Who is/are the Federal Reserve (FED)...?

Who is the FED? This guy (Glenn Beck) got fired after talking about it in his show.

How to fold a teeshirt in 5 seconds

Look this video... so easy and nicely done....Enjoy

Benefit of Cold Shower

Articles related to it...
4 Reasons Why You Need To Take Cold Showers
Cold Showers Bodytweakers Courage

Negative ions in the air are natural antioxidants and make you feel relaxed (yin) as they heal you at a physical level through a process of natural alkalization. A cold shower is alkalizing because cooler temperatures increase your body`s pH. A drink from an unpolluted mountain spring will supply you with more antioxidant and alkaline power than a month of Vitamin C. A good out-breath will help accumulated acids to break down in salts, water and carbon dioxide, increasing your body`s alkalinity by reducing its acidity. No wonder meditation asks us to examine the breath. Correct breathing fosters alkalinity and we experience it as peace. Similarly, moderate exercise is alkaline; strenuous exercise is lactic acid-forming.

So when was the last time you had a cold? A year ago, few months ago or maybe yesterday? As crazy as it sounds, but there is a way to stay cold-resistent for your whole life. The key lies in strengthening your immune system. Vitamins is not the only solution nor the most reliable one, a far more cheap and better way that may help you to develop a rock-hard immune system is a cold shower.

It’s not a masochistic fetish, it’s a healthy lifestyle. Short cold showers in the morning have immense benefits on the chemistry of your body.

• Cold water helps you to produce more glutathione as well as other enzyms that help you reduce reactive oxygen (including oxygen ions, free radicals and peroxides both organinc and inorganic). As a result your natural decay of organic material is reduced. You look younger.
• Low levels of reactive oxygen mean low risk of cancer.
• Regular cold showers make you half as likely to get any chest infection than people who always stick to warm showers.
• Cold showers bring more blood to remote body parts and provide a better blood circulation. As a result you have a reduced blood pressure in your organs and all the toxins are literally flushed out of your system.
• Your mucous membranes become stronger, that gives you resistence to fever, allergies, colds, coughs, etc.
• Most important: your nervous system becomes much stronger. You can deal better with stress, you are calm, you can relax better, you are simply cool.

No coffee in the world can wake you up better than an ice cold shower. It takes some self-discipline to go through it, though. First few weeks are the worst, but you get used to it later. Bodytweaking’s philosophy is that you have to suffer, if you want to look good, be strong and healthy. It doesn’t matter if it’s a workout, a cold shower or a thesis you have to write for college: everything takes some effort, courage, determination and fortitude. That’s the difference between a real bodytweaker and the dregs of humanity.

Note: A real bodytweaker takes a cold shower at least 5 times a week.

More reasons... 

4 Reasons Why You Need To Take Cold Showers!

A friend of mine is 45 years old, has no gray hair, and very good skin for her age. I wanted to find out if there was anything in her routine that could have been a reason for such youthful looks for her age (all without any surgery by the way!). Leaving genetics out of the equation for a moment, the one interesting thing that popped up was the fact that she takes a cold shower every morning. So I did a little research about the subject and found 4 main benefits that you gain by taking cold showers.

Now when I say cold shower, I want to clarify exactly what I mean by that. Taking a full cold shower, meaning no hot or warm or lukewarm water at all, is borderline torture! Especially in the cold winter months (I am from Montreal, and it is VERY cold here!). Besides, there are many benefits to taking a warm shower, the primary one being that it feels really good! But seriously, what I mean in this context, is the practice of starting with a warm shower, and ending the last few minutes with cool to cold water. Here are the benefits that you gain by incorporating a cold shower into your shower routine:

1- Better Circulation
Warm water makes the blood rush to your skin, and cool water makes the blood rush to your organs. This switching between hot and cold triggers better circulation in your blood by forcing the blood to move. The ideal practice would be to switch numerous times between hot and cold water, but merely ending the shower with cold water does help with circulation. Why should you worry about having good circulation? Well, it prevents such problems as hypertension, hardening of the arteries, and the appearance of varicose veins. Good circulation improves the performance of your system and thus help looking and feeling better.

2- Better looking skin
When you shower with warm water, it opens up your pores. Then you wash and this cleans up your pores. That’s all good. When you end, it would be best to close your pores and cold water does just that. It’s good to close your pores after you are all cleaned up because it will prevent the pores from being easily clogged by dirt and oil, which causes skin imperfections such as acne for example. Another benefit is that cold water makes your blood vessels constrict which reduces swelling and the appearance of dark circles under your eyes (where skin is at its thinnest). This provides you with a young, healthy glow.

3- Healthier hair
Cold water makes your hair look healthier and shinier. As a matter of fact, cool air makes your hair shinier too (that’s why there is a cool air button on your hair dryer). What the cold water does is that it closes the cuticle which makes the hair stronger and prevents dirt from easily accumulating within your scalp. Basically, the same principle with how it closes the pores of your skin as mentioned above. Stronger hair, of course, prevents hair from being easily pulled out when you are combing, and it helps in slowing down overall hair loss.

4- Mental benefits
There are plenty of mental benefits to ending your shower with cold water. The ancient samurai warriors used to pour buckets of cold river water on their heads every morning in a Shinto practice called Misogi. This was a purification ritual on a spiritual level. They believe that it cleansed their spirit and helped start a new day & new adventure fresh. Cold water obviously helps waking you up, which is what you want in the morning. Also, it energizes you and invigorates your entire being with the essence of life. Give it a try, you will definitely feel more alive! It can also lift you up if you are feeling a little down or unmotivated.

Ending your shower with cold water clearly has its advantages. Many benefits to cold showers, as you can see. I know this is something that can be very difficult for many people to do. The key is to not torture yourself. Go about it gradually. Start with a level of cold you can deal with, and slowly make it colder after each shower. As long as you get your feet wet (no pun intended!), and begin adding this routine at the end of your showers, you will be on your way to making a habit out of it and enjoy the benefits that this practice can bring you. Who knows, maybe you can avoid gray hair altogether like my friend! Maybe the fountain of youth is made up of very cold water?! 

You are going to take a cold shower tomorrow morning. I am going to take one, too.

Cost: 0$ for a cold shower. You actually save energy costs.

Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader

Interesting article by "The New York Times" - David Barboza.

He has been a correspondent for The New York Times based in Shanghai, China since November 2004. He writes primarily for the Business section but also writes often for the culture section about art, film, television and dance in China.

David graduated from Boston University with a bachelor's degree in history and attended Yale University Graduate School. He was a freelance writer and a research assistant for The New York Times before being hired in 1997 as a staff writer. For five years, he was the Midwest business correspondent based in Chicago. He also covered the Enron scandal for The Times and was part of a team that was named a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002. In 2005, he was one of five Times reporters awarded the Gerald Loeb Award for Deadline Writing about Lenovo's acquisition of I.B.M.'s personal computer business. He lives in Shanghai with his wife, Lynn Zhang.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Markets

Another video worth watching....

How I Learned To Stop Trading And Love The Farm

A good insight on investing.....

Very nice swimming from Total Immersion
Total Immersion Swimming Freestyle Demo by Shinji Takeuchi

Tracking the pulse of the economy

Interesting webpage on the US economy.
Source: IHS Global Insight
Credit: Barbara Hansen and Juan Thomassie, USA 
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/story/Economic-Outlook/35290148/1

Tracking The U.S. Drought

Tracking The U.S. Drought

Six Essential Ratios For Finding Cheap Stocks

Link to article

With the art of picking lowly valued stocks playing such a central role in any value investing strategy, it is essential for the investor to get acquainted with the necessary tools to make a proper assessment. While not many investors managed to make it to accountancy school, there are a few shortcuts available to understand a company’s valuation and its business quality.
These generally come down to understanding a few simple ratios that help isolate both cheap stocks in terms of valuation ratios, but also good stocks in terms of their operating ratios.
When an investor buys a company he’s buying the company’s assets but also a claim on the future earnings of that company. As a result it’s unsurprising that the top two things that Value Investors try to do is to buy assets on the cheap or earnings on the cheap.
While some financiers specialise in evaluating these things in extremely complicated ways, plenty of star investors such as David Dreman and Josef Lakonishok have had great success just focusing on the simplest ratios like the P/E Ratio and P/B Ratio which we describe in this article.
When using valuations ratios such as these its important to take a couple of things into account. Firstly, investors should compare the ratio for the company in question against the market and the sector peer group but also against the company’s own historical valuation range. By doing this the investor can not only find cheap stocks in the current market environment but also make sure they aren’t being caught up in frothy overall valuations.
There are risks to using these kinds of ‘relative valuation’ ratios that we’ll discuss in a forthcoming article, but nonetheless the following six ratios are essential weapons to keep sharpened in the armoury.


1. Price to Book Value – buy assets on the cheap  
The P/B ratio works by comparing the current market price of the company to the book value of the company in its balance sheet. Book Value is what is left over when everything a company owes (i.e. liabilities like loans, accounts payable, mortgages, etc) is taken away from everything it owns (i.e. assets like cash, accounts receivable, inventory, fixed assets).
It is worth noting that this book value often includes assets such as goodwill and patents which aren’t really ‘tangible’ like plant, property and equipment. Some investors remove such ‘intangible’ assets from calculations of P/B to make the more conservative Price to Tangible Book Value (P/TB).
The P/B ratio has an esteemed history. As it doesn’t rely on volatile measures like profits and has a hard accounting foundation in the company’s books, it has often been used as the key barometer of value by academics.
The lowest decile of P/B stocks, similarly to low P/E stocks, have been found to massively outperform the highest P/B stocks by an average of 8% per year highly consistently. Most Value Investors try to buy stocks at a discount to their Book Value – or when the P/B ratio is at least less than 1.
We’ll be looking at several of Ben Graham’s more obscure and arcane ways of buying assets on the cheap in another article.


2. Price to Earnings Ratio (P/E) – buy earnings on the cheap!  
Much maligned by many as an incomplete ratio that only tells half a story, the P/E ratio is nonetheless the most accepted valuation metric among investors.
By dividing a company’s stock price by its earnings per share, investors get an instant fix on how highly the market rates it. It is effectively shorthand for how expensive or cheap a share is compared with its profits.
Celebrated contrarian investor David Dreman put the P/E at the top of his list of criteria for selecting value stocks. In a study that spanned from 1960 through to 2010 Dreman found that stocks in the lowest 20% of PE ratios outperformed high P/E ratio stocks by an astonishing 8.8% per year! Not only that but he found that low P/E stocks outperformed in 70% of calendar years. Investing in such a strategy might miss the glamour growth ‘stars’ but who wouldn’t want to place their bets on those kinds of odds!
The ultimate value investor’s take on the P/E is known as the CAPE or cyclically adjusted P/E ratio. It takes takes the current price and divides it by the average earnings per share over the last 10 years. Sometimes current earnings can be overly inflated due to a business boom so the CAPE gives a much more measured view. Originated by Ben Graham and popular in the blogosphere it’s an excellent part of the value investors toolkit. You can read more about the PE Ratio here.
The trouble though with the P/E ratio in general is that it doesn’t take a company’s debt into account and, in a value investing situation, that’s a pretty serious shortcoming which makes comparing differently leveraged companies like-for-like almost impossible. This is where the so called earnings yield comes in…


3. The Earnings Yield (or EBIT / EV) – buy earnings on the cheap  
Investors have a tendency to switch off when faced with tricky jargon. So if you’ve made it to this sentence you are doing pretty well. Most investors define the Earnings Yield to be the inverse of the P/E ratio (or E/P) and consider it a great improvement. Why? Because yields can be compared with other investments more easily – for example bonds and savings accounts – whereas P/E ratios are, well, sort of useless for comparing against well, anything… other than other P/E ratios of course. This is most probably why brokers and the media love PE Ratios so much as they are infinitely flexible for ramping stocks up to silly valuations.


But, given that the P/E (and thus E/P) ignores debt – Joel Greenblatt in the “Little Book that Beats the Market” redefined it to take the debt into account. His definition compares the earnings due to all stakeholders in the firm (the operating profit) to the entire value of capital invested in the firm (i.e. the debt + the equity or ‘enterprise value’).
Just be aware that the earnings yield defined this way is a far better version of the P/E ratio for comparing how cheap differently leveraged stocks are to other stocks and that it’s definitely the right way up for comparing stocks with bonds (which is what a lot of Value Investors like to do).


4. Price to Cashflow – a good catch all?  
The price to free cash flow ratio compares a company’s current share price to its per-share free cashflow. Free cashflow is defined as cash that the operation creates minus any capital expenditure to keep it running. It’s the amount of cash left over which a company can use to pay down debt, distribute as dividends, or reinvest to grow the business.
The benefits of looking at the price to cashflow versus other ratios like P/E or P/B Ratios are several – firstly some companies systematically understate their assets or earnings which can make them harder to isolate with a low P/E or low P/B scan – but secondly earnings and assets can be manipulated by crafty management accountants to make companies appear more profitable or asset rich than they actually are. In Josef Lakonishok’s studies he showed that the return profile of using the P/CF ratio is very similar to the P/B and P/E ratio – cheap P/CF stocks massively outperform high P/CF stocks in almost all timeframes – making it imperative to hunt for low P/CF stocks.


5. No earnings? Buy sales on the cheap  
But what do you turn to when a stock doesn’t have any earnings and therefore no PE ratio? While earnings can vary from year to year, sales are much more stable and as a result one of the more popular approaches is to look at a stock’s Price to Sales Ratio.


The ratio was first popularised in the 1980s by Kenneth Fisher in the book “Super Stocks” and later labelled the ‘King of the Value Ratios’ by another author Jim O’Shaughnessy in “What Works on Wall Street”. But it really got a bad name when it was misused in the dotcom bubble to justify nosebleed valuations.
But it does remain a key indicator for isolating potential turnaround stocks. Low Price to Sales Ratio stocks, especially compared against their sector, can often be stocks that bounce back very quickly as they return to profitability. Look out for Stocks with historically reasonable margins trading on P/S ratios of less than 0.75 without much debt.  


6. PEG Ratio – Buy earnings growth on the cheap
Popularised by ex-Fidelity star fund manager Peter Lynch and later given a twist by UK investment guru Jim Slater, the price-to- earnings growth ratio, or the PEG, takes the PE Ratio and puts it on steroids. The trouble with the PE Ratio is it is so variable depending on the growth rate of the company. By dividing the PE Ratio by the forecast EPS growth rate an investor can compare the relative valuation of each more comfortably.
It is generally accepted that a PEG ratio of under 0.75 signifies growth at a reasonable price (e.g. PE ratio 20 for EPS growth of 20%) – though be aware that when market valuations fall below average this barometer should be reduced. While the PEG tends to focus on the growth prospects of a stock, which aren’t necessarily vital to a value hunter, it nevertheless gives improved depth to the more simplistic PE for investors that like a bit more bang for their buck. You can read more about the PEG Ratio here.


Horses for courses…  
The choice of which of these valuation ratios you will prefer to use will come down to the situation at hand. Some companies are consistently profitable (use P/E or Earnings Yield), some have more consistent cashflow than profits (use P/CF or EV/EBITDA), some are losing money on their sales (use P/S), others have no sales to speak of but do have hard assets (use P/B), others are a bit pricier but are cheap for their growth (use PEG). By understanding this array of value factors you’ll be far better placed to turn over different stones when circumstances favour it. Don’t be a one trick pony!

After $2 Billion Loss, Will JPMorgan Move to Claw Back Pay?

After $2 Billion Loss, Will JPMorgan Move to Claw Back Pay?
BY STEVEN M. DAVIDOFF

Ina Drew and two JPMorgan Chase traders are leaving in the wake of the bank’s $2 billion trading loss, and others could follow.

The question now is whether JPMorgan will invoke its newly implemented clawback policy to penalize these executives, including forcing the return of Ms. Drew’s reported $14 million salary last year.

We are on new terrain.

Prior to the financial crisis, a clawback wasn’t really an option. Bank executives and other employees kept prior compensation, even if it turned out that they bore responsibility for their institution’s later billion-dollar losses. For example, Charles Prince, the former chief executive of Citigroup who left in the midst of the financial crisis, not only kept the hundreds of millions he was paid but also received a $68 million exit package.

Financial institutions were savagely criticized for these practices, the “heads I win, tails you lose” nature of Wall Street compensation. It was a problem that extended beyond the C-suite. Traders could pocket millions of dollars for strategies that later soured.

One of the most egregious examples was Joseph Cassano of the American International Group. The executive, who headed up the A.I.G. Financial Products, kept more than $300 million in salary and bonuses despite heading the group the led the insurer to near collapse.

When things went bad during the financial crisis, many Wall Street traders pulled the eject button, escaping with millions and leaving the wreckage behind.

In the wake of the financial crisis, the Dodd-Frank Act was supposed to change all this by implementing clawback policies. By ensuring that prior compensation could be returned to a company, employees would act in the long-term interest of the company instead of trying to make money in the short term. The clawback ensures that employees have the right incentives and can’t just run with the money.

But the clawback policy in Dodd-Frank as adopted by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has been criticized as weak, since it only applies to the “too big to fail” banks and other financial institutions. The policy is triggered if the bank is put into insolvency proceedings and employees are found to have failed to apply their job with the “degree of skill and care an ordinarily prudent person in a like position would exercise under similar circumstances.”

This is a legal standard and allows the employee to simply claim they made an error but acted with appropriate care. And the policy only applies to senior executives and directors, not traders. The standard is so high and the circumstances it can be used so narrow, I doubt the F.D.I.C. will ever invoke this clawback provision.

But this does not end the matter. Regulators and institutional shareholders have been at work in the market to build on these requirements. New York’s comptroller, John C. Liu, has been pushing financial institutions to adopt stronger clawback provisions, including getting Goldman Sachs to implement tougher rules. Not surprisingly, given Jamie Dimon’s prior criticism of financial reform, JPMorgan resisted most assiduously although it did eventually address some of Mr. Liu’s concerns.

Under JPMorgan’s policy adopted in 2009, JPMorgan retains “the right to reduce current year incentives to redress any prior imbalance. . . . ” In addition, prior equity compensation can be clawed back if the employee “engages in conduct that causes material financial or reputational harm to the Firm or its business activities” or “for members of the Operating Committee and Tier 1 employees, such employees improperly or with gross negligence fail to identify, raise, or assess, in a timely manner and as reasonably expected, risks and/or concerns with respect to risks material to the Firm or its business activities.”

According to Mr. Liu, JPMorgan takes the position that this clause not only applies to the business as a whole but also to various units. So it is possible that the policy could ensnare executives in the chief investment office, where the trading losses occurred.

I do not know if any of these traders or Ms. Drew is a Tier I employee, but there is a real question whether they and others have acted in a way to trigger these policies. It is even worth asking the question whether the intelligent Mr. Dimon — who admittedly has been upfront that this was “stupid” and has been a valuable chief executive for JPMorgan — has acted in a way to trigger this policy as the supervisor of these people.

JPMorgan’s shareholder meeting is on May 15. No doubt shareholders will be asking whether JPMorgan rewarded these traders with termination packages, but also about clawbacks. At a minimum, the JPMorgan board has a duty to look at this issue, find out the facts are and determine the situation warrants clawbacks. Others are likely to be scrutinizing the board to make sure there is no whitewash, since these clawbacks and compensation adjustments are seen as ensuring that Wall Street does not again profit and leave others holding bag.

We are about to see the first real test of the new post-financial crisis regime. Hopefully, Wall Street will do better this time.

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Steven M. Davidoff, writing as The Deal Professor, is a commentator for DealBook on the world of mergers and acquisitions.