I like prices to fall and quality to improve and there have been some absolutley amazing inventions in the last 20 to 30 years like smart phones, tablets, flat screen TVs, car navigation, ever better portable laptops, apps etc that just make our lives easier and more fun and have a massive effect on improving our productivity. The great thing about these products is that over time they tend to become better and fall in price so more and more consumers are able to afford them. There is a nice article on ranker.com showing old gadgets and the price people paid at the time and the price it would be today once inflation is taken into account. Well many of the proiducts are now obselete  (think video casette recorders!) or in much higher specification (old mobile bricks versus todays smart phones). So lets stop moaning all the time, when it comes to consumer products you have never had it so good or so cheap. LINK1

Having recently got stung €70 by Ryan Air for failing to bring my booking number to my flight I am happy to share the following warning from Bloomberg about other rip off charges. They do please feel free to share !

Yes the yield on the 10 year German bund is now lower than it was during the Eurozone crisis. Its not just Germany bond yield are low around the globe LINK1. This is despite large fiscal deficits and record printing of money....somehow I think this is all a bubble and there will be a "tipping point" when bond yields start to rise and rise rapidly. Still until then the party can continue !

Follow up from my earlier post on CYNK LINK1. After a  10 day suspension CYNK is back trading today and sure enough its price has collapsed from $20 to $2.50 with more to go ! Nice Bloomberg video about this stock below. I love the skull and crossbones that have been placed above the stock to warn people about trading this one !

Yep the Federal Reserve has made these markets very hard to bet against, they keep interest rates at 0 to 0.25%, print nearly $4 trillion in new cash to buy god knows what securities. Still; hardly anyone complains about it and why should they ? Stock prices up, unemployment down. However there is the odd American who does like to moan about it all and where it will all end up. His name is Mr Santelli enjoy his rant below - one of the most amusing ones I have seen for some time. I think he is right the mess is gonna be quite nasty down the road.

Since I work in a University it is probably quite hard to replace my job with a robot. Students like to talk to real humans and I think robots would have great difficulty in designing tests, appraising essays and exams and doing a PhD viva. Sure my lectures could be recorded and replayed in future years but they do need updating from time to time ! However, this is not true for many manufacturing jobs. We have already seen robots taking over the production lines at car factories, in the production of computer chips and now the iphone 6 will have far more robots involved in the manufacturing process. A nice article covering this in the following LINK1. The production of robots in various forms for both manufacturing and consumer product uses is going to be one of the big industries of the next twenty years in my opinion. Today's sophisticated software makes them more intelligent (think google cars that drive themselves LINK2) and there are enormous amounts of potential applications. Think about how robots in the home could end those chores like hovering, the washing, cleaning, doing the shopping and even making a cup of tea !

Nice video about income and wealth inequality in the UK by the Centre for Economic Performance. What it shows it that both income and wealth inequality have grown greatly in the UK  since the 1960s. In addition, social mobilty has worsened in that it is harder for people at the bottom 10% of the income distribution  to get into to the top 25%.

There is an over the counter penny stock called  CYNK Technolog whose stock has gone from 6 cents to over $20 in one month, giving it an amazing $6 billion market capitalization see LINK1 and LINK2 It seems to be associated with a fairly crappy site called IntroBiz.com. Looks like some people may have been offered stock  to write nice things about the Company. What amazes me is people will just buy the stock and push the price up without any proper research into what they are buying. This one is going to end up nasty - pity you can't take a short position on the stock as it is over the counter and so you can't borrow the stock and sell it and hope to buy it at a lower price later. Reminds me of a company during the internet Bubble called NetJ.com that came to the market with no record of trading, no plans to run a business or do anything yet had a market cap of $85 million LINK3 and LINK4. So this story seems even more crazy ! Watch it sink in price on Yahoo Finance LINK5

One of the side effects of quantitative easing and the accompaning low interest rate environment is that market particpiants are desparately looking to obtain higher yields without thinking enough about risk. This "reach for yield" means that low grade corporate borrowers have been able to issue debt without too much difficulty and sell it readily to eager investors such as hedge funds, bond fund managers and the like. Yields on the Merrill Lynch  high yield index are currently 5.71% well below the pre 2007 crisis level - yields later peaked at over 23% whacking investors big time.  Issuance of junk bonds has soared to a record $331 billion in the first half of 2014, well above the roughly $100 billion in the period 2004-2007. This is a dangerous game because the yields are now so low that they really don't compensate for the risks involved ! Also now more than half of issuance is "covenant lite" meaning there is little protection for investors about the way the funds are used or the amount of debt issued relative to earnings. Caveat Emptor (buyer beware) ! There is a nice Bloomberg story covering this in some detail LINK1

The BrandZ100 report is out LINK1 according to the report Google is now the world's most valuable brand at $159 billion followed by Apple $148 billion, IBM $107 billion and Microsoft at $91 billion. The report began in 2006 and since then the value of the top 100 brands has risen every year despite the global recession from $1.5 trillion in 2006  to $2.9 trillion in 2014. Shareholders and executives need to take note of these enormous values and to protect their brand reputation as it hard to win but can be easily lost. While the top 12 places are dominated by American companies, it is interesting to note the rise of Chinese companies such as Tencent, ($54 billion) a Chinese internet services portal, China mobile ($50 billion) and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. ($42 billion). The BrandZ100 report may be of relevance to investment strategy as it seems that investing in the top 10 of these companies would have made you 88% rather than 44% if you invested in the S&P 500 over the period 2006-2013 !