Stock Market Reaches Record Highs After Positive April Jobs Report - TIME

Stock Market Reaches Record Highs After Positive April Jobs Report

Posted: 05 May 2017 02:17 PM PDT

(NEW YORK) — A solid pickup in hiring last month helped push the stock market to record highs Friday. The gains were driven by energy, technology and industrial companies.
The Labor Department told investors what they had hoped to hear: employers added more workers last month after a sluggish beginning to the year.
Energy companies rose as the price of oil recovered from losses earlier in the week. Media companies like CBS and Charter Communications recovered from their losses earlier in the week. Technology companies rose, but IBM missed out after billionaire investor Warren Buffett said he sold a large part of his stake in the company.

After a quiet morning, stocks rose in the afternoon and the S&P 500 finished above the all-time high close it set March 1.
Scott Wren, senior global equity strategist at Wells Fargo’s Investment Institute, said stocks benefited from the combination of greater hiring and slower wage growth because if wages rise too quickly it will affect corporate profits.
“The market is likely to be concerned about wage gains and the impact on corporate margins as we move into 2018,” he said.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index climbed 9.77 points, or 0.4 percent, to 2,399.29. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 55.47 points, or 0.3 percent, to 21,006.94.
The Nasdaq composite jumped 25.42 points, or 0.4 percent, to 6,100.76, which beat a record it set earlier this week. The Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks added 8.15 points, or 0.6 percent, to 1,397.
Employers in the United States added 211,000 jobs in April, according to the Labor Department. That comes after slow hiring over the first three months of the year and sluggish economic growth.
Energy companies bounced back as the price of oil steadied. After two steep losses in three days, benchmark U.S. crude oil jumped 70 cents, or 1.5 percent, to $46.22 a barrel in New York. Brent crude, the standard for international oil prices, added 72 cents, or 1.5 percent, to $49.10 barrel in London. Oil prices had fallen earlier this week as investors wonder if OPEC will extend a deal that trimmed oil production.
Occidental Petroleum rose $2.38, or 4.1 percent, to $60.40 and Transocean jumped 84 cents, or 8.1 percent, to $11.18. Baker Hughes gained $1.92, or 3.3 percent, to $59.33.
Apple jumped $2.43, or 1.7 percent, to $148.96, another record for the world’s most valuable publicly-traded company. That helped tech stocks move higher.
Basic materials makers advanced. Dow Chemical gained $1.67, or 2.7 percent, to $63.09 and gas supplier Praxair rose $3.16, or 2.5 percent, to $129.48. Fertilizer maker CF Industries climbed $1.35, or 5 percent, to $28.42.
CBS announced a bigger profit and more revenue than analysts expected, and its stock gained $1.35, or 2.1 percent, to $65.20. Media companies have struggled the last few days as investors worried about declining cable ad revenue. Charter Communications, Scripps Networks and Tegna all traded higher.
IBM fell after Warren Buffett said he’s sold about 25 million shares of the technology and consulting company, about a third of the stake that his Berkshire Hathaway company had owned. Buffett started buying IBM stock in 2011. IBM faces stiff competition from companies including Microsoft and Amazon, which have focused on cloud computing services. IBM reached an all-time high of $215 in early 2013 and closed at $155.05 Friday, down $4, or 2.5 percent.
Cosmetics maker Revlon plunged after its sales in North America fell during the first quarter. That affected all parts of its business, as its consumer and professional divisions both reported smaller profits and lower sales than they did a year ago. Revlon bought Elizabeth Arden in September, and sales for that business were about the same as they had been a year ago. The stock had its worst day since 2008 as it gave up $5.95, or 23.6 percent, to $19.30.
Biotech drug companies slipped. Biogen dropped $6.45, or 2.4 percent, to $262.15 and Incyte sank $2.69, or 2.1 percent, to $122.41. Celgene fell $2.05, or 1.6 percent, also closing at $122.41.
Bond prices held steady. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note remained 2.35 percent. High-dividend stocks did fairly well. Telecommunications companies recovered from a hard loss the day before, and utility companies also rose. Banks traded lower.
Gold dipped $1.70 to $1,226.90 an ounce. The precious metal fell more than 3 percent this week for its biggest decline since right after the presidential election. Silver lost 3 cents to $16.27 an ounce. Copper rose 2 cents to $2.53 a pound.
In other energy trading, wholesale gasoline rose 2 cents to $1.50 a gallon. Heating oil added 2 cents to $1.44 a gallon. Natural gas jumped 8 cents, or 2.5 percent, to $3.27 per 1,000 cubic feet.
The dollar rose to 112.61 yen from 112.42 yen. The euro climbed $1.0990 from $1.0981.
France’s CAC 40 jumped another 1.1 percent as investors hoped centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron will be elected president over the weekend. The CAC 40 is at its highest level since early 2008. Britain’s FTSE 100 was up 0.7 percent and Germany’s DAX added 0.5 percent. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong lost 0.8 percent. Markets in Japan and South Korea were closed for holidays.

A CEO Explains Why He Doesn’t Care About Your Résumé, Your Alma Mater, or Your Last Job When He’s Looking to Hire - Business Insider

A CEO Explains Why He Doesn’t Care About Your Résumé, Your Alma Mater, or Your Last Job When He’s Looking to Hire Posted: 05 May 2017 03:00 AM PDT For United Shore CEO Mat Ishbia, it’s not about what you know. Ishbia says that specific skills, such as salesmanship, graphic design, or programming, can be taught. Those don’t guarantee whether or not a candidate will succeed at the Troy, Mich.-based financial services business. “I don’t care about your résumé,” Ishbia says. “I don’t care about what school you went to. I don’t care about what you did at your last company.” So, what does matter to Ishbia? Two things: work ethic and attitude. “It doesn’t matter if you went to Harvard or you went to a community college or you didn’t go to college,” he told Business Insider. “What I care about is your work ethic and attitude. That’s what’s going to dictate your success at our company and your success in life, in our opinion.” Ishbia says that his company has a rather unusual way of vetting attitude and work ethic. United Shore has its own on-site, mortgage-themed escape room (a game that requires participants to gather hidden clues and solve puzzles and brainteasers in order to “escape” a locked room). Prospective employees interviewing for some positions—he doesn’t like to say which—must “escape” the room before they receive a job offer. This particular escape room’s not all fun and games, according to Ishbia. Hidden among eight or so candidates is a “mole”—a United Shore recruiter. He says that a person’s work style and personality will usually shine through as they work piecing together the puzzles and clues. The whole exercise is meant to give recruiters a sense of what candidates will truly fit in with the company’s culture, which prizes drive and teamwork. “Some people take the bull by the horns and actually do things, some collaborate well and work well together, and others kind of just do their own thing and aren’t team players,” Ishbia says.”That recruiter is really able to measure leadership.” This story originally appeared on Business Insider.

Some of the Best Available Mutual Funds Are Now Off Limits to Millions of Investors - TIME Business

Some of the Best Available Mutual Funds Are Now Off Limits to Millions of Investors Posted: 04 May 2017 09:37 AM PDT The largest brokerage in the country, Morgan Stanley, is cutting off access to the only mutual funds that investors seem to want to buy. Vanguard was the best-selling mutual fund manager last year—with roughly $183 billion in net new assets flowing into its mutual funds, according to Morningstar. MONEY frequently recommends its low-cost, no-frills indexing approach—championed by its founder, Jack Bogle—and has placed almost 20 of its funds on the MONEY 50, an annual list of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds we recommend using to build a long-lasting portfolio. But starting next week, Morgan Stanley will not permit its 15,800 financial advisors (currently the biggest team of brokers in the U.S.) to sell customers shares of Vanguard’s mutual funds, a company spokeswoman confirmed Thursday. As first reported by industry website AdvisorHub, Morgan Stanley customers who are not already invested in Vanguard will not be able to buy new shares of the company’s conventional mutual funds starting on Monday. Those with existing Vanguard shares will not be immediately yanked out of the funds, but they only will be able to increase their positions through early next year. The follows Morgan Stanley’s announcement in April that it would be pursuing a series of pricing, policy and product changes spurred by the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, which would require advisors to act in their clients’ best interests when working on retirement assets. “These changes are designed to reduce client costs, ensure we are offering top quality products to clients, and reduce the potential for conflicts of interest,” said the company, which says it has 3.4 million clients. The company did not explain how eliminating a line of low-cost funds would help reduce client costs. After the cuts, the firm will offer about 2,300 funds. Morgan Stanley’s move is seen as retaliation against Vanguard over its refusal to pay the brokerage for access on its advisor platform, AdvisorHub reports. (Last May, Merrill Lynch made a similar decision to remove Vanguard mutual funds from the funds available for advisors to sell to clients.) It’s not unlike what happens when cable companies threaten to cut certain channels when contract negotiations break down. “It’s unfortunate that certain advisors and then therefore their clients are not able to access the conventional shares of Vanguard mutual funds,” a spokeswoman for Vanguard said Thursday. However, she noted that Vanguard’s ETFs are still available and provide the same kind of low-cost, broadly diversified option for investors. Even with ETFs still available, Morgan Stanley could be taking a big risk—because Vanguard is one of the few mutual fund companies that investors can’t get enough of. Last year, Vanguard’s mutual funds took in more money than the rest of the fund industry combined, according to Morningstar’s calculations.

Getting rich is largely about luck – shame the wealthy don’t want to hear it - Independent

Getting rich is largely about luck – shame the wealthy don’t want to hear it

A new report confirms how the rich become deluded about their talents, but also hints at a growing acknowledgement of inequality

• Danny Dorling 
• @indyvoices 
• Friday 5 May 2017 23:00 BST

The UK suffers from the highest levels of income inequality in Europe – partly because of the delusions of its rich. In countries where the rich have less, they tend to be less delusional, about themselves, about other people, about what is possible, and about why some become rich.

In the UK, it is unsurprising to read that an investment banker thinks £100m is a lot of money but “not a ridiculous amount of money”. In a report in The Guardian this week, we also heard that one particular banker is “fairly confident” that a driven and passionate individual could “start from zero and get to £100m within 20 years”.

However, there is hope. In the research report that kicked off this latest set of news stories, Katharina Hecht from the London School of Economics and Political Science found that one third of her sample of extremely rich people working in the City of London agreed that “the government should reduce income differences”. The sample is extremely small and this subset of the very rich has not been asked similar questions before, but what they say chimes with reports from the US last year, which implied attitudes among the extremely wealthy are beginning to change.

In 2016 in New York, 50 millionaires wrote to the state’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, asking him to increase their taxes because they thought economic inequalities had grown too high. The group included Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Walt Disney, and Steven Rockefeller, a fourth-generation member of that very wealthy family. The offspring of the rich at least know they did not bring in their riches, let alone create them out of thin air.

In truth, no one creates wealth out of the ether as the mythic phrase “wealth creator” suggests. Most wealth is appropriated from others, not made. Wealth can grow but only when it is well shared, not corralled into the hands of a few. Wealth growth rates are highest in countries that are more equitable than their neighbours.

Four years after the great financial crash, Michael Lewis, one of the most successful people ever to write about the financial industry tried to explain to a group of Princeton University graduates why most of his own and his audience’s success would be down to luck. The author of The Big Short and Moneyball told them that the odds would just be tipped a little in their favour if they were born with a silver spoon in their mouth:

People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck – especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.

The world Lewis was talking about was not the whole world, but the world as seen by the elites in unequal counties. By “world” he really meant “America”, and in particular he was talking about the “American Dream” – the idea that anyone can make it if they try hard enough and are talented enough, no matter how economically unequal the society is they are competing in.

The American dream is a myth, just like the London investment banker’s fantasy. Those who make money are often not very talented at all. They were just lucky at the right points in their lives. They might have worked hard and often are driven and greedy, but thousands of others will have worked as hard as them, been just as greedy as them, and not consistently struck it lucky. Most often, those who make money had money given to them in the first place, through inheritance that increased their chances; but it is always down to luck. Don’t believe the myth of the nice, kind, gifted, self-made entrepreneur.

We live in a world in which those who have got to the top have got there not out of great merit, but because they often had a few unfair advantages to start with, such as being born male, white and rich, because they had many lucky breaks on the way up, and often because they were willing to stamp on others’ chances as they rose. The human world does not consist of just a few superior beings able enough to do the key things that need doing, and a lumpen mass of inferior beings who could never do these things and so should be penalised appropriately.

Danny Dorling is a Halford Mackinder professor of geography, University of Oxford. This article first appeared on The Conversation (theconversation.com)