Links for 4/13

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For the next installment of his "Best For Your Buck" series, Cramer offered up his pick for the best stock trading in the $10 to $50 range. That honor went to GT Advanced Technology (GTAT), a stock that's up 84% so far in 2014. Cramer said GTAT should only be bought for speculation, which means investors mustn't buy all at once and must use limit orders to avoid chasing shares higher. What makes GTAT so exciting? The company was primarily a solar and LED equipment supplier up until a few months ago, when the company's sapphire technology caught the eye of Apple (AAPL), which already uses sapphire, the second-toughest material on Earth behind diamonds, for its fingerprint readers and camera lenses. Apple offered GTAT a $578 million loan five months ago, presumably to allow the company to significantly ramp up its sapphire production with a new plant and supply Apple with more sapphire for its products. If that happens, Cramer said shares of GTAT would be worth significantly more than they trade today as 2014 could become the year the company becomes profitable.

Page 2 - Jim Cramer's 'Mad Money' Recap: Blame China, Greece for the Meltdown - TheStreet

Some of Wall Street and Silicon Valley’s best minds are packing it all in for greener pastures. And they’ve found those pastures in…trailer parks. “Trailer parks have unusual economics,” says Anthony Effinger, the author of an article on the topic for Bloomberg Markets. “It’s a supply and demand curve that’s super attractive to investors.”

You won't believe this hot new investment 'vehicle' | Breakout - Yahoo Finance

If you want to know where the euro is headed, look to Texas. That’s the home of Prestige Economics LLC, the fewer-than-10-person researcher and consultancy that proved to be the most-accurate forecaster of the euro-dollar pair last quarter among more than 50 firms worldwide in data compiled by Bloomberg. Prestige was also No. 1 for the pound-dollar and dollar-Swiss franc, while coming in at No. 2 for euro-yen.

Texan Discovers Key to Euro Going Against Consensus: Currencies - Bloomberg

it’s already quite easy to find examples of people who died because their states refused to expand Medicaid. According to one recent study, the death toll from Medicaid rejection is likely to run between 7,000 and 17,000 Americans each year.

Economist's View: Paul Krugman: Health Care Nightmares

Prices for solar PV modules delivered to the U.S. by Chinese suppliers could increase by as much as 20 percent by the end of 2014 due to supply constraints, rising input costs and the ongoing U.S.-China solar trade case, according to GTM Research's new report on solar pricing

Chinese Solar Module Prices in the US May Increase Up to 20% in 2014 : Greentech Media

After the Tohoku earthquake in March 2011, Japan was in a seemingly impossible situation. A tremendous amount of conventional generation capacity, including the entire nuclear fleet, was unavailable, and the country faced the risk of power cuts during summer consumption peaks. But miraculously, or seemingly so, in just a few short weeks Japan managed to avert the rolling power cuts that many believed inevitable. Even more impressive, the Japanese have turned these emergency measures into lasting solutions.

How Japan Replaced Half Its Nuclear Capacity With Efficiency : Greentech Media

Let's dispense with all form. Here it is.

1. Something is very wrong with the market when we get strong news out of the economy and interest rates plummet. That's a fear of an unknown unknown. What's the point of buying when there is something lurking?
2. When interest rates plummet, the banks plummet, particularly now that the short rates aren't going higher. Banks are the linchpin of all big rallies, and we have lost them.
3. There is no price where the insiders won't sell these extended techs with no dividends or earnings.
4. We have had a big run from the bottom, almost a triple, so it has to be out of gas and extended. It was just high-multiple stocks. Now it is every stock.
5. We've seen this movie before in 2000. In fact, it was this week to the week that we were really beginning to thrash with the really awful dot-coms -- the equivalent to what has come public like FireEye (FEYE) and Splunk (SPLK) -- crashing daily and the insiders still selling no matter what the case.
6. Japan's a disaster.
7. China's a disaster.
8. The world's being kept afloat by central bank fiddling.
9. The initial public offering flow doesn't stop.
10. Earnings will be terrible.

There, I made it. It's very easy to stand by. In fact, it's so easy that, perhaps, it's too easy, too obvious.

Jim Cramer: The Bear Case in 10 Easy Lessons - TheStreet

An Eleanor is 100 times more likely to go to Oxford than a Jade. However, there is no evidence that it's the names causing such a marked discrepancy, rather than other factors they represent, Clark says. Different names are popular among different social classes, and these groups have different opportunities and goals.

BBC News - Does a baby's name affect its chances in life?

The country's homicide rate is associated with a stable and prosperous society with low inequality and high levels of development. Young Japanese males now commit only a tenth of the homicides committed by their predecessors in 1955, and the age and sex distribution of victims tend to be uniform across age groups. This has been attributed by some researchers to, amongst other factors, extremely low levels of gun ownership (1 in 175 households), a greater chance of detection (according to police data, 98 per cent of homicide cases are solved), the rejection of violence after the Second World War, the growth of affluence without the accompanying concentrations of poverty common in many highly developed countries, and the stigma of arrest for any crime in Japanese society.

Why Japan's Murder Rate Is So Low - Business Insider

the U.S. saw more than 12,000 firearm-related homicides in 2008, while Japan had only 11.

Why Japan's Murder Rate Is So Low - Business Insider

First there are the debts: government debts and household debts across the developed world. Put simply they are still too high. Bank debts in the eurozone and corporate debts in many emerging-market economies are similarly at risk from small financial shocks.

The IMF Moving Toward Global Economic Catastrophe - Business Insider

banks in 2006 had borrowings worth 32 times their balance sheets and now "only" about 21 times – the problem had shifted to exotic derivatives, which accounted for $19tn of bank portfolios in 2006, but total $31tn today. Then there is the fact that 90% of trades in New York are generated by algorithm-driven computers, making the financial system prone to extreme volatility.

The IMF Moving Toward Global Economic Catastrophe - Business Insider

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“Here,” says Hwang, pointing to two women in the center of the group. Both had the same job at the same semiconductor factory, on the same line, standing side by side at the same workstation, dipping computer chips into the same vat of chemicals. Both got a particularly aggressive form of the blood cancer known as acute myeloid leukemia. One was his daughter, Yu-mi. In South Korea, only about 3 out of every 100,000 people die of leukemia.

Deaths at Samsung Alter South Korea's Corporate-Is-King Mindset - Businessweek

CME Group Inc. (CME), owner of the world’s largest futures market, was sued by users who allege the company sold order information to high-frequency traders ahead of other market participants.

CME Gave High-Frequency Traders Peek at Market, Lawsuit Claims - Bloomberg

European Union lawmakers are poised to approve some of the toughest restrictions in the world on high-frequency trading, the first crackdown in the aftermath of Michael Lewis’s latest book, “Flash Boys.”

High-Frequency Traders Set for Curbs as EU Reins In Flash Boys - Bloomberg

Swiss and international regulators probably will ask banks to hold more capital in relation to total assets after the U.S. raised leverage-ratio requirements for the biggest lenders, UBS AG (UBSN) Chairman Axel Weber said.

UBS Chairman Weber Sees Leverage-Ratio Rules Tightening - Bloomberg

But one thing that's remained constant is Techmeme, the must-read site for anyone who wants to know what's happening in the technology industry.

Gabe Rivera Techmeme Interview - Business Insider

The chart above, from Deutsche Bank strategist Keith Parker, shows the extent to which fund positioning has helped fuel the recent decline in the stock market. "Performance over the last month across stocks and sectors has been driven by position covering," says Parker in a report on recent investor positioning and flows.

Momentum Stocks Might Not Rebound - Business Insider

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"Each of the market reversals of the past few weeks has in common that they represented widely held positions — long equities, overweight small caps, overweight tech, underweight emerging markets, and short duration," says Loeys. "If there were greater worries about the economy or other downside risks, then we should have seen the dollar rise, credit and swap spreads widen, and emerging markets underperform. Correlations across risk assets should have risen. None of this has happened. There is no breadth to this sell-off."

Momentum Stocks Might Not Rebound - Business Insider

Tedi Kumaedi earns about $87 a month selling instant coffee from his rusty bicycle near Jakarta’s stock exchange. At nearby TechnoBike, they’ve sold out of $25,000 Lamborghini-branded bicycles.

Lamborghini Bikes Show Indonesia Inequality Risk: Southeast Asia - Bloomberg

The wealth gap in the world’s fourth most populous country is widening, threatening President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s goal for reducing poverty before he steps down after a decade in power. It’s also restraining growth in Southeast Asia’s largest economy, as consumption by the poorest half of the country stagnated last year, according to the World Bank.

Lamborghini Bikes Show Indonesia Inequality Risk: Southeast Asia - Bloomberg

Lithium-ion batteries are just about everywhere—they power almost all smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Yet Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, says he intends to build a factory in the United States three years from now that will more than double the world’s total lithium-ion battery production.

Will Musk’s Gigafactory Gamble Pay Off? | MIT Technology Review

Now for the first time since 1995 the Masters is Woods-less thanks to Tiger's back injury, and the tournament is taking a TV ratings hit to the tune of 28% (in the first day coverage on ESPN). Can golf survive without Tiger?

Masters viewership down 28%, can golf survive without Tiger Woods? | Breakout - Yahoo Finance

Solar is now around 1 percent of global electricity generation. But that might mean we’re further along than you’d think.

Are We Halfway to Market Dominance for Solar? : Greentech Media

First Solar’s ambitious roadmap sees the company exceeding standard silicon panel efficiency by the end of 2015, according to GTM Research’s PV Pulse.

Could First Solar’s Thin Film Beat Silicon PV on Efficiency? : Greentech Media

Thanks to the world’s largest retailer, another large block of space in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, will go on the market at a time when there is generally too much supply.  The problem is especially pronounced in the city’s premium office market.  Hangzhou’s Grade A office buildings at the end of 2013 had, according to Jones Lang LaSalle, an average occupancy rate of 30%.

China Property Collapse Has Begun - Forbes

Google Inc has acquired solar-powered drone maker Titan Aerospace as the Web search giant ramps up plans to deliver wireless Internet access to remote parts of the world.

Google to buy drone-maker Titan Aerospace - Yahoo Finance

On Friday the government of Lanzhou, China, informed its 3.6 million residents that their drinking water would be carcinogenic for the next 24 hours. Benzene, a chemical used in plastics manufacture, was the immediate cause, but that wasn't even the most horrifying revelation to come from this crisis.

If You Thought China's Air Was Bad, Try the Water - Bloomberg View

In a new note to clients, Goldman Sachs analysts reiterate their prediction that gold will fall to $1,050/oz within 12 months.

GOLDMAN: Gold Prices Will Fall To $1,050 - Business Insider

Neuroscience based music company focus@will said listening to the right kind of music can help you retain information and lengthen your attention span. Music which doesn’t connect with your emotions can boost your focus levels and cut out distractions, focus@will said.

Neuroscience Music - Business Insider

French stocks could see a 60 percent rally over the next two years, thanks to the country's long-overdue economic reforms, a Société Générale analyst told CNBC. The CAC 40 will hit 7,000 in 2016, surpassing its all-time high of 6,922 of 14 years ago, according to Alain Bokobza, head of global asset allocation at Societe Generale.

French stocks to see 60% rally on Hollande reforms: Soc Gen

The struggle to fix problems caused by the Heartbleed bug may slow browsing speeds, warns analysis firm Netcraft. The sheer number of sites refreshing key credentials may trigger delays, reported the Washington Post.

BBC News - Heartbleed fallout may 'slow' browsing speeds

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Hayman Capital's Kyle Bass believes Wall Street's recent declines in the biotech and social media sector, which spread to global stock markets last week, shows cracks in the Japanese economy.

Why Japanese bonds look 'terrible' after Wall Street selloff: hedge funder Kyle Bass — CNBC

According to data from smartphone retailer Carphone Warehouse, the Samsung Galaxy S5 broke sales records over the initial days of it going on sale after its April 11 release date. Over those two days, Galaxy S5 sales were 150 per cent higher than that achieved by the Samsung Galaxy S4 for the same period last year.

Samsung Galaxy S5 sales break records over launch weekend - News - Trusted Reviews

A massive private island in the Bahamas — which comes with its own airport code and 2,700-foot landing strip — will be auctioned off next month in New York City.

Private Innocence Island Bahamas For Auction - Business Insider

What begins as an exception soon becomes the norm. A product launch, a trade show, a sprint. Sometimes the work doesn't fit into the time allotted. Often lack of planning is the culprit. Regardless of the reason, employees inevitably are called upon to save the project, sacrificing their personal lives for the good of the company. When this becomes standard practice, everyone loses. The employee, the employee's family and the company all suffer. People burn out. Kids don't get to see their parents before bedtime. Turnover skyrockets.

Why You Should Only Work 40 Hours A Week - Business Insider

There are numerous advantages to installing an SSD into your PC or laptop. A Windows installation on an SSD will boot in mere seconds rather than the minute or two it can take for an older, neglected hard disk to get ready for use, and applications installed to the SSD exhibit similarly rapid loading times – handy for both work and play. SSDs can also be smaller than hard disks, which means they’re often able to fit where platter-based drives can’t reach. This makes them ideal for ultra-compact desktop PCs or of course the ever-slimming world of laptops. SSDs also have no moving parts, which makes them tougher and more reliable than traditional hard disks.

Best SSD Test: Samsung 840 EVO vs 840 PRO and Crucial M550 - Opinion - Trusted Reviews

You can build a strong business—with loyal employees, happy customers, healthy margins and manageable stress—without working more than 40 hours a week. How do I know? Because at my company, BambooHR, we've built a rapidly growing global business on the merits of an "anti-workaholic" policy.

Why You Should Only Work 40 Hours A Week - Business Insider

So make the long-term unemployed more desperate; so what? They can’t do anything to increase the amount of work demanded, and in fact their reduced purchasing power reduces labor demand. You might imagine that the long-term unemployed, through their desperation, might take jobs away from existing workers — but it’s not easy to see how that might work, and there’s no evidence that this is happening. So the point is that as long as you understood that we have a demand-constrained economy, you knew that cutting off the unemployed would produce all pain, no gain. And your prediction was right.

Supply, Demand, and Unemployment Benefits - NYTimes.com - NYTimes.com

There is a fundamental and inescapable truth: the speeds that have been achieved are useful only to extract value from the modern process of the financial markets, not from investment.

The Real Cost of High Frequency Trading | Demos

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One big problem with the U.S. economy is that sectors that should exist to facilitate the productivity and success of American society have been turned into profit centers that do the opposite, funneling resources in the wrong direction. Finance is the leading example, of course: Wall Street should be a boring place that mobilizes capital to serve the real economy, kind of like a utility. Instead, it's become a place to get rich by inventing fancy financial products and services -- which mainly benefit the middlemen peddling them as opposed to creating more national wealth.

Healthcare is another leading example. In most other advanced countries, being a doctor or running a hospital is a nice job, but it's not a way to become a multimillionaire. The healthcare system exists in those countries to ensure a healthy and productive populace -- and is typically run for under 10 percent of GDP. Here things are different: Healthcare is a not a utility that operates efficiently in the background. It's a splashy industry where a fair number of ambitious people are jockeying to make a fortune.

Downsize the Doctors | Demos

Market rallies can cause as much consternation as corrections and pullbacks. Every time there is a significant rally I'm often asked to parse the "truth" behind it to declare exactly what kind of indication it is.

Here's the Truth Behind the Recent Market Rally - TheStreet

For Saracen Mineral Holdings (SAR) Ltd., which agreed in January to buy OAO GMK Norilsk Nickel’s mothballed Thunderbox mines in Australia, the Golden Orb weaving spiders are the first challenge before production can resume next year.

Spider-Infested Mine to Reopen as Saracen Chases New Gold Rush - Bloomberg

This 15.6-inch clamshell features a 3,840x2,160 native resolution, the same found on the current generation of big screen 4K televisions. That trumps even the highest better-than-HD screens we've seen in laptops over the past year. Those models, from the Retina MacBook Pro to the Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro to Toshiba's own Kirabook, have resolutions that range from 2,560x1,440 to 3,200x1,800.

Toshiba Satellite P55t (2014) Preview - CNET

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Leggings and sweatpants, once thought exclusively to be for the gym, have now surpassed jeans as the pants of choice…at least for teens. Activewear now comprises 28% of teen apparel purchases, up from 6% in 2008. And "Athleisure" wear (an industry term for athletic wear that can be worn away from the gym) makes up 14.4% of purchases.

Teens abandon denim for this new "It" pant | Daily Ticker - Yahoo Finance

The rate of uninsured is dropping significantly more in states that have set up their own insurance exchanges and have expanded the federal Medicaid program, according to a new survey from Gallup released Wednesday morning.

Gallup: Obamacare Leads To Uninsured Rate Drop - Business Insider

One of the more disquieting parts of covering banking regulation is how often, in an interview, either a regulator or a banker will say something like this: Regulators have to treat banks with some respect. If they clamp down too hard, the money will go somewhere else, to a place we only dimly understand. Beyond the banks, the logic goes, there be monsters.

Larger, Older, Richer: Asset Managers Are the New Banks - Businessweek

New York caffeine junkies, look alive: A new app called CUPS allows subscribers to pay $45 per month for unlimited coffee from almost 40 independent coffee shops around the city.

For $45 Per Month, All the Coffee You Can Drink - Businessweek

The US government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country's citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful, a new study from Princeton and Northwestern Universities has concluded.

The peer-reviewed study, which will be taught at these universities in September, says: "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."

Major Study Finds The US Is An Oligarchy - Business Insider

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Britain is marginal to the great debate on Europe. France is the linchpin, fast becoming a cauldron of Eurosceptic/Poujadist views on the Right, anti-EMU reflationary Keynesian views on the Left, mixed with soul-searching over the wisdom of monetary union across the French establishment.

France is the new cauldron of Eurosceptic revolution – Telegraph Blogs

Greece’s triumphant sale of five-year bonds to hedge funds (1/3) and global in investors – half based in London – tells us a great deal about the mental and emotional state of investors. It tells us very little about the state of the Greek economy or Greek society. It is certainly not evidence that Greece is safely out of the woods. It is even less a vindication of EU/IMF Troika policies, an epic failure that will be studied years hence by scholars.

Europe has subjected the Greek people to a cruel experiment – Telegraph Blogs

I’ll eat my hat. The St Louis Federal Reserve – the last bastion of monetary orthodoxy in the Fed family – has just published a paper that basically deems quantitative easing to be useless. John Maynard Keynes was right all along.

Fed goes Keynesian, praises China’s fiscal blitz, abjures QE West (technical) – Telegraph Blogs

Davide Furceri and Prakash Loungani of the IMF have investigated the effect of capital account liberalization on inequality. They looked at 58 episodes of capital account reform in 17 advanced economies, and found that the Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) increased by about 1% a year after liberalization and by 2% after five years.

Angry Bear » Capital Liberalization and Inequality

In North Korea, 800 professional and amateur runners were at the same time lining up inside the Kim Il-sung Stadium ahead of Pyongyang's 27th annual marathon. Open to overseas recreational runners for the first time as part of a wider initiative to boost tourism, this was a historical moment for the world's most secretive nation.

Secrets and strides – the singular experience of a North Korean marathon | Sport | theguardian.com

ovaldi, the medical community was wowed by the 90% cure rate the drug racked up in clinical trials. Then Sovaldi hit the market early this year with an eye-popping price tag: $84,000 for a 12-week course of treatment, which amounts to $1,000 a day...  It may be tempting to pronounce Gilead guilty of prioritizing profits over patient need, but many Wharton experts say the blame for high drug prices should be placed on the U.S. health care system instead. “Companies obviously have an obligation to their shareholders to maximize profits,” says Patricia Danzon, Wharton professor of health care management. “That generally means doing the best that you can within the reimbursement environment that exists in any particular country. In the U.S., we have established a system of reimbursement for pharmaceuticals that unfortunately puts absolutely no limits on the prices that companies can charge.”

Sovaldi: Who's to Blame for the $1,000 a Day Cure? » Knowledge@Wharton

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Amid predictions that China’s GDP growth rate will slow to 7.5% this year (also the government’s official target rate), Morgan Stanley suggests in a recent report that China will soon be meeting its “Minsky Moment,” or a “disorderly unwind” of private sector and local government debt. High rates of investment, fueled by borrowing, stand now at more than 45% of GDP and contributed 80% of China’s growth over the last 10 years, according to the World Bank.

China’s Ticking Debt Bomb » Knowledge@Wharton

The European Union's 2014 volume cap on Chinese PV modules dropped from 7 gigawatts to 5.8 gigawatts, and the price floor was lowered from €0.56 per watt to €0.53 per watt. Despite some gains in the U.K., the EU is seeing weak demand and lower average module prices. GTM Research's James notes that China's Trina and Yingli have both revised their shipment forecasts down. Yingli, the world's largest solar-panel maker, "expects first-quarter shipments to have slumped by at least 30 percent from the previous three months," according to Bloomberg. The bottom line is that demand is soft in the EU. The GTM Research analysts cautioned that Germany was on pace to hit a relatively modest 2 gigawatts in 2014, a low point in recent demand. James believes that the move by the EU to dial-in the price floor and volume cap is an effort to stoke regional demand.

Global Solar Note: EU Drops China Module Price Floor, Plus Chinese DG and Turkey PV : Greentech Media

New research suggests that the performance payoff from organizational health is unexpectedly large and that companies have four distinct “recipes” for achieving it. For the past decade, we’ve been conducting research, writing, and working with companies on the topic of organizational health. Our work indicates that the health of an organization is based on the ability to align around a clear vision, strategy, and culture; to execute with excellence; and to renew the organization’s focus over time by responding to market trends. Health also has a hard edge: indeed, we’ve come to define it as the capacity to deliver—over the long term—superior financial and operating performance.

The hidden value of organizational health—and how to capture it | McKinsey & Company

What you really need is a second factor of authentication. And that's why many Internet services, a number of which have felt the pinch of being hacked, are embracing two-factor authentication for their users. It's sometimes called 2FA, or used interchangeably with the terms "two-step" and "verification" depending on the marketing. But what is it?

Two-Factor Authentication: Who Has It and How to Set It Up | PCMag.com

As President Obama looks at the Ukraine crisis, he sees an asymmetry of interests: Simply put, the future of Ukraine means more to Vladimir Putin's Russia than it does to the U.S. or Europe. For Putin, this is an existential crisis; for the West, so far, it isn't -- as the limited U.S. and European response has demonstrated. Putin has exploited this imbalance, seizing Crimea and now fomenting unrest in eastern Ukraine, perhaps as a prelude to invasion. But in the process, Putin may be tipping the asymmetry in the other direction. For Obama, this is now becoming an existential crisis, too, about maintaining a rules-based international order.

Existential Crisis for Obama Too | RealClearPolitics

Novices tend to believe there's some answer out there, that it's a matter of finding the right formula, the single right technique. That's why books like, "How I made a million dollars trading in the markets," always sell well. The truth is it doesn't work that way. There is no single way that works continuously. If it did, it would stop working anyway because everyone would follow it.

What Makes a Great Trader? An Interview with Jack Schwager | Inside Investing

For example, say your goal is to become well-read on industry news. This can be translated into the habit of reading two articles from an authoritative blog each day. However, pledging to do something so manageable is counterintuitive to most high-achievers. Instead, individuals are more likely to set goals such as "I'll finish all of the articles in my reader feed," or "I will read for 60 minutes each night."  "We create a situation somehow where A) failure is likely and B) failure is terribly, terribly devastating," Forte said.  But there's an easy solution. In fact, it's ridiculously easy.

Why Your Goals Should Be Laughably Simple - Business Insider