strictly focused on large-scale industrial machines.

In each case, though, investors are missing the point -- and overpaying in the process. Yes, 3-D printing holds vast potential; it could eventually reshape U.S. industry. But that's because of its applications in industrial manufacturing, which the publicly traded 3-D outfits don't address as effectively as some private companies. The systems of those private firms have been embraced by the likes of General Electric (GE). The industrial conglomerate is currently using 3-D printers to manufacture key parts for its next-generation jet engines.

Pure plays in 3-D printing, meanwhile, seem more interested in consumer novelties and the hobbyist market. Consider Rock Hill, S.C.–based 3D Systems, with a market value of $7 billion. At CES, the company unveiled a dozen new printers, including a sub-$1,000 version of its entry level Cube printer. A few days after the show, 3D issued a press release touting a partnership with Hershey (HSY) to create an in-home chocolate factory. The plan, 3D said, is "to explore and develop innovative opportunities for using 3-D printing technology in creating edible foods, including confectionery treats."

The day of the announcement, 3D Systems shares closed up 3%. The company has a ChefJet sugar and chocolate printer slated for delivery in the second half of the year.

But lately, 3D Systems has grown better at printing press releases than profits. The company has repeatedly missed its own earnings forecasts, while lowering the bar for the future. Early last month, shares fell 20% after management warned about fourth-quarter earnings, blaming higher spending on research and development.

The stock recovered, before falling to a recent $69. Investors have made a habit of overlooking bad news from 3D Systems. A year ago, analysts thought the company would generate $1.31 a share in earnings for 2014. Today, the forecast stands at 82 cents per share. The 37% haircut has been accompanied by a 110% gain in the stock, and Wall Street remains as bullish as ever. Fourteen analysts rate 3D Systems a Buy and four a Neutral. Just three rate the stock as Sell or Underperform.

3D Systems is expected to earn $85 million on revenue of $702 million this year. It currently trades at 84 times earnings, a wild multiple for a company likely to see per-share profit decline by three cents this year.
The hot story for investors is 3D Systems' 37% sales growth. But even on that basis, the valuation looks stretched. At 13 times last year's revenue, 3D Systems is the third most expensive technology stock in the Standard & Poor's 1500, behind only Facebook, at 23 times, and Visa, at 15. Investors are pricing all of the 3-D pure plays at premium valuations; Stratasys, ExOne, and Voxeljet all carry double-digit sales multiples.
Facebook and Visa have unique networks and some power to dictate pricing on its products. 3D Systems is driving down the price of its printers, trying to compete with a wave of upstarts.

FOR ALL THE ATTENTION ON 3D Systems, Stratasys boasts the world's largest installed base of 3-D printers, with roughly 65,000 systems. In 2010, Stratasys partnered with Hewlett-Packard to manufacture 3-D printers under the HP brand. By mid-2012, the companies had canceled the deal, offering little explanation. HP recently said it plans to enter the market, though details are scant.

In 2014, Wall Street sees Stratasys revenue growing 39%, to $674 million, with profit of $117 million, or $2.21 a share, a 20% gain.

As for Germany-based Voxeljet, which has a market value of $540 million, it sold a total of three printers in its most recent quarter, for $2.5 million. This was actually better than a year earlier, when the company sold two used printers. For 2014, analysts expect Voxeljet to earn $1.1 million, or seven cents a share, on revenue of $18 million. The stock recently traded at $35.

"Investors love organic revenue growth," says Whitney Tilson, manager of hedge fund Kase Capital and co-founder of the Value Investing Congress. "The problem is that you really have to differentiate between organic revenue growth and profitability."

Tilson calls 3D Systems a "dream short," and he has been adding to his own short position of late. He's betting against four other 3-D printing names, as well, which he declined to name. "These stocks are being valued as if this is the next coming of the iPhone and iPad combined," he says. He describes walking around CES seeing dozens of companies hawking essentially the same thing. "There was booth after booth of companies with very similar products to 3D Systems. And at lower prices."

He thinks 3D Systems would be generously valued at three times revenue, which would put the stock at $15, 80% below its recent close.

WHILE CES ATTENDEES were gawking at the 3-D showcase in Las Vegas, game-changing developments were taking place 2,000 miles away in Cincinnati, the home of GE's aerospace unit....MORE

Here's the 1-year spaghetti chart of the five stocks, note VJET did not come public until October, 2013.
From Yahoo Finance:

How a Chicago Heiress Trained Homicide Detectives With an Unusual Tool: Dollhouses

From Smithsonian Magazine:

Frances Glessner Lee's miniature murder scenes are dioramas to die for

Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962) was a millionaire heiress and Chicago society dame with a very unusual hobby for a woman raised according to the strictest standards of nineteenth century domestic life: investigating murder. And she did this through a most unexpected medium: dollhouse-like dioramas. Glessner Lee grew up home-schooled and well-protected in the fortress-like Glessner House, designed by renown American architect H.H. Richardson, but she was introduced to the fields of homicide investigation and forensic science by her brother's friend, George Magrath, who later became a medical examiner and professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School. Instantly captivated by the nascent pursuit, she became one of its most influential advocates. In 1936, she endowed the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard and made subsequent gifts to establish chaired professorships and seminars in homicide investigation. But that’s not all.

As architect and educator Laura J. Miller notes in the excellent essay “Denatured Domesticity: An account of femininity and physiognomy in the interiors of Frances Glessner Lee,” Glessner Lee, rather than using her well cultivated domestic skills to throw lavish parties for debutantes, tycoons, and other society types, subverted the notions typically enforced upon a woman of her standing by hosting elaborate dinners for investigators who would share with her, in sometimes gory detail, the intricacies of their profession. Glessner Lee oversaw every detail of these dinners herself, down to the menu and floral arrangements. She could probably tell you which wine goes best with discussion about a strangled corpse found in a bathroom. But the matronly Glessner Lee -- who may have been the inspiration for Angela Lansbury’s character in "Murder She Wrote"– wanted to do more to help train investigators. She wanted to create a new tool for them....MORE

Now the NSA Infiltrates the Internet To 'Manipulate, Deceive And Destroy Reputations'

Imagine having to sit through these PowerPoint presentations:

"...Do I press this button here? Function-F7? No, that's not right. Hmmm. Maybe I'll have to reboot...." 
"Where'd you do your graduate work?"

I'll take waterboarding thank you.

From Techdirt:

A few weeks ago, Glenn Greenwald, while working with NBC News, revealed some details of a GCHQ presentation concerning how the surveillance organization had a "dirty tricks" group known as JTRIG -- the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group. Now, over at The Intercept, he's revealed the entire presentation and highlighted more details about how JTRIG would seek to infiltrate different groups online and destroy people's reputations -- going way, way, way beyond just targeting terrorist groups and threats to national security.

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.

For years, people have said that the purpose of groups like the NSA and GCHQ were merely "signals intelligence," which were about understanding and decoding signals, not about taking any sort of offensive standpoint. However, as the Snowden docs have repeatedly revealed, the mandate of these organizations has long been much more offensively based, and they seem to have little problem with using questionable tactics to destroy people's lives. As Greenwald notes, is this really a power you trust a totally secretive government agency with almost no real oversight to use without it being abused?

There's a lot more in Greenwald's writeup, which you should read, but just a few of the key slides are worth reading to get a sense of what's going on here. This isn't just about infiltrating terrorist organizations. They seem to be using these kinds of techniques on just about anyone they dislike, which harkens back to the Hoover-era FBI infiltrating and seeking to discredit anti-war groups. It also raises very serious questions about whether these efforts are being used to stifle political expression.

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The full presentation is embedded below. The cover slide is really something....MORE

Fibonacci Flim Flam

This is a repost from a couple years ago.
You have to be careful with this stuff. If someone presents a complicated explanation for their technical analysis my B.S. detectors start flashing, it doesn't mater it it's Elliot Wave alternate wave counts or flipping between point-and-figure and candlestick charts to show the chart "predicted" a move. There is a fine line between genius and madness.
[don't I know it. -ed]
From Lock Haven University:

...Footnote on dubious investment schemes.

I remarked that stock traders and investment counsellors these days often use Fibonacci ratios as a guide to guessing their predictions. There is even computer software for making market predictions that claims to use "Fibonacci methods". This is one of the methods used in "technical trading". Using numbers and charts to make predictions justifies the label "technical", though the results would be just as good had the patterns of tea-leaves been used. One only has to eavesdrop on the websites and forums these people frequent to discover that many of them still believe in the "magic of numbers". Whole books tout these methods, with testimonials to their success, and these do make money, for those who write the books. One fellow who uses Fibonacci ratios frankly admits that they may not be "magic" but they do make his presentation charts look more impressive to clients. Of course the efficacy of such methods has never been scientifically tested. And why should anyone waste the effort? 

 
One such fellow emailed me, complaining about my negative comments. I soon discovered that this fellow was a sucker for all sorts of pseudoscientic numerology. He even tried to tell me how valuable was the Martingale system, popular in 18th century France and still used by some gamblers. It's simple. Each time you win you make the same size bet the next time. When you lose, you double the size of your bet the next time. Of course, any "system" can seem to work in the short run, once in a while. But in the long run (when played for a long time, or many times) it has no advantage, and while your chance of winning in the short run may seem to be improved, your chance of losing big increases the longer you play. Statisticians have analyzed such systems and concluded they are deceptions, but gamblers are often susceptible to such deceptions. And what is the stock market, but a gambling game with confounding variables, and with the players themselves affecting the odds?

Then this guy tried to tell me that Fibonacci numbers show up more often in winning lottery numbers. He could provide no data supporting that. Then he claimed Fibonacci numbers show up more often in the digits of phone numbers in the phone book. Well, duh? Of the digits 0 through 9, six are Fibonacci digits (0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8) and four are not (4, 6, 7, 9), so Fibonacci digits should show up about 60% of the time. No great mystery there. The only example he could produce, from his own "extensive research", was a set of 200 phone numbers, 65% of the digits being Fibonacci digits. That's well within the limits of error for that small size sample. [3]

Some say that you can increase your success in the stock market by rolling dice or throwing darts to make your choices. Such investments will, in the very long run, averaged over many investors, do as well as if you used a broker, and you won't have to pay the broker's fee. I am sure there are brokers who shun mystical and magical formulas, but I remain unconvinced that even they earn their large fees.

More Fibonacci Fakery.

This picture was emailed to me by someone who could not remember the source. It is a clever piece of deception. I suspect the picture was delibrately embellished to make fun of Fibonacci foolishness. If the person who created this would like credit, please get in touch. 

The water path isn't a Fibonacci spiral, but someone has cleverly superimposed the golden rectangle on part of it that at first glance looks like it is. Look carefully. That large inner rectangle should be a square, but it is in fact wider than high. The rectangle in the upper right corner is almost a square. If you tried to cheat by reducing the horizontal magnification, you could make the large one square, but the smaller one would no longer be nearly square. I think that's clear forensic evidence that someone was deliberately cheating, probably to make fun of what I call "Fibonacci Foolishness". The "hand-drawn" appearance of the rectangles seems contrived to disguise the cheating. (They should have used computer drawn clean straight lines and perfect geometry.) Such cheating is often done with the pictures of Nautilus shells seen in books (see above). A physicist would conclude immediately that this can't be a golden spiral, nor any of the textbook spirals common in physics. Textbooks of important mathematical spirals show pictures and equations for the Spiral of Archimedes, the logarithmic or equiangular spiral, the hyperbolic or reciprocal spiral, the parabolic spiral, and my favorite, the involute of a circle. The reason is simple. Such spirals are radially unbiased. In this picture gravity provides a bias (and distortion) compared to a similar process happening in a horizontal plane. Also, the source of the water, her wet hair, isn't stationary. She produces this dramatic picture by flinging her head and body rapidly upward and backward. 

This sort of cheating is what I object to. If one wants to be honest one might say this picture "suggests" a golden spiral. The "fact" of it being "something like" a golden spiral tells us nothing useful about it. Deeper inquiry might lead to design of a water hose rotating about a fixed vertical axis to experimentally investigate whether this process could produce something closer to the Fibonacci spiral. I have no reason to predict that outcome with certainty. It might just be an involute of a circle. I've challenged some mathematicians with this problem, but they don't take the bait. 

HT: Maoxian

Also at Mr. Simanek's LHUP webpage:

The Museum of Unworkable Devices. Perpetual motion machines
as physics puzzles.
Intelligent Design Creationism: Fraudulent Science, Bad Philosophy.
Myths and Mysteries of Science. Removing the mystery.
Cutting Edge Science. Profundity or parody?
Illustrated Lectures on these subjects.
Uncle Don's Notebook. | Bob Schadewald's Corner.
Physics and Astronomy. | Physics Abused.
History and Philosophy of Science.
Skepticism, pseudoscience, urban Legends.
Humor, satire, parody, mostly about science.
Hoaxes. | The Ed-Biz. | Quotes. | Illusions and 3-D photography.
Articles written for print publication.

"Former NASA Engineer Makes Mind-Boggling Cake Creations"

File under: Things I can't do.
From My Modern Metropolis:

...If you're a Food Network fan, you may already know the name BethAnn Goldberg. She's the two time gold medal champion on the show "Challenge" and the owner of Studio Cake, a custom-order bakery in Menlo Park, California. The Stanford alum and former NASA engineer uses her masters in engineering and work experience from NASA to construct incredible works of edible art. As she tells us, "Engineering school set me up for being an amazing problem solver. Whether it is the challenge of owning a small business and weathering an economic downturn or making supports for a 3-foot tall cake, it all comes down to problem solving and planning to make the best outcome possible."

Though she spends a majority of her time making beautiful wedding cakes (they regularly appear on the popular wedding blog Style Me Pretty), it's her special, sculpted cakes that will have you talking. As she states about them, they're "cakes that look like anything but! If you can dream it, we can create it in cake!" Who wouldn't be fooled into thinking they're looking at a humongous sandwich? "The stacked sandwich cake is actually a four tiered cake in disguise," Goldberg says. "It is a large column of cake with sandwich fixings on the perimeter. It took the better part of a work week to create, but who's counting?"...MORE

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"As Tesla Cools, A Few Brave Shorts Creep Back In" (TSLA)

The stock closed at $246.21, down $6.73. Here's the last month's action via Yahoo Finance:

From MoneyBeat:

After a 32% rally in the past month, Tesla Motors Inc.TSLA -2.66% shares finally seem to have found their plateau, at least for the moment. The stock is little changed in the past five sessions, up just 1%, at around $247.

Also finding their level: Traders betting against Tesla. Short-selling of the stock plunged over the course of the past year, as Tesla’s persistent rally has made it harder to justify betting against it. Now, it is beginning to tick up again, though just a smidge.

Last March, nearly 25% of Tesla shares available to be borrowed by shorts were loaned out, according to Markit. (Short sellers borrow stock to sell it, hoping to buy it back later at a lower price.) The measure fell through 2013, and went from 17% at the beginning of 2014 to just 11% in February. Now, in the past week, it has edged back up to just under 13%, Markit data showed.

That drop in short-selling was critical, because it played a part in enabling Tesla to complete a giant convertible bond offering last week, according to traders and people familiar with the company’s thinking.

The link between the two lies in how some traders play the convert market. These traders, often hedge funds, want to get a pure-play exposure to Tesla’s credit, which is the interest-paying component of the convertible. What they don’t want is exposure to the stock price, which is the part of the convertible that can be exchanged for shares....MORE

There's one more wrinkle in the convertible story we'll get to next week.

London Listed Miners Also Whupped (GLEN; RIO)

Following up on the hits to U.S. miners in "It Doesn't Matter What They Mine: "The Miner Massacre...."".
From the Financial Times:

China’s first onshore default sent London-listed miners plunging on Friday, with Anglo American leading the fallers.

Miners dropped in tandem with metals prices on rumours that the default of Shanghai Chaori, a small solar power company, was prompting banks to call in loans to the private steel industry. Iron ore producers were weakest, with Glencore down 4.4 per cent to 324.9p, Rio Tinto off 3.3 per cent to £32 and Anglo losing 6.6 per cent to £14.63.

Analysts also highlighted risks around South Africa’s approval of amendments to its mineral development act. The act gives South Africa’s mines minister the power to restrict exports of minerals by classifying them as “strategic”.

Anglo currently sells thermal coal for just $17 a tonne in South Africa, against $74 to export markets, and iron ore for $62 a tonne against $115 internationally, according to Liberum....MUCH MORE

Like Intel, Tesla Has No Plans To Build Manufacturing Facilities in California, Ever Again (TSLA)

As we've pointed out over the years, Intel has publicly stated they will never again build a manufacturing plant in California (Arizona says thanks for the new $5Billon plant), Google and Microsoft will not pay California utility rates when they build server farms, the entire aerospace industry has adiosed, and on and on and on.
From the Los Angeles Times:

California positively gets a negative from Tesla on battery factory
Tesla has already ruled out California for the plant costing as much as $5 billion and employing 6,500 workers. Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas are in the running. 

California loves Tesla Motors.

The Palo Alto electric car maker's Model S sedan is the state's new eco-luxury status symbol. Californians bought more than a third of Teslas sold globally last year. Residents of the state pack the order list for Tesla's next offering, a sport utility vehicle.

California pollution-control policies enable Tesla to rake in tens of millions of dollars each year from selling environmental credits to other automakers — a key source of Tesla's revenue.
But is this a case of unrequited love? When it comes to building a $4-billion to $5-billion battery factory that will employ 6,500 workers, Tesla is shunning the Golden State.

The automaker is looking at 500- to 1,000-acre sites in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas. Although the location hasn't been determined, Tesla has crossed California off the list. The company declined to comment on the reasons.

State officials aren't saying much either. A spokesman in Gov. Jerry Brown's administration said the state presented a proposal to the automaker with several possible sites, but that the automaker didn't bite.
Brown's office provided no other details.

"The Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development maintains a strong partnership with Tesla and continues to work with them on future opportunities in California," the office said in a statement....MORE

Of course they'll tell you the lack of plans may change but just you watch.

"OPEC oil output: a big jump, lifted by Iraq"

From Platts:

Platts Survey: OPEC Pumps 30.11 Million Barrels of Crude Oil Per Day in February
Up 240,000 b/d from January, Driven by Surge in Iraqi Oil Exports

London - March 7, 2014

Crude oil production from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) climbed by 240,000 barrels per day (b/d) to 30.11 million b/d in February from 29.87 million b/d in January following a surge in Iraqi exports and despite new setbacks in Libya, a just-released Platts survey of OPEC and oil industry officials and analysts showed.

“These are the sorts of output numbers that not long okago, when combined with the rising production from North America, looked like they might weigh on the market and cause a fall in prices,” said John Kingston, Platts global director of news. “In particular, the Iraq numbers are surprising, given that output there has been troubled in recent months. And yet, West Texas Intermediate crude is solidly above $100, Brent prices are up near $110, and world inventories have been drawing sharply. With all of this supply at the ready and prices greater than $100 per barrel, it might be time to review some of that conventional wisdom.”

The February total is the highest since August 2013, when the Platts survey estimated output at 30.28 million b/d.

With the Basrah terminal in full operation and weather conditions good throughout the month, Iraq's southern export average of 2.5 million b/d was the highest rate since 1979....MORE

It Doesn't Matter What They Mine: "The Miner Massacre...."

From Barron's Stocks to Watch Today:

The market is playing whack-a-mole with miners of all stripes today. There are the coal miners, with Alpha Natural Resources (ANR) and Peabody Energy (BTU) getting smacked. There are the base-metal miners like Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold (FCX), which have been hammered. And even gold miners like Newmont Mining (NEM) and Agnico-Eagle Mines (AEM) are down hard.

Sterne Agee’s Michael Dudas and Satyadeep Jain explain why:

Broadly, metals and mining shares down 3%-4% while met focused names pressured 7-9%. While this morning’s release of the February employment report has generated possible marginal confidence in a more hawkish Fed, and a dollar bounce, recent Chinese credit market concerns caused industrial commodity spot prices in copper, met coal and iron ore to retreat around 5%....MORE

Yikes! "Hedge Fund Short Interest In Europe Surges; Lansdowne Shorts Near $5B"

Any "not-as-bad" news, say Germany getting their energy act together, or France not being so French and the short covering would blow the lid offf the bourses.
From ValueWalk:

12% rise in new shorts is "significant," leading to $31 billion total short position across EU, most held by prominent hedge funds located in the UK.

Short interest in European shares has surged to nearly $31 billion, up $3 billion from last month, according to new research from Novus Partners, a research and analytics provider to institutional investors.
February was the most “significant” jump in short EU stock interest since Novus has been tracking European short interest, according to Stanley Altshuller, Co-Founder and Chief Research Officer at Novus.  He attributed the rise partially to those complying with regulations put in place in 2012 but more significantly increased short positions across Europe.

Tiger Cubs and Chanos short Gemalto

Among the more interesting positions was a short in Gemalto, a European digital security.  The stock garnered shorts from known Tiger Cub disciples at Blue Ridge Capital, Lone Pine Capital and Maverick Capital, which all share a similar investment style, as well as garnering a short from Kynikos Associates.  Maverick Capital, run by Tiger Cub Lee Ainslie, had the largest short at $173 million, followed by Blue Ridge Capital’s John Griffin at $163 million and Lone Pine Capital Management’s Steve Mandel....MORE

Mercuria: "Behind the $100 Billion Commodity Empire That Few Know"

From Bloomberg:

In less than a decade, Marco Dunand and Daniel Jaeggi have turned a 10-person company supplying oil to a pair of Polish refineries into the world’s fourth-largest commodity trader with revenue topping $100 billion last year.

Now Dunand, 52, and Jaeggi, 53, are executing a plan to propel Geneva-based Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. nearer to the top independent traders, Glencore Xstrata Plc (GLEN), Trafigura Beheer BV and Vitol Group. After entering exclusive talks last month to buy JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s $3.3 billion commodities unit, Dunand and Jaeggi will probably announce a deal within the next week, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

“This gives them a strong opportunity for growth and puts them close to the top players in the league,” said Roland Rechtsteiner, a partner at management consultant Oliver Wyman, who’s published a series of reports on the industry written with Trafigura co-founder Graham Sharp. “Scale is going to be more important than ever.”

Mercuria, named for the Roman god of trade, is targeting a JPMorgan business that includes energy trading and storage assets in North America, where a boom in shale oil and natural gas has transformed the flow of commodities worldwide. The unit has generated $750 million in annual operating profit before compensation costs, according to people who have seen documents circulated in relation to the sale.

Asset Shift
Banks including JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley (MS) are exiting or reducing their commodities businesses as regulators crack down on risk. Revenues for the 10 largest investment-bank commodity businesses fell to $4.5 billion in 2013 from $14 billion in 2008, according to London-based analytics company Coalition.
Independent traders including Mercuria are filling the void. Owning businesses that produce, store, transport or process raw materials can provide an advantage in trading at a time when expanding populations have pushed global commodity demand to a record.

A deal with JPMorgan would further challenge Dunand and Jaeggi, who each own 15 percent of Mercuria’s equity, to integrate the operations into a company that is already growing rapidly. Benoit Lioud, a Mercuria spokesman, declined to comment on talks with JPMorgan.

From 2011 to 2013, Mercuria hired 570 people, including key executives from investment banks as it expanded beyond energy. That took the headcount to 1,200 from about 10 in 2004.

Goldman Vets
The hires include Houston-based Shameek Konar, a former managing director with Goldman Sachs (GS) Group Inc. who is chief investment officer overseeing Mercuria’s corporate development, including the JPMorgan negotiations. Victoria Attwood Scott, Mercuria’s head of compliance, also joined from Goldman Sachs.

Roger Jones, the former head of commodities at Barclays Plc (BARC) who has spent more than a quarter-century trading, was hired in 2012 to head its non-oil business and join the board.

Commodities other than oil now represent more than 50 percent of revenue, which totaled $98 billion in 2012 and generated $343 million in profit, according to financial statements seen by Bloomberg.
“What really makes them different is their growth,” said Olivier Jakob, managing director of Petromatrix GmbH in Zug, Switzerland. “They have grown at a very fast pace in the oil markets, and now they are expanding into other commodities.”

Oil Trading
Mercuria traded 182 million metric tons of oil or oil equivalent in 2012, according to its website. Vitol, the largest independent oil trader, handled 261 million and Trafigura traded 102.8 million tons of oil and petroleum products. Brent crude rose 3.5 percent that year in a fourth annual advance. It slipped 0.3 percent in 2013 and is down 2.6 percent this year at about $108 a barrel.

With more trading companies trying to gain an edge by owning businesses that produce, store or process commodities, Mercuria followed suit. It now has stakes in a coal mine in Indonesia, oil and gas fields in Argentina, oil storage in China and a biodiesel plant in Germany. In June, it invested $50 million in a Romanian gas producer.

The JPMorgan unit employs about 600 and represents a range of assets assembled over decades by firms including Bear Stearns Cos. and RBS Sempra, which the bank bought during an acquisition binge beginning in 2008.....MORE

"Do Your Grandmother’s Experiences Really Make It Into Your Genes?"

From Pacific Standard:

Epigenetics is a hot field right now, and while many recent findings aren’t nearly as revolutionary as its practitioners believe, we have seen some provocative study results that are hard to dismiss.

•

You inherit some of your grandmother’s genes, but do you also inherit her experiences? Last month, a group of Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute and the University of Umeå released their latest in a series of reports on a long-term health study of people born between 1890 and 1920 in Överkalix, a small town in northern Sweden. These scientists have been making waves for more than a decade with claims that our health is influenced by the experiences of our grandparents. Using statistics of 19th-century harvests in Northern Sweden to determine how much food was available to the ancestors of the residents of Överkalix, the researchers concluded that the risk for cardiovascular disease among their study participants was influenced by the dramatic swings from feast to famine experienced by the participants’ grandparents during childhood.

Studies like this one are part of the hodgepodge of research that gets lumped together in the growing and increasingly ill-defined field of epigenetics. Scientific interest in this field has boomed over the past decade, thanks in part to technological advances that make new types of experiments possible. Epigenetics is hot in the popular press as well. It made the cover of Time in 2010. In Germany, Der Spiegel declared that epigenetics is a “victory over the gene,” illustrating both the victory itself and the sexiness of the science with an image of naked woman emerging from the confines of her gene pool. And of course, epigenetics is touted as the new secret to curing cancer. But the popularity of epigenetics is misplaced: It’s a badly over-hyped field whose recent findings aren’t nearly as revolutionary as many of its practitioners believe....MORE

Also at Pacific Standard:
Is It Possible to Degrade and Exploit Your At-Home Sexbot?

"Corn hits $5, wheat soars on Crimea, dryness fears"

This is pleasing.
From Agrimoney:

Corn futures regained $5 a bushel, and wheat prices jumped on both sides of the Atlantic, spurred by concerns of the Ukraine crisis driving import demand to Europe and the US, with Brazil dryness adding to buying pressure.

Corn futures for May delivery, the best-traded lot, touched $5.02 ½ a bushel in Chicago, topping $5 a bushel for the first time for a nearest-but-one contract since August last year.

Wheat for May soared 2.6% to $6.63 a bushel in Chicago, a three-month high, while in Paris jumping 3% to E212.75 a tonne, a level not seen in a nearest-but-one contract in 10 months.

The gains came amid ideas of continuing unease in Ukraine, whose southern Crimea region will on March 16 vote on joining Russia in a poll condemned in Kiev, and which has been seen as fuelling east-west tensions over the crisis.

Export worries

Although there is little evidence so far of disruption to grain export logistics in Ukraine, the third-ranked corn exporter and sixth-biggest wheat shipper, the crisis is seen as likely to prompt buyers to switch orders to other origins....MORE 

Wednesday, November 27, 2013 
Looking Ahead: Corn price 'to return near to $5 a bushel', SocGen

$4.275 up $0.0275.
 

And  every damn week since then, out in public, dancing naked.
So yes, it pleases.

Climateer Line of the Day: Climate Negotiations ALWAYS End in Money Edition

From the Guardian:

"We will want more than the $100bn to agree to a new Paris protocol," 

The paragraph continues:

...said Quamrul Choudhury, a lead negotiator for the group which includes many African and Asian countries. "On top of that we will want a legal mechanism to compensate for 'loss and damage' [compensation for extreme climate change events]. There should definitely be some space in the [final] treaty for that," he said in London.

As Nicholas Stern (he of the eponymous report, then Sir, now Lord), Vice-overseer of consultancy IDEACarbon said:

“Bali will set in motion a process that will define the structure
of the carbon markets for decades to come”
“By 2020 the global carbon market could be worth EUR 240-
450 billion”
-Sir Nicholas Stern

"This (climate change) is much too important to leave to environment ministers"
-Sir Nicholas Stern
to Finance Ministers basking in Bali

Good times, good times.

Last seen in our 2012 post "The Man Who Oversaw the Decline and Fall of Carbon Trading is Crabby on His Last Day at IETA".

Natural Gas: EIA Weekly Supply/Demand

From the Energy Information Agency:
Natural Gas Weekly Update
for week ending March 5, 2014  |  Release Date:  March 6, 2014  |  Next Release: March 13, 2014

In the News:
Marcellus production strong; backlogged wells will support further growth

EIA's recently released December 2013 data indicate that 2013 was a record year for U.S. gas production, with consistent growth in the "other states" category, which include states with active Marcellus shale production. According to EIA's monthly production survey (EIA-914), overall marketed production in the United States averaged 70.2 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in 2013, up about 1 Bcf/d (1.5%) from 2012 and the eighth straight year of production growth. Much of the growth came from states other than the more widely known hydrocarbon-producing states of Louisiana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Alaska. Growth in the Marcellus states has more than offset declines in other areas, particularly the Gulf of Mexico.

EIA's monthly Drilling Productivity Report, which uses different methodology than the monthly survey and which estimates production by shale play, estimated that Marcellus gross natural gas production grew 47.6% from 2012 to 2013. EIA forecasts that the overall growth in U.S. marketed production will continue in 2014, averaging 71.8 Bcf/d (or, plus 2.3%), according to EIA's February Short-Term Energy Outlook.

A current backlog of natural gas wells, or wells that have been drilled but not yet completed so they can produce natural gas, will be a major contributing factor to future growth in production, particularly in the Marcellus Shale. A Barclays report on February 28 estimated that more than 1,300 wells in Pennsylvania remain backlogged. Backlogs are often the result of inadequate pipeline infrastructure in a region to support production. As new infrastructure becomes available, these wells can quickly begin producing....MUCH MORE 

U.S. Natural Gas Supply - Gas Week: (2/26/14 - 3/5/14)
	Percent change for week compared with:
	last year	last week
Gross Production	3.66%	-1.27%
Dry Production	3.62%	-1.26%
Canadian Imports	6.38%	10.96%
West (Net)	-30.83%	-16.23%
MidWest (Net)	59.60%	26.74%
Northeast (Net)	7.17%	37.98%
LNG Imports	-52.96%	-0.08%
Total Supply	3.51%	-0.46%

U.S. Consumption - Gas Week: (2/26/14 - 3/5/14)
	Percent change for week compared with:
	last year	last week
U.S. Consumption	19.0%	24.4%
Power	0.9%	31.7%
Industrial	5.1%	3.9%
Residential/Commercial	35.2%	32.1%
Total Demand	19.0%	24.1%

An Awful Lot of People Are Shorting Volatility (VIX; VXX; XVIX; XXV)

I'm starting to wonder if Izabella likes posting on volatility because, in addition to talking to Chris Cole who is pretty sharp, the ETP symbols read like Roman numerals?

As to the headline, I mean "awful lot" in both the colloquial and the literal.

From FT Alphaville:
Why the new shoeshine boy trade is shorting volatility

Crowded trade alert.

Chris Cole, of volatility fund Artemis Capital, has an insightful piece in the latest edition of the CFA Institute Conference Proceedings Quarterly warning about one of the most popular trades of recent times: the shorting of volatility via Vix ETPs.

The speculative shorts on Vix futures as a percentage of open interest, for example, are already running at an all-time high. In Cole’s mind this now equates to the shoeshine boy trade of the modern era.
One of the ironies, he also notes, is that the trade simply synthesizes a much less efficient version of a 3-4 times leveraged position on the S&P 500.


From the piece:

On a risk-adjusted, equal volatility–weighted basis, the return on a strategy of consistently shorting volatility on the front of the volatility term structure using the XIV ETN is lower than the return on holding the S&P 500. Since November 2010, the annual return on the S&P 500 is 14.26%; for the risk-adjusted XIV ETN, it is 9.16%.

The annual volatility for both—with the XIV risk adjusted to the S&P 500—is 17.41%. So by holding the S&P 500, an investor could have earned a higher return per unit of risk than by holding this short volatility ETP, which has large drawdowns during sharp volatility rises.

In the end, shorting volatility is just a leveraged version of index beta. The problem when many “shoeshine boys” are shorting volatility is that the volatility of VIX futures dramatically outpaces the volatility of the VIX dur­ing the last 15 minutes of the trading day when all the structured products rebalance....

...MUCH MORE

China's Biggest State-owned Grain Trader Buying Grain Traders

From Merco Press:
China buys majority stake in Nidera as part of its investment in food assets

 China's State-owned Chinese food giant Cofco Corp. on Friday announced it was buying a 51% stake in closely held grains trader Nidera NV. By investing in Dutch Nidera, Cofco--China's largest stated-owned grain trader-- would have greater control over pricing as well as better access to major grain-growing regions, such as Latin America and Russia.

 China is already a huge importer of soybeans from Argentina and Brazil, and has been investing more in agriculture in Eastern Europe. Nidera trades agricultural commodities, including grains and soybeans.

China has spent billions of dollars in the past decade acquiring commodities assets in metals and energy, but it has stepped up investing in food assets overseas in recent years, buying farmland in Latin America.

Growing wealth in China is prompting increased demand for food resources. In 2011, China became a net importer of rice, and the gap between exports and imports has been widening in recent years. Chinese imports of soybeans overtook domestic production in 2004. The country also imported record volumes of corn in December, mostly from the U.S., with most of that going toward feed for animals.

Nidera chief executive officer Ton van der Laan said the company had been looking for a strong partner in China and the rest of Asia to help it expand....MORE

And from the South China Morning Post:

Grain trader Cofco in talks to buy agribusiness unit of Nobel

• 

State-backed Cofco, which last week agreed to buy a 51 per cent stake in Dutch grain trader Nidera, was conducting due diligence on the Noble unit.

China's biggest grains trader, Cofco, is in talks to buy Noble Group's agribusiness arm in a deal that would value the division at around US$1 billion, sources said.

Acquiring the Noble unit would help China develop a powerful agricultural trading house, something it lacks.

State-backed Cofco, which last week agreed to buy a 51 per cent stake in Dutch grain trader Nidera, was conducting due diligence on the Noble unit, the sources said.

The precise stage of the talks was not clear, they said, cautioning that a deal for the unit, which trades and processes grains, may not materialise.

Noble said it was engaged in discussions with a consortium over a potential joint venture around its agriculture business, but no binding arrangements had been entered into. It did not identify Cofco as part of the consortium.
A Cofco spokesman said he was not aware of talks with Noble.

An acquisition push by Cofco comes after a wave of consolidation in the global agribusiness sector - including deals by Japanese firms to snap up rivals - that largely passed China by.

The Nidera acquisition was Cofco's first major overseas purchase of a trading house and signals China's ambition to create a global trading company along the lines of Japan- ese, European and US trading giants.

Last year, Japanese trading house Marubeni agreed to pay US$5.6 billion for US grain merchant Gavilon while Anglo-Swiss Glencore bought Viterra, Canada's largest grain handler, for US$6 billion in 2012....MORE

"Natural gas futures rally more than 2% after bullish supply data"

Front futures up a dime at $4.623. We're seeing a developing series of higher lows on the daily chart, four days worth anyway.

From Investing.com via NASDAQ:

Natural gas futures rallied sharply on Thursday, after data showed that U.S. natural gas supplies fell more-than-expected last week.

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, natural gas futures for delivery in April rallied to a session high of $4.661 per million British thermal units.

Nymex gas prices last traded at $4.639 per million British thermal units during U.S. morning hours, up 2.55%, or 11.6 cents. Futures traded at $4.542 prior to the release of the supply data.

The April contract tumbled 3.09%, or 14.4 cents, on Wednesday to settle at $4.523 per million British thermal units.

Prices were likely to find support at $4.441 per million British thermal units, the low from February 27 and resistance at $4.736, the high from March 3.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration said in its weekly report that natural gas storage in the U.S. in the week ended February 28 fell by 152 billion cubic feet, compared to expectations for a decline of 138 billion cubic feet....MORE

Earlier:
"CERAWEEK-Natural gas industry ready to rebuild depleted U.S. supply"
US Natural Gas Price at Odds with Low Storage Stocks

Here's the Weekly Natural Gas Storage Report.

US Natural Gas Price at Odds with Low Storage Stocks

The futures are changing hands at $4.542 up 1.9 cents.
From the Financial Times:

The US natural gas market is sending out mixed messages. Supplies held in underground storage are at the lowest level in a decade, but futures prices suggest the country is still a land of plenty.
This contradiction has begun to spark debate among analysts. Has a tough winter dealt a lasting blow to stores of the heating fuel? Or will gas drilled from shale rock again flood the market once temperatures – fingers crossed – climb?

The answer to these questions has big implications on the direction of natural gas, used by manufacturers of everything from steel to fertiliser and widely tracked by commodity investors....

...Teri Viswanath, gas analyst at BNP Paribas, says the futures market has it wrong. This week she raised her forecast for 2015 gas prices from $4 to $4.55 per mBtu.
“Despite the industry’s best efforts to bring additional supplies to market, we believe it will take more than a single injection season to swing the market back into equilibrium,” she says.

Ms Viswanath argues “structural” increases in gas consumption, from new, cleaner-burning power plants to petrochemical complexes, will divert some gas away from storage caverns. She likens this year’s end-of-winter inventories to a serious crunch in 2003, which set off a “six-year cycle of tightness” that sent gas to record highs above $15 per mBtu.

Citigroup believes inventories will plunge to 875bn cu ft by the end of March, less than half the average. “The market may need more than hopeful signs of production growth and precipitation on the West Coast” – which would allow more hydroelectric generation, reducing reliance on gas power plants – “to replenish depleted gas inventories”, the bank says....MUCH MORE

We are in agreement, having speculated that ending supplies in storage could drop as low as 800 Bcf . The exact quote from our Feb. 20 post "Natural Gas: Storage Report Comes In As Expected, Futures Drop":

...There is a structural shortfall of natural gas potentially shaping up. At 1,600 Bcf of gas in storage as of Valentine's day and with another cold snap coming next week it is possible that we may end the heating season in the 800 Bcf range.

And here's the problem. A cold winter is often followed by a warm summer. Looking back to the 1930's some of the largest winter/summer temperature spreads ever recorded occurred in 1936 (also in '34 but I don't have the table):

Just shy of 170 degrees F in both North Dakota and Montana!

We have been so successful switching electrical generating plants from coal to natural gas, have built almost $100 Billion of chemical co. infrastructure to take advantage of natty and have had some (small as a percentage) uptake of natural gas powered transportation that we may have trouble building storage reserves for the 2014-2015 heating season.

Be careful what you wish for eh?...

"South Africa Platinum Wage talks Halted as parties remain Too Far Apart" (PPLT; GLD)

Every day that goes by the stockpiles are depleted. Kitco spot platinum up $7.00 to $1480, spot gold up 60 cents at $1337.40.
From Mineweb:

JOHANNESBURG (Mineweb) - 
The platinum wage negotiations have been adjourned; leaving the parties involved pondering  their next course of action.

The Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union is still demanding R12,500, but by yesterday afternoon, AMCU had lowered their demand, arguing for a wage increase that will see workers earn R12500 by 2018

The big three platinum producers, Anglo American Platinum, Lonmin, and Impala Platinum, however, remain resolute in their offer of increases between 7 percent and 9 per cent over three years.

The Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration has its hands full trying to find an amicable solution to the stalemate. And according to a press release from Lomin on Wednesday, “CCMA has deemed the respective parties’ current position to be too far apart to warrant further mediation at this stage”.
Mpumi Sithole, a spokeswoman at Amplats said talks between the platinum sector and the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union have been suspended indefinitely to allow stakeholders time to reflect the current offer.

 AMCU revised its wage demand to achieve a R12, 500 basic salary for the lowest paid workers over a period of four years.

“This revised wage demand translates to an average annual increase of 29% and remains unaffordable. The Company maintains that AMCU’s revised offer remains significantly above inflation and a further increase is not sustainable,” said Sithole....MORE

Here are the five day and one month charts of our short gold/long platinum pair trade, through yesterday's close:

and

"CERAWEEK-Natural gas industry ready to rebuild depleted U.S. supply"

We are not having a lot of success with the long natty idea as the daily chart shows:

Since the drop it has shown a (very) slight upward tendency but hasn't gained enough traction to convince bears to flip to the buying side of the boat. $4.5800 last, up 5.7 cents ahead of today's storage report.

From Reuters:

U.S. utilities have withdrawn a record amount of natural gas from underground storage to meet heating and power needs during an extremely cold winter, but gas producers say they are confident they can rebuild inventory.

"We believe North America has the capacity to supply far more natural gas than we are doing now at a reasonable price," said William Maloney, Statoil's executive vice president of development and production for North America, speaking at the IHS CERAWeek conference in Houston, an annual meeting of global energy leaders.

Some traders have expressed doubts that inventories would be rebuilt in time for next winter, but Maloney said the biggest challenge is not supply, but demand.

"Is there enough demand to lead to sustained higher prices and can matching midstream and upstream capacity happen in a continuous way?"

Maloney noted that the number of rigs looking for gas has fallen, but gas production has kept rising as the industry finds more efficient methods to drill and complete wells in U.S. shale formations.
At Statoil, which produces in the Marcellus and Bakken formations, drilling efficiency gains have been in the 25 to 50 percent range, Maloney said. "We are not going to stop improving."

The long and bitterly cold winter season has reduced gas in storage to the lowest level in a decade, according to government estimates, leading some traders to project that gas inventory will end the winter season with less than 1 trillion cubic feet, much below the record storage levels seen in the past few years as shale gas production soared.

"In the space of just a few short months, the multi-year surplus has disappeared with the rapid system-wide destocking that has fundamentally altered our outlook on the market," Teri Viswanath, director of natural gas strategy at BNP Paribas, said in a note earlier this week.

"Despite the industry's best efforts to bring additional supplies to market, we believe that it will take more than a single injection season to swing the market back into equilibrium," Viswanath said.

Maloney declined to comment on the current storage level, he said Statoil has recently brought new wells online after falling a little behind. "The rigs are not going away; we will continue drilling," he said.

Bob MacKnight, an IHS director, offered a more cautious outlook, saying gas prices must rise to $5 per million British thermal units "for a sustained period" to get producers to boost drilling activity....MORE

Jobs Report: "The +139K ADP Jobs Equates To About +150K BLS"

From ValueWalk:

The ADP jobs number came in at +139K, an acceleration from the 127K of the prior month.
On a year over year basis, the ADP jobs figure represents an increase of 1.9% over February 2013.

ADP jobs relation with BLS job

What do today’s ADP jobs figures mean for Friday’s huge BLS’ job report?
Here’s how the relationship looks.

The scatterplot shows that the two surveys are closely related, with only a slight bent rightward from a perfect linear correlation.

Based upon the relationship, what would today’s ADP +139K number predict for Friday’s BLS job number?

145K.

Friday’s job number falls below expectations

The +145K is in contrast to market expectations of +170K.  In other words, it’s highly unlikely that Friday’s job number will reach analysts’ expectations....MUCH MORE

"The report of the high-level panel of eminent persons on the post-2015 development agenda"

Huh, there really is a New World Order.
Who knew?
From the United Nations:

"The Battle of Little Bitcoin: Native American Tribe Launches Its Own Cryptocurrency"

The tribes are sovereign which puts an interesting spin on the idea. The key question is whether Native casinos would accept the cryptocurrency.
From Forbes:

Standing on the banks of the Little Bighorn River last year, a son of the once-mighty Oglala Lakota Tribe made a promise to continue his ancestors’ fight against the United States. Only this time the war wouldn’t be fought with arrows or bullets, but with QR codes and cryptography.

“My family fought and died on this soil,” recalls Payu Harris, a Bitcoin developer and native activist. “Suddenly the story of Custer’s Last Stand wasn’t just words on a page but something deeply personal. I looked at how things were for the tribe now and suddenly had an idea about how we might fix it. We can’t continue to be 20 years behind the times, always trying to catch up. We have to be forward-thinking.”

Now, a year later, the opening skirmishes of this latest battle have begun in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, one of the most impoverished areas in the US. His tribe has just become the first native people to launch their very own cryptocurrency, MazaCoin. Harris wants to see if it’s possible to sidestep the federal government and use the tribal nation’s limited sovereignty to set its own rules on cryptocurrencies.  After all, greenbacks haven’t done much for the people of Pine Ridge. If they can ditch the dollar and make MazaCoin work, Harris thinks, they could set an example for the whole world.

“I think cryptocurrencies could be the new buffalo,” he says. “Once, it was everything for our survival. We used it for food, for clothes, for everything. It was our economy. I think MazaCoin could serve the same purpose.”...MORE

Amazon CEO Bezos, Others Put Another $12 Mil. Into Business Insider for U.K. Launch

From the Wall Street Journal:
Site Plans to Use Money to Hire More Staff, Finance U.K. Launch

Business Insider raised an additional $12 million in funding from investors including Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, the online news site said.

The site plans to use the money for growth efforts including hiring more journalists and photographers as well as to help finance a launch into the U.K., Business Insider Chief Executive Henry Blodget said. The money will also go to expanding the site's subscription research and advertising staff.

Business Insider has emerged as a popular source for online business and general interest news, spanning topics from Warren Buffett to the Oscars. In January, Business Insider ranked as the fourth largest business news site, drawing a total of 25.4 million unique visitors on desktop and mobile devices, according to comScore. That is more than AOL Inc.'s Money and Finance and Bloomberg L.P.'s news site.

Business Insider earned just under $20 million in total revenue last year, an 80% increase from a year earlier, according to a person familiar with the company. And while the company turned a profit in the fourth quarter, it doesn't expect to be profitable this year because of the further investments it is making to expand the business, the person said.

Mr. Bezos' investment firm, Bezos Expeditions, was the lead investor in the latest funding round, according to a person familiar with the company. Other investors in the latest round include RRE Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners and publishing executives Jim Friedlich and Gordon Crovitz. Those investors, like Mr. Bezos, have previously provided funding to Business Insider.

Representatives from Amazon, Bezos Expeditions, RRE and Institutional Venture Partners weren't immediately available for comment. Mr. Friedlich and Mr. Crovitz confirmed their investment.
Mr. Blodget said the fundraising was a sign that the news site isn't looking to be acquired in the immediate future....MORE

"Why Does Everyone Hate Monsanto?" (MON)

From Modern Farmer:

In recent years, no company has been more associated with evil than Monsanto. But why?

The house was raised above the ground, like a mushroom or a white ray gun, its rooms radiating out like spokes of a wheel. It was 1957 and this was the “House of the Future,” a prototype modular house created by Monsanto, in collaboration with M.I.T. to help solve the housing crisis baby boom America was in the middle of. Not coincidentally, the house was made of plastic, one of Monsanto’s products at the time.
“They imagined fast subdivisions of this house, like Levittown,” says Gary Van Zante, curator of architecture and design at the M.I.T. Museum.

While that never happened, Walt Disney did select it as an exhibition at his new Disneyland. For 10 years, until it was torn down, the chemical giant’s creation stood peacefully in The Happiest Place On Earth, where millions of people marveled at it.

It is safe to say that if Monsanto’s pod house were erected there today, it would not be such a happy home.

Over the past decade, Monsanto has become a pop cultural bogeyman, the face of corporate evil. The company and its genetically modified organism (GMO) seeds have been the subject of muckraking documentaries (“Forks Over Knives” and “GMO OMG“), global protests, and assaults by everybody from environmental activists to “The Colbert Report.” Facebook and other social media are awash in memes (here’s a blog devoted to the topic) and hashtags like #monsantoevil. And it seems everyone, from your plumber to your mother, has an opinion about the company. This past year, when Monsanto bought a weather data company called the Climate Corporation for about $1 billion, David Friedberg, the company’s CEO, found himself bending over backwards justifying his decision to sell.  (As if the money wasn’t enough reason!) Friedberg told the New Yorker that even his father disapproved: “His first reaction was, ‘Monsanto? The most evil company in the world? I thought you were trying to make the world a BETTER place?’” (Friedberg also felt compelled to write a letter to his entire staff, laying out his rationale for Monsanto’s aptness as a new owner.) In short, you don’t need to have a degree in marketing and communications to see that Monsanto has a PR problem.

How did this happen? How did Monsanto go from the future of American innovation to a late-night punchline? Critics point to their role in GMOs, creating “frankenfood,” but Monsanto is not the only company that produces genetically modified organisms. And though it has a bad environmental record, so do lots of companies. Also, unlike, say, other corporate villains like General Motors (the antihero of Michael Moore’s “Roger & Me”) Monsanto is not a consumer facing company, and its actual biotechnological workings are mystifying to the average person. Yet somehow it manages to serve as a focal point for popular fear and rage about everything from political pandering to globalization. Why?

The answer, of course, is complicated but numerous experts point to a fuse: the bungled launch of GMO seeds in Europe in the late ‘90s that progressed into a vicious war of disinformation that shows little sign of abating.

If you set aside for a moment from the usual debate about whether GMOs are bad or good, a curious fact emerges. For a rich and powerful company that seems to excel at nearly everything it does, Monsanto sucks in one important aspect: spin control.

Let the record reflect
Before Monsanto became the face of industrial agriculture, it courted controversy in other ways — namely, as a chemical company. Founded in 1901, Monsanto was one of a handful of companies that produced Agent Orange, and its main poison, Dioxin. It sold DDT, PCBs, the controversial dairy cow hormone, rBGH, and the cancer-linked Aspartame sweetener.

Starting in the ‘80s, however, Monsanto shed its chemicals and plastics divisions, bought up seed companies, invested in bio genetics research, and ultimately reincorporated itself as an agricultural company. Its first GMO product, the patented Glyphosate-resistant, “Round-Up Ready” soybean, was approved by the USDA in 1994. But most Americans hadn’t heard of Monsanto until it tried to sell the seeds to Europe. That’s when things turned sour.

In 1996, the U.K. was reeling from the Mad Cow disease epidemic, in which the British Government insisted the highly dangerous disease posed no risk to human health, while people were dying. Brits had gotten a fast education in the modern farm system and were primed to be suspicious of GMOs’ supposed safety. Although the seeds were approved by the European Union, consumers rebelled in England. Grocery store chains pushed back, tabloids printed stories about “Frankenfoods” and environmental groups such as Greenpeace swung into action with high-profile campaigns. Even Prince Charles, a longtime supporter of organic farming, wrote a newspaper editorial opining that genetic engineering “takes mankind into realms that belong to God, and to God alone.”

This reaction caught Monsanto execs off guard. As Dan Charles writes in his book, “Lords of the Harvest,” Philip Angell, the head of Monsanto’s corporate communications at the time, bemoaned that the Brits were the “sad sacks of Europe” for their suspicion of GMOs. But Monsanto believed it could overcome the problem....MORE

We have so many posts on Monsanto it is borderline ridiculous. Some of the stories:
"Is Monsanto Ready to Enter The Medical Marijuana War?" (MON)
Intellectual Property: Justices Seem to Favor Corp. in Bowman v. Monsanto (MON)
This is classic grey goo stuff.
Self-replicating technologies baby.
First up, SCOTUSblog with some backround... 
Monsanto Is Going Organic (MON)
Not the Onion.
Well, maybe the onion. 
Like a Gang of Clowns in a Pie Shop: "Monsanto sues rival DuPont for copycat seed technology" (MON; DD)
Possibly the Biggest Agriculture News of the Month: Monsanto And Novozymes Team Up (MON; NZYM OMX Nordic)
All your food are belong to us.
 
And many, many more.

Architectural Digest Features Steve Wynn's New York Duplex

From Architectural Digest:

The casino-resort mogul showcases an extraordinary art collection amid sumptuous, inviting interiors by designer Roger Thomas

The title “Mr. Las Vegas” may technically belong to entertainer Wayne Newton, but by rights it should go to Steve Wynn. After all, were it not for Wynn and the opulently appointed resort-casinos he’s created in the city—a list that includes the Mirage and the Bellagio—it’s hard to imagine the desert destination enjoying its current appeal to affluent travelers, for whom gambling is only part of the draw. And Wynn did it not by abandoning the glamour and glitz that made Vegas famous in the first place but by marrying those traits to the same passions—quality, craftsmanship, beauty, creative vision—that have made him one of the world’s foremost art collectors.

All those attributes are on prominent display at his expansive Manhattan duplex, a place he and his wife, Andrea, use for regular East Coast visits. Today Wynn’s company has two properties in the Nevada city—the Wynn Las Vegas, and the Encore at Wynn Las Vegas—as well as two in Macau, where a third resort, the Wynn Palace Cotai, is slated to open in 2016. With a relentless travel schedule, the businessman clearly relishes his time in New York. “It’s such a kick to have friends over when we’re here,” he says. “In Las Vegas we don’t entertain at home, so here it’s more of a residential experience.”

Located across from Central Park in a landmark building, a former hotel, the Wynns’ apartment sits high above the treetops and contains a onetime ballroom, so there are dramatic views but also, on the residence’s main level, astonishing 16.5-foot ceilings....MORE

HT: Curbed