Salient to Investors: Paul Ashworth at Capital Economics said: The 1.3 million private-sector jobs created in half1 2014 paid an average of $867 a week versus $843 per week for the existing 117 million private-sector jobs. Mining, construction and business-services companies – which traditionally pay more than the average – are increasingly
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jeremy Bowles at Bruegel said 54% of EU jobs are at risk of advances in computerization, ranging from 40% to over 60% in each country and close to the US number in the UK, Germany and France. Carl Frey and Michael Osborne at Oxford University estimated in September
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Gary Shilling writes: Persistently slow growth will NOT be the norm for years to come. When private-sector deleveraging is completed, real GDP growth will return to its long-run trend of 3.5 percent or more. Productivity will return to 2.5 percent annual growth or more after deleveraging is
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Tim Bajarin at Creative Strategies said one of Apple’s biggest moves is in Southeast Asia, given Android has passed Apple in smartphones and has made huge strides in tablets in 2014. Gartner said Android smartphones comprised 78 percent of the global market in 2013 versus 66 percent
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Paul Zemsky at Voya Investment Mgmt sees a new era of macro policy where the Fed uses new tools to prevent bubbles and raises concerns when markets are away from fundamentals. Alan Gayle at RidgeWorth Investments said the Fed recognizes it needs to broaden its scope of
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: A Bernstein Research study “Do High R&D Spenders in Tech Generate Stock Outperformance?” found: Over 1, 3, 5, and 10-year periods, the companies with the lowest spending on R&D tended to perform the best on Wall Street. Over the past 5 years, stocks in the biggest R&D
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: American short sellers have been hurt for 5 years by the biggest market rally since the Internet bubble. Bearish wagers in the SPDR ETF are near 11 percent of its shares, the highest level since 2012. Bearish wagers against a technology ETF are 67 percent above the
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: US-based emerging-market ETF equities and bonds are heading for their biggest monthly inflow since September, while global tech funds lost the most funds among 12 industries. Richard Titherington at JPMorgan Asset Mgmt said investors recognize emerging-market equities are cheap, rotating into sectors that have underperformed. Jennifer Vail
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Kenneth Heebner at CGM Focus Fund shorted Apple during Q4 2013. Morgan Stanley said institutional ownership of Apple shares has been declining as funds question the company’s ability to increase revenue long-term – the 30 largest stockholders own a record low 30 percent of shares outstanding, versus
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: TS Eliot called TV “a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome”. Ethan Kross et al at the University of Michigan and the University of Leuven found that Facebook use correlated with
READ MORE... →