Coin News

Next time you sell old furniture, you can use it as a chance to add more bitcoins to your stockpile. Craigslist now gives you a way to specify in your listing whether you accept virtual currency. Blockexplorer News has noticed a new checkbox option t...

• Rick Rieder, the chief investment officer of fixed income at BlackRock who oversees $1.7 trillion, barely sleeps and has an extremely demanding schedule.
• His extensive research helps inform an investment strategy that involves making a huge number of small but diversified bets.
• Over his 30-year career, Rieder has risen through the ranks of his many employers, all while finding time to do a good deal of charitable work.

Rick Rieder thinks sleeping is a waste of time, so he wakes up at 3:30 every workday and gets right down to business.

Rieder is responsible for $1.7 trillion as the chief investment officer of fixed income at BlackRock, and he isn't keen to let anyone outwork him. And while Rieder's wake-up time is just one example of the commitment required to be an investment chief at the world's largest money manager, it does set the tone for a jam-packed daily schedule.

The first thing Rieder does on waking is check his Bloomberg terminal to see what's happening in global markets. Then he hits Twitter and scans for the latest headlines and expert punditry. After that he checks his email to catch up on what transpired during his brief slumber. He also trades heavily, because there's still money to be made while so much of the world is awake and moving markets.

"I tend to trade a lot between 3:30 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. because markets tend to overreact in those hours," Rieder said. "Every day is truly insane. There's not a minute when I don't have my eye on the markets."

A hellacious schedule, and a remarkable work ethic

Those first three hours are a mere warm-up for Rieder's daily gauntlet of calls and meetings.

He hosts a weekly call with his Asia-based team every Monday at 6:30 a.m. That's followed by a "daily events" call at 6:55, which includes everyone on his teams around the world. And at 11 on Monday, Rieder hosts a meeting to go over macro topics.

At 7:15 a.m. on Tuesday, he holds a meeting for the firm's investment-strategy group, where he and his colleagues painstakingly cover every asset class managed by BlackRock. Further, each day, at 10 a.m., Rieder has a mutual-fund meeting, where portfolio positioning is discussed. And that's just a sampling.

Rieder's hellacious schedule continues in that fashion all week long, starting with broad discussions about strategy before getting increasingly granular. A quick glance at his calendar is enough to make anyone feel overwhelmed, with a color-coded patchwork of endless appointments, one after the other. Not present: many opportunities to come up for air.

But that all pales in comparison to the painstaking preparation that goes into a monthly meeting Rieder hosts, where he leads a discussion about the global-investment regime.

One weekend a month, on both Saturday and Sunday, Rieder wakes up at 4 a.m. and works straight until 6 p.m. He spends that time poring over charts and tables to crystallize the firm's big-picture framework. In his mind, if he didn't do this work, he'd be woefully unprepared for his big monthly meeting.

"You get these aha moments when you stare at so many things and they start to come together," he said. "If you didn’t do the work you’d never get there. It’s not the most socially enhancing experience, but I have to do it."

You get these aha moments when you stare at so many things, and they start to come together.

Considering how tough these weekends are, you'd figure Rieder would take a load off for the rest of the month. That's far from the case. Rieder estimates that he spends 10 to 12 hours working on the average weekend.

But surely vacation is a time to relax, right? Well, that really depends on your definition of relaxation.

"When I’m on vacation, I’ll read research reports and business books the whole time," he said. "My wife says I'm working, but I say I'm not. I enjoy doing this."

And Rieder's tireless work ethic doesn't just stop at the financial realm. He's also heavily involved in various philanthropic efforts, serving as chairman of the board for 13 charter schools in Newark, New Jersey, as well as for a Graduate Generation public-school association in Atlanta. Rieder is also a trustee for the US Olympic Foundation and sits on the board of advisers for the Hospital for Special Surgery.

A billion little bets

When you consider Rieder's overall investment strategy, his willingness to dig deep into countless reports and charts makes total sense. Rather than making huge wagers on very specific trades, as many of BlackRock's competitors do, he prefers to be diversified.

Rieder's thesis is, if you do an extraordinary amount of work and look at many different areas, you should have no reason to go big into one single position. He likens it to how a casino makes money by tilting the odds in their favor and then processing a huge number of wagers:

"Make a lot of little decisions and little bets and do it billions of times. If you put all your eggs in one basket, you can do well for a while and then it’ll blow up. I don’t believe in that."

Make a lot of little decisions and little bets, and do it billions of times.

Rieder's enjoyed an incredible 30-year career since getting his MBA from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business in 1987, after which he started at Lehman Brothers. Within two years of joining Lehman, Rieder had already made a big impression, building the risk system for the firm's corporate bond trading business from scratch.

He ended up as head of Lehman's corporate-bond desk and earned his stripes through tough market cycles, in 1990, 1994, 1998, and 2002, eventually running the firm's global credit business. The last position Rieder held at Lehman before the firm's collapse during the financial crisis was head of the global principal strategies team.

Starting a hedge fund during the financial crisis

While at Lehman, Rieder launched his own hedge fund, R3 Capital Partners. Lehman sold R3 about $5 billion in assets and invested in the firm. In retrospect, he said, launching a fund in 2008, during the throes of a major recession and financial crisis, was an incredibly risky idea. And Rieder concedes that R3 had a tough 2008, as Lehman agreed to sell its stake in the firm in October as part of its bankruptcy case.

But things turned around quickly in 2009, and that escalated discussions Rieder had been having with BlackRock about the firm acquiring R3. The deal ended up getting done in April 2009, and by 2010 Rieder was the chief investment officer of fixed income. Then, in 2015, he moved into the same role on a global basis.

For Rieder, BlackRock was the only option worth considering.

"I wouldn't have gone anywhere else," he said. "We wanted to be at the epicenter of markets, and credit markets and BlackRock allowed us to do that."

When I spoke with Rieder, it was the afternoon before the long Thanksgiving weekend, a time many professionals treat as relaxing holiday.

True to form, he was preparing for a long weekend spent combing through data. After all, that's what's relaxing to him.

"I’m working on a big company whose debt has gotten pounded, and I’m going to go through a bunch of spreadsheets," Rieder said. "I look at it like a puzzle — what’s driving their cash flow. You have to prepare.

"If I didn’t do my work on the weekends, I wouldn’t be ready on Monday morning."

SEE ALSO: 2 Berkeley grads are using AI to make stock-buying decisions — and it could change investing forever

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How to buy and sell bitcoin using one of the most popular cryptocurrency apps on the iPhone

• Gemini, the crypto exchange, extended a scheduled maintenance after a bitcoin sell-off.
• The exchange appeared to be down for some users for much of the morning.
• Bitcoin, the red-hot cryptocurrency, shed more than $1,500 during the downtime.
  
• The exchange will provide data for Cboe Global Markets' bitcoin futures contracts, which will go live Sunday.

Gemini, the cryptocurrency exchange founded by the famous Winklevoss twins, has extended a scheduled maintenance of its site after a massive bitcoin sell-off.

The company said Friday night that its site would undergo maintenance from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. ET Saturday, adding that users shouldn't expect "downtime." Still, the site appeared to be down for some users during the period, preventing folks from accessing their cryptocurrency accounts. 

At around 1:00 p.m. ET the company said the maintenance would continue:

The outage coincided with a massive bitcoin sell-off, which shaved more than $1,500 of its price, according to Markets Insider data. By 1:22 p.m. ET, bitcoin was trading down 11% against the US dollar at $14,305 a coin. The outage infuriated some users who were unable to move their coins around as bitcoin's price slid. One person criticized the firm for not giving users enough notice on the original maintenance:

Here's another discontent tweeter:

Founded in 2015 by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who reportedly own a billion dollars of bitcoin, Gemini is one of the best-connected firms in the cryptocurrency space. Cboe Global Markets is partnering with the exchange for its bitcoin futures contracts, which are set to go live Sunday.

When volumes have increased on Gemini, the firm has faced challenges staying online.

Earlier this month, the firm showed many users a "504 Gateway Time-out" message, which meant its servers were not responding to requests. The company posted on its status page that "systems are currently experiencing degraded performance."

The exchange also experienced outages lasting as long as 10 hours in August, according to reporting by Quartz.

“This is not the first scaling challenge we’ve encountered, and it won’t be the last,” Gemini said in a blog post. “We’re continuing to improve our performance and infrastructure monitoring so we can anticipate potential problems more quickly in the future.”

Gemini did not respond to a request for comment.

SEE ALSO: The first bitcoin futures depend on trading at the Winklevoss twins' tiny exchange — and that's a problem

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Cryptocurrency is the next step in the digitization of everything — 'It’s sort of inevitable'

[…]

The post Exponential Growth: Number of Bitcoin Users to Reach 200 Million by 2024 appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

[…]

The post Bitcoin Community Raises Over $1.6 Million For Andreas Antonopoulos appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

• Bank of America has announced plans to buy back an additional $5 billion of its own stock, just five months after announcing a $12 billion repurchase.
• This latest buyback activity signals to investors that the firm sees its stock as attractively priced, and the action itself should be accretive to shares.
• The Federal Reserve gave approval for the capital plans of many Wall Street banks back in June, and this is an extension of that.

Bank of America thinks its stock is cheap. And to show you that it's serious, the firm plans to buy back more of its own shares.

Just five months after announcing plans to repurchase $12 billion of common stock over a one-year period, the bank on Tuesday said it would buy back an additional $5 billion by June 30.

With this latest development, Bank of America has once again signaled to investors that it sees its stock as undervalued — hence its willingness to fork over cash to buy shares at current levels. And in a win-win of sorts, by reducing the number of shares outstanding, the firm will drive the price higher for its remaining stock.

The firm could be reacting to what it perceives as further upside to its stock, now that the Senate has passed Republicans' tax bill. Banks are expected to get a boost from the tax plan, which is intended to improve US growth and allow firms to pay lower taxes.

Financial firms have already been feeling the positive effects of a successful tax bill, having led gains in the S&P 500 over the past week. The sector has combined with telecom stocks to supplant tech as the best-performing segment of the market.

Bank of America and other Wall Street heavyweights were emboldened to buy back more of their own stock back in late June, when the Federal Reserve gave across-the-board approvals for their financial plans — most of which heavily featured share repurchases and dividend increases.

The firm's continued willingness to buy back shares comes with its stock already up 31% year-to-date. Still, that performance lags mega-cap tech titans like Amazon and Apple, which have soared roughly 50% apiece over the same period.

CEO Brian Moynihan put it in simple terms at a conference in September: "Our stock's a good buy and we'll continue to buy it until the cows come home."

Bank of America's stock climbed 0.9% in premarket trading on Tuesday, a day after surging 3.4%.

SEE ALSO: One chart highlights the tug-of-war raging over control of the stock market

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How to buy and sell bitcoin using one of the most popular cryptocurrency apps on the iPhone

[…]

The post Winklevoss Twins Expect Bitcoin Market Cap to Surpass Trillions in Long-Term appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

• S&P 500 inter-sector correlation is close to its lowest on record, showing that industries within the index have been trading independently of one another.
• The offsetting nature of S&P 500 sector moves has been particularly pronounced in the past week as traders rotate out of tech and into financials and telecom.

The next time someone you know conflates low stock market volatility with an overall lack of excitement around equities, be sure to point them to the chart below.

It shows that intra-sector correlation — or the degree to which industries in the benchmark S&P 500 index trade independently of one another — sits close to its lowest on record. Weaker only during the tech bubble, the measure suggests that trading has been heavily polarized on a sector basis.

One of the main reasons that overall market price swings have been subdued — with the CBOE Volatility Index, or VIX, sitting close to its lowest ever for much of 2017 — is that these sector fluctuations have offset one another. So while your friend has repeatedly bemoaned the lack of trading opportunities in a low-volatility environment, the truth is that there have been shifts happening at the industry level.

This dynamic has been in play for much of the past week, which has coincided with the above measure's drop to fresh multiyear lows. On Monday, the S&P 500 slid by less than 0.1% as tech stocks, which have led the market higher for much of the year, lost nearly 2%. Balancing that out were gains of more than 1.5% in financial and telecom stocks.

It also perfectly encapsulated trading late last week, in the lead-up to the Senate's successful passing of the GOP tax bill, when traders drove a so-called rotation out of expensive tech positions to finance purchases of lagging sectors like — you guessed it — financials and telecom. This was especially pronounced on November 29, when the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 dropped 1.7%, while the S&P 500 was little changed.

"The extreme sector dispersion explains why index moves have been so muted this year, as the market has really been driven by sector rotation," the equity derivatives strategist Mandy Xu wrote in a client note.

With that in mind, it looks as if low-volatility truthers may need to find a new excuse for their underperforming portfolios.

SEE ALSO: GOLDMAN SACHS: Here's how to make a killing on the 7 top trades of 2018

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How to buy and sell bitcoin using one of the most popular cryptocurrency apps on the iPhone

[…]

The post Zimbabwean Exchange Adds Ethereum, Re-Enables Bitcoin Buying appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

[…]

The post Big Banks Block Client Access to Sunday’s Bitcoin Futures appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

[…]

The post Bitcoin? Not For Me: Alibaba Founder Jack Ma appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

[…]

The post Indian Central Bank’s Bitcoin Warning: A Sign of Fear? appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

One of the most talked about technologies in development for bitcoin is the Lightning Network. But what does it do, and when might it be ready?

• John Stolzfus of Oppenheimer has the most bullish S&P 500 forecast for 2018, with a year-end price target of 3,000.
• He sees many of the positive drivers from 2017 continuing, such as slow-and-steady economic expansion, strong earnings growth and continued monetary accommodation.

With nearly every market expert bullish on stocks heading into 2018, it's tough to stand out. But John Stoltzfus has managed to do it.

The chief investment strategist at Oppenheimer just unveiled his year-end S&P 500 target of 3,000, which makes him the biggest bull on Wall Street.

That's a roughly 13% increase from current levels, which Stoltzfus says will result from a combination of factors that are all aligning at the right time. They include:

• The expectation of 2% to 2.5% long-term GDP growth, as well as a strong employment picture.
• Continued accommodative monetary policy. Although the Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates multiple times in 2018, Oppenheimer sees the steady pace and signaling ahead of time keeping the risk of disruption subdued.
• Modest inflation without signs of overheating. Stoltzfus points out that low inflation presents more near-term risk for bonds than equities.
• Market pessimists being won over, increasing the market's bullish base.

"Skeptic and bear capitulation appears to have just begun in the fourth quarter of 2017 and contributed to the number of this year’s equity benchmark record highs," said Stoltzfus. "We believe that it is early in this process and multiples could expand further than we currently anticipate should the capitulation gain momentum."

Here's a round-up of the other 2018 year-end S&P 500 targets on Wall Street, ordered from most to least bullish:

• Bank of Montreal — Brian Belski — Target: 2,950
• UBS — Keith Parker — Target: 2,900
• Credit Suisse — Jonathan Golub — Target: 2,875
• Jefferies — Sean Darby — Target: 2,855
• Deutsche Bank — Binky Chadha — Target: 2,850
• Goldman Sachs — David Kostin — Target: 2,850
• Bank of America — Savita Subramanian — Target: 2,800
• Canaccord — Tony Dwyer — Target: 2,800
• Morgan Stanley — Mike Wilson — Target: 2,750
• Scotiabank — Vincent Delisle — Target, 2,750
• Stifel Nicolaus — Barry Bannister — Target: 2,750
• Citigroup — Tobias Levkovich — Target: 2,675
• HSBC — Ben Laidler — Target: 2,650
• Goldman Sachs — David Kostin — Target: 2,500

SEE ALSO: BlackRock's $1.7 trillion bond chief explains the key dynamic every investor needs to understand

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How to buy and sell bitcoin using one of the most popular cryptocurrency apps on the iPhone

[…]

The post First Bitcoin Dispute Due for Trial in Singapore appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

• ING FX Strategist Viraj Patel uses a game theory approach to determine how sterling might move as Brexit progresses.
• Patel's "Prisoner's Dilemma" chart provides a handy summation of where the pound may be headed in 2018.
• Sterling dropped in reaction to news that the UK and EU have reached an agreement on the first phase of Brexit negotiations.

LONDON — The UK and EU reached an agreement on Friday on the first phase of Brexit negotiations after overnight talks between Theresa May, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, the DUP and the Irish government.

On the surface, the announcement should have been good news for the pound, creating a little bit more certainty about Brexit talks going forward. In reality the opposite happened, with a small but not insignificant drop in the pound's value against the euro and the dollar.

No one can be 100% certain of what happens going forward, especially given the wide array of issues still to be sorted once the second phase of negotiations, but it is the time of the year that bank analysts and strategists start making predictions about the next 12 months in the markets.

Among those analysts are the FX team at Dutch lender ING.

In March this year, before Article 50 had even been triggered, ING Strategist Viraj Patel produced a so-called Prisoner's Dilemma charting the different consequences for sterling that certain developments in Brexit negotiations could have. You can see it here.

Almost 10 months on, ING has released its FX outlook for 2018, and included an updated version of the chart, chronicling how both the pound and euro are likely to fare in the next year.

"Our game theory application to Brexit negotiations is proving a handy framework for analysing the political risks to GBP. While much of 2017 has been marred by UK and EU politicians playing ‘hardball’ with one another, it appears as though the tide may be turning in a constructive direction," Patel writes.

"Politicians moving away from seeking to protect their own domestic interest (the Prisoner's Dilemma scenario) – and slowly moving towards a mutual agreement – is unambiguously positive for GBP."

"For example, while agreeing a ‘divorce bill’ has little economic significance for the price of GBP, the political significance of progress in Brexit talks is quite profound – not least as it reduces the tail risk of a 'No Deal' scenario and a complete breakdown in negotiations," he concluded in the note, published a couple of days before the deal was announced.

Here's the chart:

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This is one of the best responses to Jamie Dimon calling bitcoin a fraud that we have heard so far

[…]

The post CNBC’s Jim Cramer Calls Bitcoin “Monopoly Money” appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.