vote - What We're Reading - StockBuz2024-03-19T09:44:15Zhttp://stockbuz.ning.com/articles/feed/tag/voteMarket Predictions For 2018? Bring 'Em On!http://stockbuz.ning.com/articles/market-predictions-for-2018-bring-em-on2017-12-12T19:13:54.000Z2017-12-12T19:13:54.000ZStockBuzhttp://stockbuz.ning.com/members/1t2xbcvddkrir<div><h2 id="ae-body">Saxo Bank has a few</h2>
<p><img title="" class="cms-png img-responsive" src="http://az705044.vo.msecnd.net/20171212/2017-12-12_10-26-20.png" /></p>
<p>Naturally, predictions like this are more for bank PR than education but they have some value.</p>
<p>For one, they're a reminder that unexpected, huge and unpredictable moves happen in markets. And they happen far more often than we expect.</p>
<p>The thing is, they usually happen somewhere you least expect.</p>
<p>As for this set of predictions, let's hope this trader is you (from the report):</p>
<p>"World markets are increasingly full of signs and wonders, and the collapse of volatility seen across asset classes in 2017 was no exception. The historic lows in the VIX and MOVE indices are matched by record highs in stocks and real estate, and the result is a powder keg that is set to blow sky-high as the S&P 500 loses 25% of its value in a rapid, spectacular, one-off move reminiscent of 1987. A whole swathe of short volatility funds are completely wiped out and a formerly unknown long volatility trader realises a 1000% gain and instantly becomes a legend."</p>
<p>Courtesy of <a href="http://www.forexlive.com/news/!/who-wants-some-outrageous-predictions-for-2018-20171212" target="_blank">ForexLive</a></p>
</div>No Worries. Googles Search Predetermines US Presidential Winnerhttp://stockbuz.ning.com/articles/no-worries-googles-search-predetermines-us-presidential-winner2016-02-26T18:32:51.000Z2016-02-26T18:32:51.000ZStockBuzhttp://stockbuz.ning.com/members/1t2xbcvddkrir<div><p><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1291252?profile=original"><img class="align-right" style="padding: 10px;" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1291252?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="359"></a>Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California and the former editor-in-chief of <em>Psychology Today,</em> warns us of a insidious and pervasive new form of mind control: search results.</p>
<p>That’s right, search results. And not just any search results: Google search results. Since 2013 Epstein and colleagues have conducted a number of experiments in the US and India to determine whether search results can impact people’s political opinions<em>.</em></p>
<p>Epstein points out that about 50 percent of our clicks go to the top two items on the first page of results, and more than 90 percent of our clicks go to the 10 items listed. And of course Google, which dominates the search business, decides which of the billions of web pages to include in our search results, and it decides how to rank them.</p>
<p>But surely, Epstein thought, a top search result would have only a small impact on a person’s political choices. Not so! To Epstein’s surprise, in his initial experiment he found that the proportion of people favouring the (bogus, skewed) search engine’s top-ranked candidate increased by more than 48 percent! Also, 75 percent of the subjects in the study were completely unaware that they were viewing biased search rankings.</p>
<p>He conducted several more experiments, including one that involved more than 2,000 people from all 50 US states. In that experiment, the shift in voting preferences induced by the researchers was 37 percent, and as high as 80 percent in some demographic groups.</p>
<p>Epstein was still skeptical. He asked,</p>
<p style="margin-left: .5in;">Could voting preferences be shifted with real voters in the middle of a real campaign? … In real elections, people are bombarded with multiple sources of information, and they also know a lot about the candidates. It seemed unlikely that a single experience on a search engine would have much impact on their voting preferences.</p>
<p>So off his team went to India. They arrived just before voting began in the largest democratic election in the world, to select the nation’s prime minister. They recruited 2,150 people from 27 of India’s 35 states and territories to participate in their experiment. (To take part, they had to be registered voters who had not yet voted and who were still undecided about how they would vote.)</p>
<p>Again, Epstein predicted that their manipulation of search results would produce only a very small effect, if any – but that’s not what happened. On average, the researchers were able to shift the proportion of people favoring any given candidate by more than 20 percent overall and by more than 60 percent in some demographic groups. In addition, 99.5 percent of participants showed no awareness that they were viewing biased search rankings.</p>
<p>So this was all quite surprising. Says Epstein:</p>
<p style="margin-left: .5in;">We published a detailed <a target="_blank" href="http://email.mauldineconomics.com/wf/click?upn=U8GusXYvzQrI-2BTfpBInOi0IkGNwQN9Xn68pCtG0oPhPDvVMjJ6j0FxzuHKnGGeyx-2BGK1ugxHeJGCNp43NMJRqSggH7FRvPr1cHBfGuMakeI-3D_JKLR1FBU0q0IqxJGrTtbPy0jh07eeWdb9hfaEUCFT-2BKVedXgnfEp-2FYkiSPDhNdmgFNuezvoOxD4Pq4ZxPvD868GX3CiP637Cj9U6uijyJdOrOEdn-2BCxRQPU8vpU4JssvjCz69VhSN-2BONDIYzX3zo5aRdBNkWLHgU-2FedkKyVjYOJ2vpbqZ85j9OtP-2By-2BxU0pS-2Bxmf1NonRQ4G1znz64sqJRwpcKkiym0-2BHkDBiNaNFiiqA7NxjKsKFCq9k6tt9YP0Y8EWQkodJ8m-2BvIzfgbHm-2FA-3D-3D">report</a> about our first five experiments … in the prestigious <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</em> (PNAS) in August 2015. We had indeed found something important, especially given Google’s dominance over search. Google has a near-monopoly on internet searches in the US, with 83 per cent of Americans specifying Google as the search engine they use most often, according to the Pew Research Center. So if Google favours one candidate in an election, its impact on undecided voters could easily decide the election’s outcome.</p>
<p>But that’s a big “could.” I was skeptical, too. Would Google ever act so nefariously? Aren’t those Silicon Valley guys all live-and-let-die free-market Libertarians? And then I thought again. The presidency of the United States is a <em>big deal.</em> The president may not be all-powerful, but he (or maybe, in the near future, she) is about as close as it comes on this planet. And national elections – whether in this country or any other – have never exactly been squeaky clean. They have always been about big money, and in recent decades they have been about big media. Now, says Epstein, they are also about big data.</p>
<p>So let’s say Google decided that it was in the best interests of all concerned to do whatever it could to help us select our next president. How might it go about it? Says Epstein,</p>
<p style="margin-left: .5in;">(I)f Google set about to fix an election, it could first dip into its massive database of personal information to identify just those voters who are undecided. Then it could, day after day, send customised rankings favouring one candidate to <em>just those people</em>. One advantage of this approach is that it would make Google’s manipulation extremely difficult for investigators to detect.</p>
<p>But it gets scarier – and a lot more real – when we remember that in the 2012 presidential election, Google and its top execs contributed more than $800,000 to Barack Obama and just $37,000 to Mitt Romney. Meanwhile, have you heard of The Groundwork? That would be the outfit that Quartz <a target="_blank" href="http://email.mauldineconomics.com/wf/click?upn=YHITX156cKgQ2PsNawtUrQJkvDWKYA5ZY5mOkuoTivNQZMIcAc3YnhRTc25gh-2FNkFNiqeJz10BombYjEMyIqXNmiKK4QjRyWdQkTCcIjLgh59y6L2fTX4mMw91cYEquC0j7ZHMVqbbRlGPSDx17pSw-3D-3D_JKLR1FBU0q0IqxJGrTtbPy0jh07eeWdb9hfaEUCFT-2BKVedXgnfEp-2FYkiSPDhNdmgnSf-2BV2UwJNOdXE7rRTpM-2BKwDms77G-2FJEGlIz4OuDbzBHRnK4EDzMlUVrq7J2AeUa9azpB6uWrL2-2FCz3lOZzbgbAQekYpAz43x1ZPLpYiBPvzUWoWi8Fm9oClam1tJ740syjyNIM3xxrTfmvWZjolvwz-2FWC9Atv-2BQW1QJ8VDeMAKbmVfWyQ0bkPEVjVgorplGyySe0ZuMd87WDbGfxngPKQ-3D-3D">describes</a> as “The stealthy, Eric Schmidt-backed startup that’s working to put Hillary Clinton in the White House” – Eric Schmidt being the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.</p>
<p>(Amusing sidebar: Google “the groundwork” and then click on the No. 1 result. That’s right, you get this:</p>
<p align="center"><img alt="" style="width: 550px; height: 296px;" src="http://ggc-mauldin-images.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/newsletters/Image_1_20160226_OTB.jpg"></p>
<p>Just one page. No links. Sinister? You betcha.)</p>
<p>There’s more – a lot more – to Epstein’s cautionary tale, so I’ll get out of the way and let him tell it. See entire <a href="http://email.mauldineconomics.com/wf/click?upn=GoKyo837vf7SS31qySxLAlJcHCMrNby5-2BUqtSr75zakSe-2B8UDglx91JOdF-2FDbVOlNA42FGeGfhLHNYpmdgHI2wT689GrrW1sGJ-2BJMa4CZ-2Bzc50oRaYmhpjKJm0IR9Tji_JKLR1FBU0q0IqxJGrTtbPy0jh07eeWdb9hfaEUCFT-2BKVedXgnfEp-2FYkiSPDhNdmg6GqoEaUvQ3WJVr0Hf39rHK2EAANl3vni-2FaE-2FQeOzOx1IldJ19YFOdgtJHCJ-2Fayvl9sSKHBVV-2BS7i87kStNv0GNE3gi3l3FIM5FN6jHF4k5LdnoeVpecUqHD50FNpz02tPEyeJJGlnI4wU6-2Fsjv84RGbqGfF2xYVxAYgGbMMCIxWkVZY1r-2ByNOWIEksQuHgpoPmMlx9CzBdeK4CHZwOSFkw-3D-3D" target="_blank">PDF format.</a></p></div>If The Scots Divorce, It Could Easily Bode For Morehttp://stockbuz.ning.com/articles/if-the-scots-divorce-it-could-easily-bode-for-more2014-09-10T18:29:25.000Z2014-09-10T18:29:25.000ZStockBuzhttp://stockbuz.ning.com/members/1t2xbcvddkrir<div><p><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1290856?profile=original"><img class="align-left" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1290856?profile=original" width="300"></a>Polls released this week showed for the first time that a majority – an extremely small majority, but a majority nonetheless – of Scots favor independence, although other polls suggest the no camp remains in the lead. A poll is not the election, which will be held Sept. 18, but it is still a warning that something extraordinary might happen very soon. The political union between Scotland and England might be abolished after 300 years. The implications of this are enormous and generally ignored.</p>
<p>Obviously, this raises a host of question about how such a divorce might take place, whether the expected time frame – divorce by 2016 – will be adhered to, and how state property might be divided. It also raises the question of Scottish foreign policy. Will Scotland remain in NATO? Will it have membership in the European Union? Will it continue to use the pound sterling, and if not, how will it roll out its own currency?</p>
<p>These are important questions, but far more important issues will follow. One of the principles of the postwar world was the inviolability of Europe's borders. Border disputes were the origin of centuries of war, and so Europe's borders were frozen after World War II to avoid discussion. This may have left some people of one nationality on the wrong side of a border, but this was accepted since the risk of opening the door to border redefinition was considered far greater than any discomforts stemming from the borders that were locked in place.</p>
<p>This principle has been weakened since the end of the Cold War. Still, though the disintegration of the Soviet Union created fully independent states, these were recognized republics within the context of the Soviet Union. One could argue that this did not in fact represent border change. Later, the "Velvet Divorce" of Czechoslovakia into Czech and Slovak successor countries represented another shift, but in a country that had only existed since the end of World War I. The separation of Kosovo from Serbia was a more radical shift but was justified by claims of Serbian oppression. Though each shift weakened the principle of inviolable borders, each came with an asterisk – that is, each had an aspect that stopped it from being the definitive case.</p>
<p>Scotland separating from England, by contrast, can't be minimized. If that centuries-old union can be revised, then anything can be revised. Scottish separatists' reason for splitting is that they are a separate nation, that each nation has the right to its own state and the right to determine its own destiny, and that they no longer choose to be in union. But if they have the right to determine this, why shouldn't others in Europe enjoy the same right?</p>
<p>For example, modern Spain is an amalgam of regions. One, the Catalan region – which contains Barcelona – has a strong separatist movement. If Scotland can leave the United Kingdom, then why shouldn't Catalonia be allowed to leave Spain? Farther east, the Treaty of Trianon gave Romania and then-Czechoslovakia large portions of Hungary along with the Hungarians living there. Why shouldn't Hungarians living in those territories have the right to rejoin Hungary? Meanwhile, if French-speaking Belgians and Dutch-speaking Belgians wish to part ways and return their two regions to their respective countries of origin, why should they not be allowed to? And why shouldn't the eastern part of Ukraine be allowed to secede and join Russia?</p>
<p>Raising the stakes, this is an issue that goes far beyond Europe. There are seemingly innumerable separatist movements in India, China, Africa and so forth. If Scotland has the right to leave the nation-state it is part of and form a new one based on ethnic identity, why can't anyone follow suit? And if anyone can do it, but they are blocked by the state they wish to leave, is resorting to violence in pursuit of independence legitimate?</p>
<p>The Scottish issue – the claim that the Scots are a separate nation and that all nations have a right to self-determination – simply cannot be asterisked. Having this happen in the heart of Western Europe would set a clear precedent that would expand geographically and conceptually. It would legitimize similar movements globally and force a reconsideration of what a nation is. Ultimately, a nation would be whatever the majority says it is.</p>
<p>It is doubtful that the Scottish precedent could be contained in Europe. And it is hard to imagine how this precedent might not lead to conflict somewhere, not in the British Isles but somewhere where the existing state would be less inclined to grant the right of self-determination to a separatist movement.</p>
<p>Of course, the separatists in Scotland may well lose, sentiment might change in the post-election negotiations, and so on. But if England and Scotland divorce, the right to separate will become an integral part of international custom – and it will arouse other movements.</p>
<p>Courtesy of <a href="http://email.mauldineconomics.com/wf/click?upn=n5W239CQZ-2BNzU8IvtdMtix6OI2jTCxm5e82ofXRPOIY-2BQFEy8PicvDArWs-2Bt4MZ1PrAGKYTOoi0wsQWS-2BCCfYPNDtEHof315bQKvnXRDhQw-3D_JKLR1FBU0q0IqxJGrTtbPy0jh07eeWdb9hfaEUCFT-2BLuv-2B1QL5c4-2FOPebXXaMS40ehsCqaZCC4P-2B6ZSFJLf2td4J3ZEKJ5YdCc5Wxc9gmyC7PYU7Fp39oQNCykQCMuMEE1sx1DztBlzTWchAe2g0oRHe0p3dIbJG75Y4r4V9YrWD8-2FDtsu-2FWVNuL2DgN02KlsIoJZWwan9x-2FNtFQBj6H-2FeJCalgyE-2BQPVWT2W-2FxbnpkxojSYXXpNQvXKoviCtJq3" target="_blank">Mauldin Economics</a></p></div>