To Celebrate Shakespeare's 450th Birthday: Investing Tips From the Bard

From time to time* we've borrowed from Mr. S.
Most recently, last Sunday, unaware of the impending Apr. 23 anniversary, it was "default, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings".
 (sorry)
From Fortune's The Buzz blog:

Most people don't pick up Shakespeare's plays when they're looking for investing advice, but the Bard of Avon did write frequently about money matters.

Consider that the word "rich" appears more than 150 times in his plays. "Gold" gets over 200 mentions, and "debt" about 40.

There are even college courses on "Bardonomics" like Duke University's "Shakespeare and Financial Markets."

As the world celebrates the 450th birthday of English literature's leading man this week, we took a look at his top financial recommendations.

1. Read the terms of any deal carefully, especially loans

"Go with me to a notary, seal me there
Your single bond; and, in a merry sport,
If you repay me not on such a day,
In such a place, such sum or sums as are
Express'd in the condition, let the forfeit
Be nominated for an equal pound
Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken
In what part of your body pleaseth me."
 -- Shylock in The Merchant of Venice Act I, Scene 3

There are many famous Shakespearean scenes, but Shylock demanding his pound of flesh from Antonio in a courtroom is up there on the all time greats. These lines come earlier in the play when the deal is struck. Much like a subprime mortgage, the terms look good upfront: Shylock isn't charging any interest. He just wants to be repaid.

But there's a big catch. Shylock sells it as "merry sport" as if it's just a joke, but he says he will take a pound of flesh if the money isn't repaid on time. It's a reminder to read all the terms of any deal.

2. Patience often pays off

"How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?"
-- Iago in Othello in Act 2, Scene 3

Sure, Iago is sort of like a stereotypical used car salesman ... or even a gangster. He spends most of the play trying to rip off his boss, Othello, and his "friend" Rodrigo. But his advice to Rodrigo to be patient would ring true to Warren Buffett and many other long-term value investors.

3. Don't spend money you don't have

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry."
-- Polonius in Hamlet Act I, Scene 3

Hamlet is more often thought of as a psychological tome than an economic one, but Polonius' advice to his son Laertes to stay out of the loan business is a telling reminder that debt can make it harder to sleep at night....MORE

*As the run in the Nikkei was gathering steam I tried to go all Avon on dear reader:
While You Were Sleeping: Nikkei Up 2.28% Overnight

...There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures....

Some of our other Shakespeare posts:
"Shakespeare: tax evader and food hoarder? "
William Shakespeare: Annuity Beneficiary
Shakespeare on Congress, AIG
Scholars Doubt Authenticity of New Shakespeare Portrait

"The Work Song Nanocluster"

"The Work Song Nanocluster" is the eighteenth episode of the second season of the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory. The episode first aired on March 16, 2009.
It's what I thought of when I saw this at the Financial Times:

Yuppy Stakhanovites give work a bad name
What matters is not how hard we toil but what we have to show for it, writes Izabella Kaminska 

“A ‘super’ working class is emerging made up of well-educated rich people who work longer hours than the poor and who do not see leisure time as preferable to the office.”
The Daily Telegraph, April 21
 
The less you need to work, the more you end up working? 
So say Oxford university sociologists Jonathan Gershuny and Kimberly Fisher. In a recent paper, they conclude that people who have completed more education end up working a larger part of each day.

I’ve heard of champagne socialism. But what’s this – champagne Stakhanovism?
Guess you’re not keen on the idea of overtime yourself.

But, you know, there is such a thing as a workaholic.

Such people exist but surely they’re the exception. No friends. No family. Lonely. Unfulfilled.
 
Are you working now?

No. I’m having a coffee. 
 
Ah, but you’re reading the Financial Times.

And a fine read it is, too.
 
So you take pleasure from reading financial news? Even at the weekend?

Er, pass me the Life & Arts section. But, yes, I like to stay informed.

Why’s that?

Because it makes me better at my job.... 

...MUCH MORE
 

I had to look up Stakhanov.

Here's BBT Season 2-Episode 18:
Here's the transcript.

The song Penny and Sheldon are singing was named one of the 10 Manliest Sea Shanties by the Art of Manliness blog.

This is not Sheldon

So, What Could You Do With a $50 Billion, 1000 Megawatt Exaflop Computer? Trade Currencies

This smells really scammy, should be fun.
From Next Big Future:

Exaflop computer project for Super programmed trading of the $5 trillion foreign exchange market is now hiring

Previously we reported taht John Fitzpatrick was forming a company that he says will provide competitively priced commodity cloud-based services on what he’s calling the world’s first Exaflop Supercomputer.

He will use foreign currency trading as the main application. This is the Bitcoin mining of the Foreign Exchange market. The machine will cost $50 billion. Financed with short term notes.

John Fitzpatrick and his partners are planning to spend $50 billion and use a gigawatt of energy to power an Exaflop computer data center to game the $5 trillion foreign exchange market. Foreign exchange markets are 500 times bigger than the Bitcoin market. Foreign exchange affects the price of goods and services imported and exported to other countries. Foreign exchange manipulation will affect the price that you pay when you go to buy stuff at Walmart or other stores. Gaming this system will affect what is in your wallet and bank account.

Exascale Power Company signed an agreement April 16, 2014 to locate the facility in the MidAmerica Industrial Park in Pryor, Oklahoma. They plan to come to market fully six (6) years before any competitor and bring 2000 jobs to Oklahoma in the next 6 months and they are now hiring.

Their commodity cloud computing price is 2 cents per core hour, less than Google at 4 cents, and Amazon at 9 cents, with data center reliability, and the ability to perform much larger computational tasks than any other computer system in the world.

They have an SEC filing.

Chartology: One Big Fake-out to Fill The S&P 500 Gap

The S&P 500 is currently at 1866.31, down 12.30 and still 22 points above the bottom of the April 15-16 gap (1,842.98 close-1,846.01 open).
Click for much larger:

"2,500 years of financial crises"

From the Financial Times:

Apr 25, 2014 : Financial crises date back to the 4th century BC, but we seem incapable of learning from them. Bob Swarup, author of ‘Money Mania’, explains to John Authers how innovation and crises are related. Both have their roots in growing complexity and in human nature....MORE

Florida Decides to Offload More Hurricane Risk Amid Desperate (but not insatiable) Reach for Yield

From Artemis:

Everglades Re 2014 cat bond hits $1.5 billion, prices towards upper end

Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corporation’s latest catastrophe bond transaction, Everglades Re Ltd. (Series 2014-1), has grown again to hit a new record at $1.5 billion in size, a 275% upsizing from the $400m the deal was initially launched at.

Everglades Re 2014-1 is the largest catastrophe bond transaction ever issued, breaking new ground for the cat bond and ILS market and sending a clear message that ILS investors, along with an increasing number of fixed income specialists, can support the needs of even the largest reinsurance and risk transfer cedents.

Just two days ago Everglades Re 2014-1 grew to $1.25 billion while the price guidance was narrowed and moved towards the upper end. The pricing guidance for the Everglades Re 2014 cat bond started at 6.5% to 7.75%, which moved to 7.25% to 7.5% two days ago but has now settled at the upper end of that narrowed range at the 7.5% mark....MORE

Why Biotechs Are Best Bought in ETF's (IBB)

Cytokinetics says Lou Gehrig's drug fails mid-stage trial

$5.15-7.84 (-60.35%)

Financing Rooftop Solar is a Thing (SCTY; SPWR; GOOG)

Readers who have been with us for a while know we have watched financier SolarCity since the IPO and before that traded both sides of the solar boom-bust. We still use First Solar as a tell on the market's risk appetite.
Here's the current state of play.
From Venture Capital Dispatch:

Solar Finance Space Heats Up as Kilowatt Financial Gains Ground 

In the shadows of SolarCity, Sunrun and other better-known providers of financing for residential solar installation, a younger entrant, Kilowatt Financial, has been quietly gaining ground, with a lot of venture capital behind it.

Minneapolis-based Kilowatt Financial has raised $125 million in equity funding to date, including $40 million in startup investment from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers at the end of 2011, VentureWire has learned.  The company is quickly deploying capital into solar and energy-efficiency projects, and relying in large part on the services of another Kleiner Perkins portfolio company, Clean Power Finance.

So far, Kilowatt has deployed $250 million into solar projects that are already operating and which it identified via the Clean Power Finance online marketplace.

The residential solar market has been growing quickly in the past couple of years, in part because of the financing methods introduced by Sunrun and popularized in large part by SolarCity, which is now a publicly traded company. These financing structures allow homeowners to get solar systems at no upfront cost and then to pay monthly for the use of the power generated. Homeowners end up saving on their total electricity use, while financing companies get steady revenue over 20 years.

Kilowatt, founded in late 2011 by management with deep consumer lending background, is expanding quickly in the solar and energy-efficiency market. It has about $400 million in assets under management, according to Kilowatt Chairman and Chief Executive Daniel Pillemer.

That’s quick uptime in this business, and part of the reason for it, Mr. Pillemer said, was that the company worked through Clean Power Finance, which matches solar installers and their homeowner customers to financing companies based on their criteria.

“We leapfrogged that way,” Mr. Pillemer said.

Clean Power Finance has brought other new capital into the residential solar market over the years, including Morgan Stanley, Google and Dominion Power.

Kilowatt, unlike SolarCity and Sunrun, and like Clean Power Finance , focuses on a distinct part of the chain of services that go into the finance installation of solar system. Other companies, by contrast, are bringing more services under a single roof....MORE

And from Zacks:

SunPower, Google Collaborate for Solar Financing

San Jose, CA-based solar manufacturer SunPower Corp. (SPWR) and Google Inc. have teamed up to form a $250 million fund to help homeowners across the U.S. to go solar.

This pact is essentially aimed at financing residential solar system installations that SunPower will then lease out to homeowners. Google has committed to invest $100 million, while SunPower will invest $150 million in the plan.

This will definitely give a boost to SunPower’s residential leasing program, launched in 2011. Through this program SunPower has gained significant traction in the U.S. solar rooftop installation market. This program enables the company to receive tax benefit under the Investment Tax Credit structure, which aims at promoting solar photovoltaic (PV) installations.
In a win-win deal, the leasing program helps customers to reduce their carbon footprint while avoiding bulky upfront payments. SunPower on its part gains significant top-line visibility.

SunPower already had more than 20,000 lease customers running under this program for 20 years. With this new partnership, SunPower expects to add thousands more to this plan.

Residential solar installation is now a sizzling story. This market even outpaced the commercial and utility segments last year and has already started to attract more conventional electric power companies that produce power mostly from coal and natural gas.

Meanwhile, this deal proves yet again Google’s commitment to advancing green power. The financial assistance to SunPower marks the Internet giant’s 16th renewable energy investment and the 3rd in residential rooftop solar. The search giant has invested more than $1 billion in renewable projects throughout the world....MORE

Finally, a word from the first winner of the Climateer "Our Hero" award back in April 2007:

The 26th Secretary of War, the Democrat and Republican (!) Senator from Pennsylvania, Simon Cameron:

Our Hero

"The honest politician is one who 
when he is bought, will stay bought."

Natural Gas: EIA Weekly Supply/Demand Report

The front futures are off a penny at $4.6950 and look a bit heavy.
From the Energy Information Administration:

...Consumption falls. U.S. natural gas consumption fell in all sectors except in the industrial sector, which increased by 0.1% from the previous week. Overall U.S. consumption decreased by 2.2 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) or 3.5% from the previous week, with a combined decrease of 2.1 Bcf/d, in power, residential, and commercial consumption. Moderate temperatures across the United States likely contributed to the decreases of gas consumption. Power burn decreased in most regions except in the Midcontinent and the Pacific Northwest, where the temperatures were colder. Gas exports to Mexico fell 6.9% from the previous week.

more price data

Storage Net storage injection exceeds average. The net injection reported for the week ending April 18 was 49 Bcf, 2 Bcf larger than the 5-year average net injection of 47 Bcf and 19 Bcf larger than last year's net injection of 30 Bcf. Working gas inventories totaled 899 Bcf, 831 Bcf (48.0%) less than last year at this time, 1,008 Bcf (52.9%) below the 5-year (2009-13) average, and 768 Bcf (46.1%) below the 5-year observed minimum.

Storage build is larger than market expectations. Market expectations called for a build of 42 Bcf. When the EIA storage report was released at 10:30 a.m., the price for the May natural gas futures contract rose 1 cent to $4.74/MMBtu on the Nymex. Prices fell 4 cents in the hour following the release.

Two regions post larger-than-average builds. The East, West, and Producing regions had net injections of 17 Bcf (10 Bcf smaller than its 5-year average injection of 27 Bcf), 10 Bcf (5 Bcf larger than its 5-year average injection of 5 Bcf), and 22 Bcf (6 Bcf larger than its 5-year average injection of 16 Bcf), respectively. Storage levels for all three regions remain below their year-ago and 5-year average levels, and their 5-year minimums.

Temperatures during the storage report week warmer than normal. Temperatures in the Lower 48 states averaged 53.6 degrees for the week, 0.9 degree warmer than the 30-year normal temperature and 0.4 degree warmer than during the same period last year....

...MUCH MORE

Deviation between average and normal (°F)

7-Day Mean ending Apr 17, 2014

MIT's Technology Review: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2014

From MIT's Technology Review:

Introduction

Technology news is full of incremental developments, but few of them are true milestones. Here we’re citing 10 that are. These advances from the past year all solve thorny problems or create powerful new ways of using technology. They are breakthroughs that will matter for years to come.

-The Editors

• Agricultural Drones

  Relatively cheap drones with advanced sensors and imaging capabilities are giving farmers new ways to increase yields and reduce crop damage.
  

• Ultraprivate Smartphones

  New models built with security and privacy in mind reflect the Zeitgeist of the Snowden era.
  

• Brain Mapping

  A new map, a decade in the works, shows structures of the brain in far greater detail than ever before, providing neuroscientists with a guide to its immense complexity.
  

• Neuromorphic Chips

  Microprocessors configured more like brains than traditional chips could soon make computers far more astute about what’s going on around them.
  

• Genome Editing

  The ability to create primates with intentional mutations could provide powerful new ways to study complex and genetically baffling brain disorders.
  

• Microscale 3-D Printing

  Inks made from different types of materials, precisely applied, are greatly expanding the kinds of things that can be printed.
  

• Mobile Collaboration

  The smartphone era is finally getting the productivity software it needs.
  

• Oculus Rift

  Thirty years after virtual-reality goggles and immersive virtual worlds made their debut, the technology finally seems poised for widespread use.
  

• Agile Robots

  Computer scientists have created machines that have the balance and agility to walk and run across rough and uneven terrain, making them far more useful in navigating human environments.
  

• Smart Wind and Solar Power

  Big data and artificial intelligence are producing ultra-accurate forecasts that will make it feasible to integrate much more renewable energy into the grid.
  

Get Started

Ironically, Milk Futures Are Not Very Liquid

We don't have many posts* on the dairy business, every couple years or so I break out the "What's Mooving" headline but the business, at least the way (whey?) it's structured in the U.S. is tough to trade from a portfolio perspective. In addition it seems to foment (ferment?) some simply awful puns in folks who write about it.

The futures are currently in backwardation, not that anyone cares. Here's the Chicago Merc Class III futures page. Ten contracts traded electronically today.
(class III is the cheesemakers milk) 

From Attain Capital Management:

Milk – That’s One Illiquid Liquid

We just so happened to stumble upon the table below courtesy of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations showing a nice breakdown of the dollar value of the top 20  agriculture “crops” produced around the world in 2012 (the last year of data). Who knew milk is the most valuable “crop” produced in the world, or that the Agriculture bellwethers in the futures space – Wheat and Soybeans – are each less than half the value of the meats (cattle, pig, and chicken).  Or that tomatoes outsell potatoes.

Rank	Commodity	Billions	Production (MT)
1	Milk, whole fresh cow	$187.28	625,753,801
2	Rice, paddy	$185.58	719,738,273
3	Meat indigenous, cattle	$169.48	62,737,255
4	Meat indigenous, pig	$166.80	108,506,790
5	Meat indigenous, chicken	$132.09	92,730,419
6	Wheat	$79.29	670,875,110
7	Soybeans	$60.69	241,841,416
8	Tomatoes	$59.11	161,793,834
9	Sugar cane	$57.86	1,832,541,194
10	Eggs, hen, in shell	$54.99	66,372,549
11	Maize	$53.60	872,066,770
12	Potatoes	$48.77	364,808,768
13	Vegetables, fresh nes	$46.14	269,852,343
14	Grapes	$38.34	67,067,129
15	Milk, whole fresh buffalo	$38.30	97,417,135
16	Cotton lint	$37.10	25,955,096
17	Apples	$31.88	76,378,738
18	Bananas	$28.21	101,992,743
19	Cassava	$25.69	262,585,741
20	Mangoes, mangosteens, guavas	$25.25	42,139,837

But we kept coming back to Milk being worth the most “moo-la”, that was utterly interesting (ok, we’re done with the cow puns), and we went searching for some more data, finding an update on Milk production from the USDA:

“Milk production in the 23 major States during March totaled 16.7 billion pounds, up 1.1 percent from March 2013. Production per cow in the 23 major States averaged 1,959 pounds for March. The number of milk cows on farms in the 23 major States for March was 8.51 million head, 1,000 head more than February 2014. The average number of milk cows in the United States during the quarter was 9.22 million head.

Chart Courtesy: USDA

A single cow produces almost 2,000 pounds of milk by itself… Good to know, but hard to believe until we found out robots were involved via the New York Times.

“Something strange is happening at farms in upstate New York. The cows are milking themselves.

Desperate for reliable labor and buoyed by soaring prices, dairy operations across the state are charging into a brave new world of udder care: robotic milkers, which feed and milk cow after cow without the help of a single farmhand.

Robots allow the cows to set their own hours, lining up for automated milking five or six times a day — turning the predawn and late-afternoon sessions around which dairy farmers long built their lives into a thing of the past.

With transponders around their necks, the cows get individualized service. Lasers scan and map their underbellies, and a computer charts each animal’s “milking speed,” a critical factor in a 24-hour-a-day operation....

...MORE 
HT: Abnormal Returns

I was inordinately pleased when I first noticed the robotic milkers in 2012:
It's All Coming Together: The $210,000 Cow Miking Robot (can the dream of plowborgs be far behind?)

We got us our own little singularity, right here at Climateer Investing.
Robotics, agriculture and energy....

*Back in 2010 we had a post, "CME Group expands dairy complex with cheese futures" which I intro'd with:

Years ago I heard of a Chicago company that made a whey-based artificial cheese.
Apparently the operation was headed by a mad scientist type who had come up with the formula but had no marketing ability.

He was producing the stuff and not selling any, converting all the investors cash into this "analog" goop and storing it in Chicago area warehouses.

Then the Chernobyl reactor blew, the price of whey skyrocketed, I've no idea what the connection was, the company went broke and the receivers opened the warehouses to find tons of this 'cheeze', semi-molten in the summer heat.

That's what I thought of when I saw this story, tons of the stuff oozing out of bonded warehouses. No connection of course, just a visual....

Bullish bet on large U.S. nat gas producer has analysts wondering (CHK)

The stock closed today at $29.22 up 20 cents.
From Futures Magazine:

Chesapeake draws large bull call spread

A bullish energy option trader just paid 40¢ to buy a 33,000-lot call spread expiring in October, and appears to be gearing up for a 20% surge in the share price of Chesapeake Energy Corp.(NYSE:CHK-D) in that time period. Shares are almost 1% higher on the day at $29.30. The trader bought 33,000 call options at the Oct 35.0 strike at 49¢ and sold the same amount of higher strike 40.0 calls at 9¢. The trade has a net cost of 40¢ implying a breakeven at expiration of $35.40 for shares of Chesapeake.

The option play appears to be without any share component at this point and looks set to benefit from a directional view according to the trader’s outlook. The trade, net of commission, costs the investor $1.32 million to place and has a maximum potential gain of $15.18 million should shares reach the upper strike some 36% above today’s trading price by expiration. Given the magnitude of Thursday’s option’s play, dealers have bumped up the uncertainty surrounding the stock’s potential future movements with implied volatility surging by 10.23% to 47.5%. Overall options volume of 96,200 contracts on the day compares to overall open interest before today of 422,000 lots.

Chart – Chesapeake higher as news of bullish option play circulates    
 

The comment "without any share component" is ignorant. Literally.
You don't know whether there is a short position being hedged or if it is just a bet on further upside to the stock.
I'd guess the latter but you just don't know.

Checking In With Larry the Numerologist (Summers)

From Economist's View:

'Will 2014 end up like 1914?'
Larry ("The Numerologist") Summers:

Will 2014 end up like 1914?: 2014 is a year, if you think about it correctly, of anniversaries. It is the 100th anniversary of 1914, a moment when the world mismanaged itself and reaped the legacy of its mismanagement in as terrible a way as has ever occurred. ... Seventy-five years ago the year was 1939. It had been thought that the war that began in 1914 was a war to end all wars. ... Fifty years ago it was 1964. ... 1964 was months after the assassination of President Kennedy. It was the year that saw the United States’ entry into Vietnam. ... Twenty-five years ago it was 1989. It was the year that in a historical sense the 20th century ended. ... A totalitarian ideology and empire was defeated without a shot having been fired. ...

So, if you believe in numerology, if you believe in centuries and quarter centuries, this is a remarkable year. History does not repeat itself, it has been said, but it does rhyme. If you think about the challenges that I have described, that sometimes were met well and sometimes were met poorly, echoes of many can be heard today. ...MORE

Archaeology: "Previously Unknown Warhol Works Discovered on Floppy Disks from 1985"

From The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon: 

Collaborative Team Rescues Early Digital Art through “Forensic Retrocomputing”

A multi-institutional team of new-media artists, computer experts, and museum professionals have discovered a dozen previously unknown experiments by Andy Warhol (BFA, 1949) on aging floppy disks from 1985.

The purely digital images, “trapped” for nearly 30 years on Amiga^® floppy disks stored in the archives collection of The Andy Warhol Museum (AWM), were discovered and extracted by members of the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Computer Club, with assistance from the AWM’s staff, CMU’s Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (FRSCI), the Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA), and New York based artist Cory Arcangel.

Warhol’s Amiga experiments were the products of a commission by Commodore International to demonstrate the graphic arts capabilities of the Amiga 1000 personal computer. Created by Warhol on prototype Amiga hardware in his unmistakable visual style, the recovered images reveal an early exploration of the visual potential of software imaging tools, and show new ways in which the preeminent American artist of the 20th century was years ahead of his time.

The impetus for the investigation came when Arcangel, a self-described “Warhol fanatic and lifelong computer nerd,” learned about Warhol’s Amiga experiments from the YouTube video of the 1985 Commodore Amiga product launch. Acting on a hunch, and with the support of CMOA curator Tina Kukielski, Arcangel approached the AWM in December 2011 regarding the possibility of restoring the Amiga hardware in the museum’s possession, and cataloging any files on its associated diskettes. In April 2012, he contacted Golan Levin, a CMU art professor and director of the FRSCI, a laboratory that supports “atypical, anti-disciplinary and inter-institutional” arts research. Offering a grant to support the investigation, Levin connected Cory with the CMU Computer Club, a student organization that had gained renown for its expertise in “retrocomputing,” or the restoration of vintage computers.

CMU Computer Club members determined that even reading the data from the diskettes entailed significant risk to the contents, and would require unusual tools and methodologies. By February 2013, in collaboration with collections manager Amber Morgan and other AWM personnel, the Club had completed a plan for handling the delicate disk media, and gathered at The Andy Warhol Museum to see if any data could be extracted. The Computer Club set up a cart of exotic gear, while a video crew from the Hillman Photography Initiative, under the direction of Kukielski, followed their progress....MORE

Urals Mint: 1 Kilogram Silver Putin Coin to Commemorate Crimea Annexation

From the BBC:

 

The company refers to the new coin as "1kg of nobility"

Commemorative coins bearing an image of Russian President Vladimir Putin are being minted at a Russian factory to mark the Kremlin's takeover of Crimea, it appears.

Putin's face is on one side of the 1kg (2.2lb) coin while the other shows a map of the Crimean Peninsula, Moscow daily Komsomolskaya Pravda reports. Factory director Vladimir Vasyuhin explains that by bringing the Crimean peninsula "back home", Putin had "demonstrated the qualities of a wise strategist and politician". In March, Russia formally took over control of Crimea from Ukraine, despite international sanctions.

The limited edition of 500 silver coins has been called The Gatherer of Russian Lands - a phrase traditionally associated with Ivan III - better known as Ivan the Great - who significantly expanded Russia's territories during his rule. The coins haven't been priced yet - some of them may be sold, although they won't be used as currency - and the factory says it is planning to present some of them to the Russian leadership.

This isn't the first time Putin has been featured on a coin, Russian website Snob.ru says. Ironically, in 2006 Ukraine launched a coin featuring the Russian president, marking 10 years of its national currency, the hryvnia. The coin was encrusted with precious stones and cost $500 (£300)....MORE

Following the EIA Storage Report: Natural Gas Futures Down, Natural Gas Producer's Stocks Up (FCG)

From the EIA:
Weekly Natural Gas Storage Report

for week ending April 18, 2014   |   Released: April 24, 2014 at 10:30 a.m.   |   Next Release: May 1, 2014

Summary
Working gas in storage was 899 Bcf as of Friday, April 18, 2014, according to EIA estimates. This represents a net increase of 49 Bcf from the previous week. Stocks were 831 Bcf less than last year at this time and 1,008 Bcf below the 5-year average of 1,907 Bcf. In the East Region, stocks were 470 Bcf below the 5-year average following net injections of 17 Bcf. Stocks in the Producing Region were 412 Bcf below the 5-year average of 805 Bcf after a net injection of 22 Bcf. Stocks in the West Region were 127 Bcf below the 5-year average after a net addition of 10 Bcf. At 899 Bcf, total working gas is below the 5-year historical range.

Note: The shaded area indicates the range between the historical minimum and maximum values for the weekly series from 2009 through 2013....MORE

The front futures are down 2.8 cents at $4.7020.
Meanwhile the equities continue to romp and play:
First Trust ISE-Revere Natural Gas Index ETF $22.82 Up 0.22 (+0.97%)

See also:
Why We Suggested Buying Natural Gas Equities (FCG)

Société Générale's Albert Edwards Is Worried

Yes, I know. Fire hot, water wet, Albert bearish, see also: tautonym.
From FT Alphaville:

Roar of the permabear

Albert Edwards, the SocGen strategist who first began advocating a big holding of long government bonds seventeen years ago, would like to bring to your attention news overlooked during the Easter break by giddy investors.

China’s Q1 GDP was highly significant, not for the headline slowdown in GDP growth to 7.4%, but because economy-wide inflation slumped further towards outright deflation. The continuing deterioration in Chinese economic data significantly increases the odds of global deflation being unleashed via an unavoidable Chinese devaluation. No wonder the markets prefer to look elsewhere!

More on that momentarily, but Albert would like to clarify his view on long bonds, that 17 year overweight.

I believe that on a 3-5 year view they will prove to be a toxic investment. I believe on that timescale QE will result in a rapid rise in inflation, with Japan probably leading the way. But it is not the QE to date that will cause an uncontrolled break-out of inflation, but what is to come in the years ahead (and incidentally, we fully acknowledge that QE has already produced rampant inflation, but in the financial markets rather than at the CPI level).

As he acknowledges, there’s no sign of price inflation yet and the hyper-inflation crowd have been dead wrong for five years now. Indeed, we are not there yet. What Albert expects is that over the next 6 to 18 months the global economy will slide into deflation, unable to tolerate the merest of monetary tightening and accompanied by financial bubbles bursting....MORE

All in all I'd have to say he sounds better than he did in February's "Société Générale's Albert Edwards Descends Into A Nightmare World of Dream Demons and Market Depravity" .

See also:
Jan. 15
More on The Mind of Société Générale's Albert Edwards
Jan. 14
"Live: The Albert Edwards Experience!"

"...The Sharing Economy’s Dirty Little Secret"

From the Wall Street Journal's The Accelerators blog:

Want some real talk? The sharing economy isn’t actually about sharing. The buyer doesn’t care if they’re sharing, renting, bartering or buying — so long as they get what they want at a good price. And the seller just wants to make some cash, preferably without working too hard.

A Few Case Studies
Don’t believe me? Let’s look at a few of the leading companies in the space formerly known as the sharing economy. Airbnb? Okay, they let you share (or rent) your apartment — fair enough. Lyft? That one’s harder. You’re renting your car, but, more than that, you’re selling your time. And Uber, Lyft’s archrival, is simply a better interface to limousine and car services — a massive industry that employs hundreds of thousands of drivers and has existed for decades.

It goes on from there. Looking through AngelList’s top 20 collaborative consumption startups (“collaborative consumption” is a synonym for the sharing economy), it’s clear that some of the early breakouts have a relationship to sharing that’s tenuous at best. Homejoy is a better interface to housecleaners. Rent the Runway is an online dress rental service. Gazelle is a convenient way to sell your old electronics. My company, Twice, is a marketplace for pre-owned fashion.

What These Startups Have in Common
Despite my semantic grumbling, however, some important commonalities truly do exist. First, in all cases, the allure for the seller (if there’s a seller) is easy access to cash. Sometimes it’s through an under-utilized asset, for example selling the clothes you no longer wear on Twice. Other times it’s through convenient scheduling and flexible hours, for example cleaning apartments on Homejoy. Second, the allure for the buyer (if there’s a buyer) is more flexible access to products and services. This, in turn, often reduces prices, since buyers can pay for only what they need. For example, ten years ago you could have employed a chauffeur to drive you around, but hardly anyone could afford it. Uber lets buyers access that convenience on-demand, so you only pay for what you use....MORE

Psst, it's not much of a secret.

Previously:
Dear Airbnb: Charging Rent to Someone Is Not "The Sharing" Economy

I usually side with the upstart against the incumbent but this guy sounds seriously manipulative.

The Economist on The Rise of the Sharing Economy
On Airbnb's $10 billion Valuation and the 'Sharing' Economy in General
"Airbnb Is Worth $10 Billion Because The Sharing Economy Is a Farce"

No, not much of a secret at all.

"'Cool Kid' Tech Stocks Are a Lightning Rod"

From Barron's Read This, Spike That:

The news that David Einhorn is shorting a basket of "bubble stocks" has triggered debate among pundits.

Professional investors and the financial media alike tend to closely read and discuss the quarterly musings of hedge-fund manager David Einhorn. 

But Einhorn's latest shareholder letter may be getting more attention than most. That's because the stockpicker who famously shorted Lehman Brothers well ahead of its September 2008 demise has written that he has shorted a basket of "bubble" stocks. 

In his letter released Tuesday, Einhorn, the manager of Greenlight Capital, didn't name the companies he's shorting. And I wouldn't venture a guess at what they might be. (He might have some interesting off-the-beaten-path mid- or small-cap names on his short list, for all I know.) And it's possible that all the names aren't purely in the tech space. However, in recent months, certain glamour tech stocks including Netflix (ticker: NFLX), Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR) have aroused the suspicions of many investors because of heady climbs followed by big falls, followed by modest comebacks in recent days. 

But even though Einhorn isn't naming names, his brief reference to a category of "cool kid" companies that are trading ahead of their true worth has become rich fodder for financial-media pundits. Tech stocks, after all, still fire the imaginations of writers like few other sectors, even though the industry is a shadow of its 1990s self.

What's interesting is that not all the pundits agree that there's a bubble in tech right now, given that many of these stocks fell by 20% or more in the past four or five weeks before a recent modest rebound. 

Jim Cramer may lead the list of critics of the bubble theory. In a piece for his Website, The Street, Cramer asks rather rhetorically: "How is it that we now bank with managers who tell us there is a tech bubble brewing without taking into account that the bubble has been bursting for a month now?"...MUCH MORE

We'll be back with some thoughts on April 12th's "Barron's Cover: Equities-The Highfliers Are Still Too High" in who's intro we referenced our "Cool Kids" trade, all but IBB are in the black, a better situation than 12 days ago:

It's been a week since Friday Apr. 4's "Mind the Gaps: A Lot Of Momentum Stocks A Starting to Look Interesting (NFLX; TWTR; XBI; FB; P)", the results are not going to earn anyone a bonus.
The initial group:

NFLX  337.38 -17.31
TWTR   42.96 -1.09
XBI     132.28 -6.90
FB         57.18 -2.31
P           27.82 -2.03

And a couple of "special situations" I started talking about on the following Monday:

TSLA  207.52
FSLR    68.00

Special because, in Tesla's case the $203.00 support seemed really important and in First Solar's case because, unlike most of the rest of the momo's, the stock had actually gained +25% over the prior month.

Here's last week's performance via Yahoo Finance:

Only one, Facebook, managed to turn a profit and even FSLR cracked and went into the red.
Not too impressive Mr. analyst guy.
Tesla dipped five bucks under support on Friday before rallying to close at $203.78 and remains the most interesting of the bunch. The rate of descent in the biotechs (XBI and IBB) has slowed but they are still dangerous, tradable for the nimble only.

Also, I have to repeat, we are still in a bull market, although you would be excused for believing otherwise based on the performance of the above group of misfits.

Given Piketty,Why Do Great Fortunes Disappear

It used to be war that did in the big piles of familial loot. The repeal of primogeniture and the introduction of death duties has also had a leveling effect.
Still though, there's nothing like having your land possessed (or repo'd) by force of arms to spread the wealth around.
From Bloomberg:

If Capital Grows This Fast, How Come Fortunes Disappear?

Michel Barthelemy Olivier, "Thé a l'Anglaise" via Getty Images

The great aristocratic fortunes of the 21st century rival those of Louis XV. And beheading is rarer.

Just how fast do fortunes grow? Andrew Carnegie started from essentially nothing to become the second-richest man in the United States by the time he’d reached the modern retirement age of 65. John Pierpont Morgan got to the top spot even faster, though he had the advantage of being born into wealth. In our own century, Bill Gates beat them both, becoming the richest man in the world before the age of 40.

If the descendants of Carnegie and Morgan and Gates (who has promised to give most of his wealth away) and Carlos Slim bank their fortunes and let it accumulate over the generations, just how much of the world will they own?

The question comes up now because of one book that has seized the attention of the world of economists and those who interpret them: Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century.” The grand summation of the worldwide problem of inequality has gotten a reception that the New York Times’s Jennifer Schuessler describes as “rapturous.”

Together with his frequent collaborator Emmanuel Saez, Piketty has probably done as much as anyone to map wealth and income in the world today. So the encomia are understandable, but as Bloomberg View’s Clive Crook argues, many folks have seem to overlook the leaps from Piketty’s careful scholarship to his big claims. Some of those claims, like Piketty’s accounting of how fast capital expands, seem downright strange.

Which brings us back to that question about how fast fortunes grow. The central claim of Piketty’s book is that the period of diminishing inequality that we saw in the 20th century is a historical aberration, and we are entering a period in which capitalism returns to its natural state of affairs: an increasing concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. That contention is based on a formula that’s fast becoming famous: When the rate of return on capital is greater than the overall growth of the economy — when r>g, in Piketty’s formula — wealth becomes progressively more concentrated.
Piketty believes this was the the case through most of history. To illustrate this, he starts off the book with a long, erudite, and charming discussion of Honoré de Balzac and Jane Austen, demonstrating how for many years it was an accepted rule of thumb that owners of land or bonds would see their capital appreciate at a rate of about 5 percent a year.

For Piketty, that 5 percent rate of growth routinely cited by Balzac and Austen is quite close to the mark; his own calculations yield a number somewhere in the 4 or 5 percent range for the period in which they worked. And that, unfortunately, is a lot faster than most economies grow. Some of that capital, of course, gets spent to maintain the lifestyles of the rentiers. But the rest gets reinvested. If the holders of capital manage to reinvest, say, three-fifths of their money (a number that Piketty takes as reasonable assumption), they will see their fortunes grow 3 percent a year. That’s much faster than economies expanded through most of history. Actually, it’s faster than just about any economy expands except during short and anomalous bursts (like China today or Europe in the period 1950-1980) — and faster than U.S. and European economies are likely to expand in the next century.

The 5 percent returns on capital that Piketty sees as the historic norm have to come from somewhere. And if the income of the 1% (or really 0.1%) is not coming from economic growth, it has to be coming out of squeezing the share of the 99%. That’s a neat and powerful argument you don’t need to be a professional economist to understand. It hinges, though, on that rate of return on capital, a number that frankly seems hard to support.

On Balzac, let’s defer to Thomas Piketty. But it’s not totally clear that on this subject French novels are more authoritative than Russian plays, in which the position of the rentier is more precarious. Not every landowner could sit back and collect a 5 percent risk-free return on the value of an estate; if that was the case, Anton Chekhov’s Anya and Varya would still be sitting pretty in their cherry orchard....MORE

HT: The Big Picture