StockBuz

A few areas of concern are beginning to display in the consumer discretionary, consumer staples and industrial sectors.  We can point a finger at Russian sanctions, an overextended market, the Fed removing the punch bowl or maybe the consumer is simply tapped out but I think we all would agree, a decent correction certainly would be welcomed as an overdue buying opportunity.

In September 2013, China became the biggest net importer of crude, beating out the U.S. for the first time. This came as no surprise, given how rapidly China’s thirst for oil has grown, although landing in top place happened a little ahead of U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) predictions that it would take place in 2014. However, where the U.S. has been shoring up its own internal production, China has lagged behind. Between 2011 and 2014, U.S. oil production rose by 31 percent, as opposed to China, which saw its own production increase by a little more than 5 percent over that time. This leaves China utterly dependent on oil imports, a vulnerable position to be in at a time when its economy is beginning to wobble.

China’s demand for black gold is only set to increase, causing it to spend a staggering…

In the business world, we're continually taught that high CEO pay is a necessary evil in order to attract top talent, and therefore, top returns.  Or "pay for performance" as they would have you believe. 

A recent analysis of CEO compensation data publicly released by Equilar oddly shows little correlation between the two.

This graph shows the pay of 200 CEOs and the stock returns of their companies: (click to enlarge)

The trend line—the average of how much a CEO’s ranking is affected by stock performance—shows that a CEO’s income ranking is only 1 percent based on the company’s stock return. That means that 99 percent of the ranking has nothing to do with performance at all. (The size and profitability of companies didn’t affect the random patterns.)

If…

Is Amazon's cloud play becoming gloomy?  Amazon, specifically Amazon Web Service (AWS) is in an out war with for the cloud with Google, Microsoft, and many, many others and it doesn't look as though these pressures are going to ease up any time soon.  Indeed everyone has or is (late bloomers) is getting into the cloud and of course, cost savings by having your own data servers is quite the enticement.

A quick look at the facts.

AWS sales dipped this quarter as Amazon announced Thursday that for its second quarter that the category that includes AWS saw a 3% sequential revenue slip. That “other” category —…

"If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears."  - Simon Sinek

When we, in the investment world, think of great innovators,it beckons thoughts of Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright brothers and modern day leaders such as Apple's Steve Jobs and possibly Amazon's Steve Bezos and Tesla's Elon Musk.

They've transformed or are currently transforming how we live each day.

Sadly Antonio Meucci doesn't come to mind, although the Italian…

As the WSJ highlights, The U.S. airline industry's newfound health is breeding something not seen in years: a flock of startups.

Two fledgling carriers already have taken off. One is a reincarnation of the old People Express Airlines, a discounter that folded in 1987. The other is a French all-business-class carrier, plying the Paris-to-Newark, N.J., route.…

Innovation continues in the advertising sector as cookies, which can be blocked or disabled, are fast being replaced with a digital "fingerprint".

This new, extremely persistent type of online tracking is shadowing visitors to thousands of top websites, from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn.com...and they're difficult to stop.

First documented in a forthcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium, this type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor’s Web browser to draw a hidden image. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign…

Americans lust for things they cannot afford continues as credit usage has rebounded since the height of the credit crisis however, with the Fed's current zero interest rate policy (ZIRP), the ongoing use of credit is not necessarily a thing for concern.

After all, if you were able to refinance your home from 6% down to 3%, that's a good thing, right?  Ditto for your credit cards which may have been 9.9% prior to 2008 and now down at much lower levels.  Indeed ZIRP has aided corporations and individuals to grab historic, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to restructure existing debt and issue new debt for acquisitions for almost nothing.

In that respect, I guess Obama's statement "we're much better off than we were" would ring true here.

What does…

I can’t tell you that gold is a bad investment. Even after the recent plunge, if you bought gold in 2004, your investment would have earned you an annualized rate of about 10.4 percent, after accounting for inflation. That is darned impressive. If you bought in 1994, it would have earned about 3.9 percent per year -- not too shabby. Even if you bought all the way back in 1984, you would have earned 1.8 percent in real terms. (Of course, this assumes that shadowstats.com is wrong, and that inflation hasn’t been massively understated.)

In addition to delivering decent long-term returns, gold has been a way to spread or…

Just some numbers on sonic cannon mapping I thought were interesting after the Obama administration announced approval for use of sonic cannons off of the Eastern US coast for geological survey purposes; much to the dismay of environmentalists and people who owe their livelihoods to fisheries and tourism.  Energy companies however, need the data as they prepare to apply for drilling leases in 2018, when current congressional limits expire.

The cannons create noise pollution in waters shared by whales, dolphins and turtles, sending sound waves many times louder than a jet engine reverberating through the deep every ten seconds for weeks or monthly at a time.

They are already used in the western Gulf of Mexico, off Alaska and in other offshore oil operations around the world. They are towed behind boats, sending…