Daily Chart Art - May 17, 2012

post from Pippin Ain't Easy on 16 May 2012 09:50:22 PM. © Pippin Ain't Easy

Looking for trend-following setups? You've come to the right place, my friend! Check out these potential plays I found on EUR/USD, AUD/USD, and EUR/CAD.

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http://www.babypips.com/blogs/pippinainteasy/daily-chart-art-may-17-2012.html

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Loss of Cabin Pressure

post from SurlyTrader on 16 May 2012 09:08:06 PM. © SurlyTrader

In the first quarter of 2012, the S&P 500 experienced an annualized volatility of 9.2%. An expectation that ~67% of the days will have moves in the range of +/-.58%. In reality, we had just 23 of the 61 (37.7%) trading days experiencing negative returns. Of those negative daily returns the average down day was [...]Related posts:

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Not quite the point

post from Start Making Sense on 16 May 2012 08:30:30 PM. © Start Making Sense

Romney is right, of course, that "[t]he $2 billion J.P. Morgan lost means someone else gained.? But that's not the point, if J.P. Morgan has at least implicit federal guarantees and would impose huge negative externalities on the U.S. and world economy if allowed to fail.

When you don't see a problem with markets when there are negative externalities and implicit guarantees, leaving you opposed to corrective regulation in circumstances where the likes of Paul Volcker support it, you are not really within the scope of conventional and defensible pro-market economic thinking.

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http://danshaviro.blogspot.com/2012/05/not-quite-point.html

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The Philosophy of Social Media: Give, don't Take

post from The Business Blog at Intuitive.com on 16 May 2012 08:20:29 PM. © The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

I talk to a lot of people about how to work in the brave new world of social media. Unlike the world of Don Draper and his compatriots on Mad Men, where companies told us consumers what to think and how to talk about brands and products, we're in an era where that paradigm has been spun 180-degrees, stood on its head, and now the message comes from the consumer and is fed back up to the business, like it or not.
I've been in the business for over thirty years now, and remember companies like the late great Kodak being incredibly obsessive about their logo having just the right color of orange in print ads and other companies obsessing over typefaces and whether we acknowledged their trademarks each and every time we wrote about them.
<<yawn>>
Things have changed. Has your thinking?
To really get how to be successful in the world of social media, a world where your customer has a louder voice than you do, you have to really take something to heart, something that's inspired by John F. Kennedy, former president of the United States and a pretty shrewd operator all around. You've probably heard his quote. He said:
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
In case you haven't heard it, here, enjoy his stirring inaugural address from Jan 20, 1961:

What's so important about this particular line in a speech? Because Kennedy totally nailed social media.
To be successful in social media, to be popular on Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc, you need to be constantly asking yourself the following:
What can I do for my customers?
Instead, too many people focus on the wrong questions, "how can I sell stuff?" or, more bluntly, "how can I get money out of your wallet?"
If you sell bicycles, for example, your blog, your Facebook fan page, should be full of handy tips that will help bicyclists save a few bucks on repairs, find out about cool new trails, learn about training tips, and even gain some smarts about teaching children how to ride. Are we selling anything here? Not yet.
The most essential part of being successful as an online business is building trust, and you can't do that without helping your customers be happy and successful. They're not stupid, however, they realize that you're a bike shop and you stay in business by selling bikes. But that doesn't mean that every communication they get from you, every update on your fan page needs to be about a new product or service. Blech.
An anecdote to illustrate: I noticed a leak under my kitchen sink one Sunday afternoon so I pulled out the yellow pages (yes, antiquated print) and looked up plumbers. I called up one place and was immediately told about the extra emergency weekend fee associated with someone coming out to see what was going on. Okay. Another spent the time telling me how busy they were and that perhaps we could schedule someone to show up Monday morning.
The third company I called, however, had a different approach. The answering service listened to my description and asked "can I have you check a few things real quick before we schedule anyone to come out to your place?" She then detailed a few simple diagnostics to try and one of them identified the problem -- a nut had come loose and needed to be tightened -- which I then fixed and solved the problem, no plumber needed. Her response: "great! glad I could help!"
My response? I circled their business in the yellow pages, with a vow to call them when I had need of a plumber in the future.
Do you see what they did? They trained their people to solve the customer's problem not sell their services. Smart. Very smart.
In the future, that's going to be the only way to stay in business. If you don't think so, just watch. The companies that are all about the hard sell, the ones with the miserable reputations, like car salesmen and insurance salesmen -- are going to die in the field, as more and more people savvy that there are smarter, less frustrating and insulting ways to do business. Hence powerhouse companies like Geico that advertise to get you to their Web site, not to get you to schedule someone to visit and hard sell you insurance.
If you're doing things right, old school folk will keep asking you "why are you giving it away?" and "what does that have to do with what we're selling?".
Those questions mean you're on the right track.
If you're truly dedicated to a healthy, engaged dialog with your marketplace -- including customers, potential customers and people who will never buy your product or service -- then you'll gain a strong reputation and will then be able to reap the benefit.
Trust me on this. And do it.

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http://www.intuitive.com/blog/philosophy_of_social_media_give_dont_take.html

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India Decides to Invest in the Oil Potential of
the Falklands

post from OilPrice.com Daily News Update on 16 May 2012 07:17:05 PM. © OilPrice.com Daily News Update

Britain and Argentina have been feuding over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands for 180 years, and 1982 fought a brief but vicious war over them.Much has changed in the past three decades ? Argentina has increasingly lined up fellow Latin American nations to support their claim to Las Malvinas, and in the past two years, intrepid British oil exploration companies have surveyed Falkland waters and found promising signs of hydrocarbon deposits.Now, an outside player has decided to take the plunge on what might be there under the stormy?

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Iran's Green Revolution may come from Energy

post from OilPrice.com Daily News Update on 16 May 2012 07:13:41 PM. © OilPrice.com Daily News Update

Against the backdrop of discussions about pending negotiations over its controversial nuclear program and the upcoming deadline of an European embargo on Iranian oil comes a quiet push by the Islamic republic to become a major electricity exporter. Tehran had said it was expecting to secure electricity deals with Syria and Lebanon and had somehow attracted an estimated $1 billion to help build new power plants in the country. With some of the largest natural gas reserves in the world, Tehran might be able to shrug off international sanctions by?

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The Top 10 Green Energy Stories Today

post from OilPrice.com Daily News Update on 16 May 2012 07:09:08 PM. © OilPrice.com Daily News Update

1. The Department of the Interior has given the green light to a power transmission line that is intended to bring power from Google, Inc.- backed offshore wind farms in the Northeast of the US to the mainland. Environmental impact studies will take 18 months to two years. The US, unlike Germany, so far has no offshore wind farms, and the US electricity grid needs to be re-done so as to bring power from such sources to consumers.2. Inexpensive natural gas is being preferred to coal in the US, so that coal electricity generation has fallen 19 percent?

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World Banks have the Power to save the Global
Economy, if they want to

The global economy appears to be headed over cliff this year. The emerging world is experiencing a significant economic slow down, the Eurozone will probably break apart in the next few months, and the United States faces sharp austerity measures at the end of the year. There are enough bearish developments here to make the original Mayan calendar look prescient after all. So should we despair? Is the global economy fated to collapse in 2012?No, says Willem Buiter and Ebrahim Rahbari of Citigroup. Though the outlook?

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The Strong Dollar Leads to a Fall in Commodity
Prices

Panic is on deck, to use the baseball terminology that my foreign readers are often attempting to decipher. That is the only conclusion one can reach after getting gob smacked by the price action this morning. Copper got spanked for eight cents, oil burned $2, gold shed another $26, and silver puked 70 cents. The tantrum like stock behaviour in producing and equipment companies, like Freeport McMoRan (FCX) and Caterpillar (CAT) has been atrocious. How many of you out there know that JP Morgan (JPM) is the largest holder of futures contracts in?

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What the EIA's Short Term Energy Outlook Tells us
about the Global Economy

The US Energy information Administration (EIA) released its updated Short Term Energy Outlook (STEO) May 8, 2012. The overview calls for falling crude oil prices, falling gasoline prices, falling electric demand but higher natural gas prices as the prospect of exports reduces fears of excess inventory.The STEO is always a volatile cocktail of near term market fluxuations and this update is no different. The question is whether this short term forecast is good news or bad news about the economic future. In the case of global oil the?

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