With interest rates at embarrassingly low levels and with stocks at all-time highs, many investors have turned to key dividend-paying stocks to generate income and hopefully to achieve long-term upside. The week of August 12 brought the Merrill Lynch RIC Report, which is effectively a culmination of the firm’s top research ideas, views and advice for clients. The one common theme throughout this report was where to find yields. Before getting into stocks and sectors, it is important to realize that roughly 25% of the bonds in developed nations had negative yields. That is effectively a safety tax, and it erodes capital through time.

Pfizer, MetLife and Other Merrill Lynch Equity Income Portfolio Dividend Stock Picks (NYSE: MET) (NYSE: PFE) - 24/7 Wall St.

The burgeoning field of bioelectronic medicine has been buzzing recently with Google affiliate Verily (previously Google Life Sciences) and medical company GlaxoSmithKline joining forces in a $715 million deal to launch Galvani Bioelectronics. By tapping into our bodies’ natural electrical signals, these tiny, implantable devices have the potential to support a new class of therapies known as “electroceuticals.” A team of engineers from UC Berkeley have made a breakthrough in the emerging field by creating tiny, wireless sensors they’ve called “ultrasonic neural dust,” which provide biometric information in real time. They say this is the first device of its kind to monitor neural activity in living animals. The minimally invasive devices may help treat disorders ranging from inflammation to epilepsy. A report detailing their study was published last week in the journal Neuron.

"Neural Dust" Sensors Monitor Neurons' Electrical Signals | Digital Trends

Something's missing in the US fast-casual sector. Flashy and aromatic flavors found in Mexican food and Asian cuisine are proving immensely popular. Even more adventurous fare, such as Middle Eastern and African, is on the rise. But of all the varied and respected global cuisines, there's one glaring omission from the US restaurant market: French food, according to Nation's Restaurant News.

Why French cuisine is absent from chains - Business Insider

But a big, "revolutionary" change may be coming in 2018. "Revolutionary iPad model likely to be introduced in 2018F at the earliest, with radical changes in form factor design & user behavior on adoption of flexible AMOLED panel," Kuo wrote. Kuo has previously said — and Apple suppliers have hinted — that Apple's iPhone is getting a big redesign in 2017 with an edge-to-edge screen, much smaller bezels, and OLED display technology.

Ming Chi Kuo's iPad predictions: 2018 redesign and 10.5-inch version - Business Insider

The answer, I’d suggest, is that we look for surprising successful predictions. General relativity got its big boost when light did, in fact, bend as predicted. The theory of a natural rate of unemployment got a big boost when the Phillips curve turned into clockwise spirals, as predicted, during the stagflation of the 1970s. So has there been anything like that in recent years? Yes: economists who knew and still took seriously good old-fashioned Hicksian IS-LM type analysis made some strong predictions after the financial crisis that were very much at odds with what lay commentators, and quite a few economists, were saying. They – OK, we – declared that with interest rates near zero massive increases in the monetary base would not cause high inflation, that large budget deficits would not drive interest rates up or crowd out private investment, and that fiscal multipliers would be positive, in fact more than one, and would be considerably larger than estimates based on non-liquidity-trap episodes suggested. And all of that came to pass. Those of us who knew our Hicks, directly or indirectly, seem to have had a real advantage over those who didn’t. Can you say anything comparable about DSGE? Were there any interesting predictions from DSGE models that were validated by events? If there were, I’m not aware of it. Yet even while failing to offer any measurable gains in insight, DSGE had the effect of crowding out the stuff that actually did work.

The conclusion is that without an external economic shock it is hard to see policymakers being prepared to take dramatic, fiscal action to jumpstart the global economy and bounce it out of a financial repression defined by low and falling real yields to one that at least initially is defined by rising nominal yields through higher inflation expectations. Ironically the shock that is needed would require a collapse in risk assets for policymakers to then really panic and attempt dramatic fiscal stimulus.

Deutsche Bank stock market collapse fiscal stimulus - Business Insider

Billionaire George Soros isn’t waiting around to see if this year’s surge in gold-mining shares will last. Soros Fund Management LLC, which took a $263.7 million stake in Barrick Gold Corp. in the first quarter, cut its holdings in the world’s biggest producer of the metal by 94 percent in the ensuing three months, a U.S. regulatory filing showed Monday. After climbing 169 percent in the year through June, its best-ever performance for the period, Barrick shares have slipped from a three-year high reached last month.

Soros Cashes In as Barrick Gold Posts Best-Ever First Half Rally - Bloomberg

When you follow the money over the past week (source: Zero Hedge quoting Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett), you see that the crowd loves stocks and bonds). Investors are still piling into ETFs ($10 billion inflow) while selling managed mutual funds ($3.5 billion outflows).  Bonds: $9.8 billion inflows (17 of 19 weeks inflows) Precious metals ($0.9 billion inflows (10 of 11 weeks inflow) Money Market: $3.6 billion outflows, the largest in seven weeks. Unless there is an unanticipated “black swan” event, the market is expected to trend higher until the November election. Conventional wisdom also says the Fed will not rock the boat until after the election (if at all). Billions of dollars are betting on this outcome. If you believe the sentiment indicators, however, the market is setting up for a major retreat. (“Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard that before,” many investors complain as they continue to buy at all-time highs.) What do you believe?

Here’s the safest place for your money with stocks at record highs - MarketWatch

Vox recently analyzed data from 35 years’ worth of wedding announcements in The New York Times, and found that “online” now ranks as the third most common way people meet — second only to “school” and “mutual friend.” In the older-than-40 age range, it creeps into the second spot. Even more remarkable than the speed with which such services became mainstream is our willingness to fess up: Maybe it wasn’t so much a meet cute as it was a photo swipe while sitting on the john. And you know what? Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that.

Tinder Will Look Quaint Next to the Future of Digital Dating | Digital Trends

Of the 30 fastest 100m times ever, nine – including the top three – are by Bolt. The other 21 were run by athletes who have tested positive at some point for doping.

Usain Bolt: the human race's ultimate speed freak | Sport | The Guardian

China says it has launched the world’s first quantum satellite, a project Beijing hopes will enable it to build a coveted “hack-proof” communications system with potentially significant military and commercial applications. Xinhua, Beijing’s official news service, said Micius, a 600kg satellite that is nicknamed after an ancient Chinese philosopher, “roared into the dark sky” over the Gobi desert at 1.40am local time on Tuesday, carried by a Long March-2D rocket.

China launches quantum satellite for 'hack-proof' communications | World news | The Guardian

George Soros’ family-office hedge fund, Soros Fund Management, increased its bearish bet on the stock market. During the second quarter, Soros bought put options on just over 1.9 million shares on the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY), making it so he owns puts on just over 4 million shares of the exchange-traded fund. It’s his fund’s biggest holding in the filing too. Puts are used for a downside bet. Buying these S&P 500 puts, essentially gives Soros the right, but not the obligation, to sell them in the future.  In other words, if the S&P 500 or the ETF that tracks falls, Soros should make a nice profit.

Billionaire Soros' namesake fund doubled down against the S&P 500

Right now, for just $140, you can get your hands on one of the most powerful gene-editing tools known to science. You don’t even have to go out of your way, either. The ODIN do-it-yourself CRISPR kit, as it’s called, will ship it to your front door. The project is the brainchild of ex-NASA scientist Josiah Zayner, who left the agency earlier this year to sell CRISPR kits from his Castro Valley, California apartment. After raising nearly $71,500 on Indiegogo, he turned to the ODIN full time.

Mail-order CRISPR Kits Want to Democratize Gene Editing | Digital Trends

Researchers at University College London have created an algorithm capable of taking a sample of hand-written text and imitating it, allowing a computer to write in the style of a real person. We’re not talking about a simple “handwritten” typeface, either. The text turned out by the algorithm created by Tom Haines and his fellow UCL researchers is authentic enough that human judges are unable to tell the difference.

Smart Handwriting Algorithm Mimics Your Chicken Scratch | Digital Trends

The problem is that most of the time, most people will be unable to see that detail on their 4K UHD screen. Why not? Assuming 20/20 normal vision, the human eye is not capable of picking up the detail that is present in a 4K image at the distance people usually sit from their TV screen.

4K Resolution Rules TV Screens But Look, The Emperor Has No Clothes - Forbes

Gordon wants to buy the September 70-strike calls and sell the September 75-strike calls for 79 cents, or $79 per options contract. If XLE closes trading on Sept. 16 at or above $75, Gordon stands to make a profit of $421 per contract. Since his $79 would become $500, that would represent a profit of 533 percent. But Gordon has also planned out what he will do if the chart doesn't go his way. "If XLE were to break back below $67, I'm going to get out of this trade and protect what premium we have left to protect that risk," he said.

Here’s how to make 533% by betting on ‘best sector to play’: Trader

European leaders and markets have something in common when it comes to acknowledging financial and economic risk emanating from the continent, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told CNBC on Wednesday. They have their heads in the sand. Following a brief dip in the wake of Britain's vote in June to leave the European Union, U.K. stocks have moved sharply higher, and U.S. equities have struck new all-time highs. But markets are underpricing risks that include growing distrust of pro-EU centrist leaders amid widespread youth unemployment and a euro that has been proven a failure, Stiglitz said on CNBC's "Squawk Box."

Market underpricing risk in post-Brexit world, says Nobel-winner Joseph Stiglitz

One way to isolate trends and trading opportunities is to look for trend channels. A trend channel occurs when the price of a stock moves back and forth between an upper and lower trendline, while making overall upward progress (in the case of an upward-sloping trend channel). Stocks moving within a trend channel have shown a tendency to bounce off support (lower trendline) and then rally toward the upper trendline. This provides general entry and exit points for the stock. In strong trends these channels can last for years, providing multiple trades. When taking a trade there are no assurances the channel will continue, so the profit potential on each trade should be greater than the risk, as it is with the trades discussed below. That way, even winning 40% or 50% of multiple trades will produce an overall profit.

Time to Buy These Stocks at Support (RAI, XRS) | Investopedia

Because of how we typically construct the input index, if we understate labor’s role, then we overstate capital’s role. This means we falsely attribute some productivity growth to capital accumulation, and hence measured TFP growth is lower because of our overstatement of capital’s role. As the labor share falls, this exacerbates the issue. Because capital tends to accumulate faster than labor (except maybe not any more?), the drag on measured TFP growth from overstating capital’s role is bigger than the boost to measured TFP growth from understating labor’s role. So as labor’s share of revenue falls, so does measured TFP growth.

More on Measured Productivity and the Labor Share | Dietrich Vollrath

Wayde van Niekerk is no ordinary athlete, and not just because he is coached by a 74-year-old great-grandmother. In winning gold at the World Championships a year ago he got to within 0.30 seconds of Michael Johnson's 400m world record set 17 years ago. But that is like saying you have climbed Everest when you are sitting round a camp fire at base camp. To break that record and run 43.03 seconds as he did in Rio is jogging up to the summit without oxygen. To do it from lane eight, blind to the forces pushing you on from inside, alone with the lactic and the fire in your lungs, adds another rich layer of wonder. To athletics fans, Bolt's defeat of Justin Gatlin 25 minutes later could only be an anti-climax.

Rio 2016: Usain Bolt, Wayde van Niekerk and Team GB shine on 'impossible' night - BBC Sport

There is evidence for a reduction in the volatility of labor productivity growth after 1982. This is what is sometimes referred to as the 'Great Moderation'. There is weaker evidence for a reduction in the mean of labor productivity growth. Even during the 1950s and 1960s there were many years when labor productivity growth was negative, sometimes by as much as 2% per year. In the post 1980 period there are fewer years with large positive increases in labor productivity, but also fewer years with large drops. Has productivity growth fallen permanently? The jury is still out.

Has Labor Productivity Growth Fallen Permanently? — Roger E. A. Farmer

Initial jobless claims fell more than expected. The claims, announced Thursday, came in at 262,000, below economists' expectations of a slight dip to 265,000. Claims have now been below 300,000 for 76 straight weeks — the longest streak since 1970. As Jefferies' chief financial economist, Ward McCarthy, noted, there have been only three times since 1980 when claims came in below 300,000 for a substantial period of time: September 1988 to February 1989 February 1999 to October 2000 January 2006 to April 2006

Initial jobless claims fall, continuing 76-week streak below 300,000 - Business Insider

Do you sit all day? If yes, you are damaging your body by doing nothing. Erica Fritz, a physical therapist and the manager of the Orthopedic Physical Therapy Center at Hospital for Special Surgery, says office workers should stand more and do these stretches in order to alleviate the pain from sitting all day.

How to stay in shape at a desk job - Business Insider

For while the U.S. has done reasonably well at recovering from the 2007-2009 financial crisis, longer-term economic growth is looking very disappointing. Some of this is just demography, as baby boomers retire and growth in the working-age population slows down. But there has also been a somewhat mysterious decline in labor force participation among prime-age adults and a sharp drop in productivity growth. The result, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is that the growth rate of potential G.D.P. — what the economy could produce at full employment — has declined from around 3.5 percent per year in the late 1990s to around 1.5 percent now. And some people I respect believe that trying to get that rate back up should be a big goal of policy.

Wisdom, Courage and the Economy - The New York Times

Ford Motor Co plans to offer a fully automated driverless vehicle for commercial ride-sharing in 2021, the automaker announced Tuesday, expanding its efforts in driverless cars and ride sharing - two areas where rivals have already made inroads. To help speed development of self-driving cars, Chief Executive Mark Fields said Ford is hiking investments in Silicon Valley technology firms, tripling its investment in semi-autonomous systems, and more than doubling the size of its Palo Alto research team while expanding its campus in Silicon Valley.

Ford plans self-driving car for ride share fleets in 2021 | Reuters

The single most important initiative that McMillon did was to pay people more. That's right, better pay. Higher benefits. Substantially better than many other companies. That's causing a monster chain reaction that's keeping good employees rather than losing them, say, to Target (TGT) , or to a fast-food company or any other national chain that could cherry-pick Walmart's best. It's all part of that plan announced last year to boost wages by $2.7 billion over several years time, to get the wages above the national average -- an amazing thing for this gigantic company. Why is this so important? Because the biggest cost to a place like Walmart is training. If you are constantly training new people after the good ones leave, you very well could be spending away all of your gross margins.

Jim Cramer -- Walmart Pays Employees Better and That's Paying Off - TheStreet

Recent research finds that traders looking at prices use parts of the brain associated with reading other people.

Neuroscience May Help Train Your Brain for Trading - Bloomberg

A surge in the yen weighed on Japanese index futures, which tracked losses in U.S. shares after Federal Reserve officials reignited speculation over an interest-rate increase this year. Oil was above $46 a barrel.

Yen Breaking 100 Damps Japan Stock Outlook With Crude Above $46 - Bloomberg

Don't look now, but the Fed is quietly unwinding QE. As seen in the figure below, the Fed's share of marketable treasuries has been shrinking: To be clear, this is a passive unwinding of QE. The Fed's treasury holdings have not changed, but the stock of marketable treasuries has grown. Nonetheless, this is still an unwinding according to the portfolio channel of monetary policy. This channel says the Fed's taking of safe treasury assets from the public would force investors to rebalance their portfolios toward riskier assets. This rebalancing, in turn, would reduce risk premiums, lower interest rates, push up asset prices, and help shore up the recovery.

Macro and Other Market Musings: The Unwinding of QE Has Begun

The Economist Intelligence Unit report, which ranks the best and worst cities to live in the world, found that 10 cities in Western Europe suffered falls in liveability in the wake of attacks in Paris and Brussels.

EIU Global Liveability Ranking: Worst cities to live in the world - Business Insider

Partly because the state charges too little for the guarantees it offers, taxpayers are subsidising housing borrowers to the tune of up to $150 billion a year, or 1% of GDP. Since the government mortgage machine need not make a profit or have safety buffers, well-run private firms cannot compete, so many banks have withdrawn from making mortgages. If there is another crisis the taxpayer will still have to foot the bill, which could be 2-4% of GDP, not far off the cost of the 2008-09 bank bail-out.

Nightmare on Main Street | The Economist

In his book Your Brain at Work, author David Rock says that the average office worker is interrupted every three minutes, and recovering from this disconnect is costly. In fact, it takes us an average of 23 minutes to fully return to a task after an interruption. That said, discoveries in neuroscience also confirm what we’ve always known: our brains aren’t wired to concentrate intensely for eight hours straight. They get tired! Our minds work in cycles of activity and downtime designed to keep us alert and responsive to our surroundings. But harnessing those cycles to promote productivity proves challenging.

How Working Long Hours Is Killing Your Productivity

Your view on the economy affects most of your decisions in life, from how you invest and how you vote, to how much you spend in restaurants. So it’s too bad that a lot of what you “know” about the economy is probably just plain wrong. Think I’m wrong? Well, here’s my challenge to you: See how many of the following six widespread economic myths you believe.

Six myths about the U.S. economy that are just plain wrong - MarketWatch

A 4:52 mile time may seem like an impossibility to most. It also seemed to be out of the realm for Jacqueline Katzman, a cross country and track & field runner from Cornell University. Until she used this psychological trick to get out from behind the pack.  Check out Katzman's other tricks to get out there and start running.

This simple trick helped this runner run a 4:52 mile - Business Insider

Now Microsoft has won a reputation as the trendsetter in tablets, with companies like Dell and HP following suit. And when Apple announced the iPad Pro in late 2015, the whole world couldn't help but notice that, with its keyboard cover and big screen, it looked more a lot like the Microsoft Surface Pro 4. Last year also saw the launch of the Microsoft Surface Book, the company's very first actual laptop, to positive reviews, with Wired calling it "the most exciting Windows laptop in years."  Microsoft? A hardware company?

Microsoft CVP Panos Panay on the history of Microsoft Surface - Business Insider