Apple’s Silence Hurts Efforts to Take Drivers Out of Cars

It should be obvious that a car is not a smartphone. Apple Inc. is acting as if they’re the same. 

It’s no secret that Apple is working on self-driving vehicle technology. Apple is among dozens of companies that have California permits to test autonomous cars on public roads. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, in his way, acknowledged the driverless transportation project in a 2017 Bloomberg Television interview. News outlets regularly report on the ups and downs of this initiative. The company this week confirmed earlier reports that it had acquired autonomous vehicle startup Drive.ai.

And yet Apple remains far more closed than its peers. Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, Uber Technologies Inc., Tesla Inc., General Motors Co.’s Cruise and other companies working on this technology talk fairly openly about their broad ambitions for autonomous transportation, milestones in progress and issues for the industry. Apple does none of this. As far as I can tell, Cook’s discussions about Apple’s autonomous transportation project has never gone beyond the vague generalities in that Bloomberg TV interview. 

It’s always Apple’s tendency to keep mum about a product in development until it’s perfect and ready for a world debut. But driverless cars are not smartphones or augmented reality glasses. Emerging technologies, particularly those that have the potential to save human life and also to take lives, need an open debate and deserve a relatively transparent process — warts and all.

Driverless cars have the potential to transform the nature of cities, upend a country’s workforce, impact the environment and necessitate revisions to laws and ethics. The public is not well served by Apple’s inclination against engaging on a subject of such importance. Apple may not be well served by its approach, either.

The driverless car industry as a whole has not been an open book. Advocates, and some regulators, have pushed companies to disclose far more than they do about safety metrics and to collaborate with rivals to ensure better and safer progress on autonomous technology. But Apple is taking the industry’s discretion to the absurd. 

Soon after that Bloomberg interview, Cook reiterated to stock analysts that Apple is interested in autonomous technology and has “a large project going and are making a big investment in this.” And that’s about it. “I don’t want to go any further with that,” Cook said. He’s been similarly vague since then. 

By comparison, Waymo executives regularly talk about the implications of driverless car technology and its potential drawbacks. In Alphabet’s most recent earnings call, executives talked about opening a Michigan facility with dedicated autonomous vehicle production, explained Waymo’s focus on Uber-like ride services and mentioned making its in-house vehicle sensors available to outside companies. Last week, an Alphabet executive answered a shareholder’s question about how autonomous vehicles might affect tax revenue.

Alphabet has progressed further with its driverless car project than Apple has, but that shouldn’t limit engagement given the way the technology is advancing. It’s growing more clear that the biggest benefit from driverless cars may not be in individually owned cars but from improving shared transportation. No single company can accomplish this in a vacuum. It requires engagement with transportation planners and researchers, input from legal experts, settling on safety benchmarks and working with suppliers. Apple may be doing some of this secretly, but that misses the point. Autonomous technology progress demands a broad coalition and open engagement with the world. 

For Apple investors, driverless technology is a “free optionality” for long-term stock owners, CFRA Research said this week. The costs are already being absorbed. Apple’s operating margin is at its lowest level in a decade as a share of revenue. Largely that’s because spending on research and development — which presumably includes Apple’s driverless car project — amounted to 6% of Apple’s revenue in the last 12 months. It was 3% just five years ago.

Down $1.7K: Bitcoin’s Price Dives Amid Crypto Market Boost

Bitcoin is down more than $1,700 since yesterday after a violent sell-off that rocked the markets and caught even seasoned traders off-guard.

At 16:00 UTC on June 27, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, bitcoin (BTC), suffered a steep correction in its price, dropping to a low of $10,300 after eight straight days in the green.

Prices attempted a rally above $11,300 with 30 minutes out from the daily close, which would have provided greater confidence in price consolidation for the bulls. Yet, instead, BTC closed on a down note below former resistance at $11,086.

BTC is currently changing hands at $11,067 and is down 14 percent over a 24-hour period.

BTC suffered a massive correction to the parabolic uptrend that had been ongoing for over two weeks. The move down was accompanied by a large surge in trading volume, with June 27’s daily total matching, if not, besting June 26’s postings across most exchanges.

For example, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, Binance, recorded $2.1 billion in total volume alone, while Huobi Global and OKEx recorded $1.7 billion and $1.4 billion over a 24-hour period, respectively.

Further, the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies combined suffered a $46.1 billion loss over the last 24-hours, marking the biggest single day loss in market value since May 17, 2019.

The total market cap is down from $372.4 billion to stand at $324.5 billion at press time while the total amount for BTC’s loss in value by trades end amounted to just over $33 billion.

Perhaps the greater story, however, is the altcoin market’s rise against BTC pairings, which has driven up their value while BTC continued to decline in price.

All but two out of the top 20 are in the green today, up between 1.3 and 15.72 percent and are demonstrating a small bounce across the lower timeframes.

The idea that traders have switched from BTC to altcoins in the short-term is supported by a change in the BTC dominance rate, down 1.41 percent over 24-hours, from 63.37 percent to 61.96 percent. This suggests traders are currently moving to tether (USDT) or major altcoins to conserve some profit from BTC’s violent drop.

The short-term remains highly volatile, so BTC could experience a brief bounce on today’s price action, but that will need to be accompanied by similar levels in volume in order to end the recent sell-off.

Perhaps the greater story, howecer, is the altcoin market’s rise against BTC pairings, which has driven up their value while BTC continued to decline in price.

All but two out of the top 20 are in the green today, up between 1.3 and 15.72 percent and are demonstrating a small bounce across the lower timeframes.

The idea that traders have switched from BTC to altcoins in the short-term is supported by a change in the BTC dominance rate, down 1.41 percent over 24-hours, from 63.37 percent to 61.96 percent. This suggests traders are currently moving to tether (USDT) or major altcoins to conserve some profit from BTC’s violent drop.

The short-term remains highly volatile, so BTC could experience a brief bounce on today’s price action, but that will need to be accompanied by similar levels in volume in order to end the recent sell-off.

Grading the performance of your company’s retirement plan

Imagine giving your company’s retirement plan a report card. Would it earn straight A’s in preparing your participants for their golden years? Or is it more of a C student who could really use some extra help after school? Benchmarking can tell you.

Mind the basics

More than likely, you already use certain criteria to benchmark your plan’s performance using traditional measures such as:

• Fund investment performance relative to a peer group,
• Breadth of fund options,
• Benchmarked fees, and
• Participation rates and average deferral rates (including matching contributions).

These measures are all critical, but they’re only the beginning of the story. Add to that list helpful administrative features and functionality — including auto-enrollment and auto-escalation provisions, investment education, retirement planning, and forecasting tools. In general, the more, the better.

Don’t overlook useful data

A sometimes-overlooked plan metric is average account balance size. This matters for two reasons. First, it provides a first-pass look at whether participants are accumulating meaningful sums in their accounts. Naturally, you’ll need to look at that number in light of the age of your workforce and how long your plan has been in existence. Second, it affects recordkeeping fees — higher average account values generally translate into lower per-participant fees.

Knowing your plan asset growth rate is also helpful. Unless you have an older workforce and participants are retiring and rolling their fund balances into IRAs, look for a healthy overall asset growth rate, which incorporates both contribution rates and investment returns.

What’s a healthy rate? That’s a subjective assessment. You’ll need to examine it within the context of current financial markets. A plan with assets that shrank during the financial crisis about a decade ago could hardly be blamed for that pattern. Overall, however, you might hope to see annual asset growth of roughly 10%.

Keep participants on track

Ultimately, however, the success of a retirement plan isn’t measured by any one element, but by aggregating multiple data points to derive an “on track to retire” score. That is, how many of your plan participants have account values whose size and growth rate are sufficient to result in a realistic preretirement income replacement ratio, such as 85% or more?

It might not be possible to determine that number with precision. Such calculations at the participant level, sometimes performed by recordkeepers, involve sophisticated guesswork with respect to participants’ retirement ages and savings outside the retirement plan, as well as their income growth rates and the long-term rates of return on their investment accounts.

Ask for help

Given the importance of strong retirement benefits in hiring and retaining the best employees, it’s worth your while to regularly benchmark your plan’s performance. For better or worse, doing so isn’t as simple as 2+2. Our firm can help you choose the relevant measures, gather the data, perform the calculations and, most important, determine whether your retirement plan is really making the grade.

© 2019

$1,800 Drop in Minutes: Bitcoin Volatility on Full Display

(Bloomberg) -- This week’s jump in Bitcoin prices revived themes well known to the digital currency that inflated then burst less than two years ago. Among them: enormous volatility, and exchange overloads.

Bitcoin soared as much as 39% this week to $13,852, the highest since January 2018. But it hit a brick wall around 4:30 p.m. New York time Wednesday, plunging more than $1,800 within about 10 minutes. Moments later, prominent cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Inc. reported a system outage, which was resolved after an hour. Swings continued Thursday, with the coin anywhere from down 7.3% to up 4.8%.

It was down 4.8% to $12,125 as of 8:02 a.m. in New York. Volatility in Bitcoin is near the highest levels since early 2018, when the bubble was bursting. Analysts said this was likely a sign of things to come.

“A 20%-30% pullback would not be surprising and very consistent with Bitcoin’s recent bull-market pullbacks,” Robert Sluymer, technical strategist at Fundstrat Global Advisors, wrote in a research note.

New Projects

The most widely traded digital currency has rebounded after a slump lasting more than a year as major multinational corporations announce new projects in the industry. Facebook Inc. unveiled plans for a so-called stablecoin called Libra to launch next year. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP said on Wednesday it had added cryptocurrency auditing to its services. And JPMorgan Chase & Co. said it is seeing interest from clients in a prototype digital coin to speed up trading of securities such as bonds.

“Regardless of how successful Libra will be, the one thing that it’s been successful in doing is bringing attention back to Bitcoin,” said Zennon Kapron, managing director of financial technology consulting firm Kapronasia and author of a book on Bitcoin in China.

Equities are getting in on the act, as well. Some stocks that had been popular proxy bets on the Bitcoin boom in 2017 rallied again this week, with Nvidia Corp, a maker of the graphics processing units popular among miners, advancing 4.9% since the start of the week. Riot Blockchain Inc, which changed its name to capitalize on the interest in distributed ledger technologies, rose 38% during the same period. Some cryptocurrency-linked stocks in Asian markets also made gains.

Richard Ross, head of technical analysis at Evercore ISI, said if Bitcoin could break through its current resistance level at $14,100, its next resistance is around $17,400. He attributed the recent gains to dovish signals from global central banks.

“The ‘problem’ with Bitcoin is not Bitcoin itself, but rather the backdrop which has given rise to this incendiary second act” -- more monetary easing and bonds with negative yields, he said.

Read about how Bitcoin’s rally feels like 2017 but isn’t quite the same.

(Updates prices. An earlier update corrected a time reference in the second paragraph.)

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Morningstar downgrades H2O fund

The fund, run by Natixis subsidiary H2O Asset Management, had previously had its rating placed under review by the agency "given concerns on the liquidity and appropriateness of several holdings in the fund's corporate-bond sleeve".

On Thursday, Mara Dobrescu, director of fixed income strategies at Morningstar, said the Allegro fund is "run by an experienced team adept at making top-down calls on government bonds and currencies".

However, she added: "This team's decision to invest a sleeve of Allegro's portfolio in illiquid, high-risk corporate bonds, all linked to German entrepreneur Lars Windhorst, raises concerns about the robustness of the security-selection process applied here. This adds to our pre-existing concerns on the effectiveness of this fund's risk controls."

Separate fund structure

The news comes on the same day as the Financial Times reported H2O is weighing up the creation of a separate entity for its illiquid bond holdings after suffering outflows worth billions of euros.

The newspaper said CIO Vincent Chailley told clients that the group may remove all the bonds linked to the controversial German financier Lars Windhorst from its main funds and place them in a separate portfolio, though nothing has been decided yet.

In a client call, the CIO said: "I suspect we will dispose of these assets in the [daily liquid] funds when prices rise in the coming weeks or months," the FT reports. He also added that some major investment banks have expressed interest in the bonds but were offering "extremely low" prices.

The Allegro fund is an absolute return strategy managed with "an annual ex-post volatility target comprised between 7% and 12% over the recommended investment horizon of four years". It invests in sovereign debt, investment grade credit and high yield paper, and currency markets.

Company response

In an effort to reassure investors, H2O has removed all entrance fees, which had been implemented on all their funds a few months ago, until further notice.

The group also said it has seen "substantial inflows" since Monday (24 June), as redemptions subsided from their peak of 21 June to €450m yesterday (26 June).

It also said it had sold part of its non-rated private bonds and the aggregate market value of illiquid securities is now just 2% of H2O's AUM.

Bruno Crastes, CEO of H2O Asset Management, said: "We are pleased to report that fund flows are returning to normal. We would like to thank our investors for their continued commitment to H2O and to reiterate that 98% of assets held by our funds are perfectly liquid."

Meanwhile, Natixis told investors last week that although none of the securities in question are in default, the H2O team has decided to record these securities at their transactional value rather than standard market value in case of a need to sell immediately.

"The liquidity of the securities is ensured and will allow to face potential additional withdrawals, if some clients decide to partially sell their funds due to a concern about the media coverage associated with these securities," Natixis said.

At the same time, the group also said it performed its periodic audit on affiliate H2O earlier than planned, on 21 June (last Friday).

Stocks Rise on Hopes for Trade Progress

U.S. stocks climbed, boosted by hopes for progress toward a U.S.-China trade deal.

The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average each gained 0.2% in late-morning trading on Wednesday. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite rose 0.6%.

The gains came after U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a CNBC interview that there was "a path to complete" a trade deal between the U.S. and China. He also said that a deal had previously been "about 90%" done.

President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to meet at the G-20 summit in Japan later this week, in what is seen by analysts as an important moment in the trade dispute between the world's two largest economies.

The market reaction to Mr. Mnuchin's comments was muted as investors are awaiting tangible results from the talks, said Michael Arone, chief investment strategist at State Street Global Advisors. "It's hard to take too much out of his comments," Mr. Arone said. "There's a bit of posturing ahead of the Trump-Xi meeting."

Energy stocks were among the biggest gainers in the S&P 500 on Wednesday, boosted by a jump in the price of oil. Benchmark U.S. crude oil futures rose 2.8% to $59.46 a barrel after government data showed a steeper-than-expected drop in inventories, a sign of strong demand.

Tech stocks also climbed, boosted by trade-sensitive semiconductor stocks. Micron Technology soared 14% after the memory-chip maker reported better-than-expected quarterly results after Tuesday's close. The company also said it had resumed shipments to Huawei after determining they didn't run afoul of U.S. curbs on exports to the Chinese telecom giant.

The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note rose to 2.030% Wednesday, from 1.994% Tuesday. Bond yields rise as prices fall.

The gains in equities marked a reversal from Tuesday, after Fed Chairman Jerome Powell defended the central bank's independence, pushing back against signals from financial markets and calls from President Trump to lower interest rates. Mr. Powell said officials would ease monetary policy only if data showed a sustained downward trend in the U.S. economy.

President Trump slammed Mr. Powell on Wednesday. "He's not doing a good job," Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network. "He has to lower interest rates for us to compete with China."

New Commerce Department data showed that demand for long-lasting goods produced by U.S. factories decreased in May for the third time in four months, underscoring a broader slowdown in U.S. manufacturing. Expectations that a weakening economy would spur the Fed to cut rates have driven stocks higher over the past months.

Bitcoin extended its meteoric rise, approaching $13,000 for the first time in around a year and a half. The cryptocurrency has rallied since Facebook said last week it planned to launch its own digital currency. Bitcoin was recently trading at $12,832.89.

Gold fell 0.4% to $1,412.70 a troy ounce, reversing a four-day rally that had lifted the price of the precious metal to its highest level since 2013.

Elsewhere, the Stoxx Europe 600 was roughly flat. Asian markets were slightly lower or close to flat, with Japan's Nikkei posting the largest decline of 0.5%.

Carney Blasts Funds With Illiquid Assets, Piling Pressure on H2O

(Bloomberg) -- Bank of England Governor Mark Carney reprimanded investment funds that hold illiquid assets but allow unlimited withdrawals, adding to pressure on firms like H2O Asset Management.

"These funds are built on a lie, which is that you can have daily liquidity, and that for assets that fundamentally aren’t liquid,” Carney told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday. “That leads to an expectation of individuals that it’s not that different than having money in a bank. You get a series of problems, you get a structural problem but then you get a consumer issue.”

H20, backed by France’s Natixis SA, suffered the steepest ever one-day decline in assets for a group of its largest funds. After almost a decade of near-constant inflows, clients last week started to yank money from some of its funds over concerns about illiquid holdings tied to a controversial German businessman. Assets in six of its funds fell more than 5.6 billion euros ($6.4 billion) over just four days through Monday to less than 16 billion euros.

H2O said in a statement that net outflows had “slowed significantly” since Monday, and that it had received some “material inflows” on Tuesday. It didn’t provide further details.

H2O, founded by Bruno Crastes and Vincent Chailley in 2010, attempted to stem the decline in assets last week with a series of measures meant to assure investors it can meet redemptions while making it more painful for those seeking to get out. The goal was to avoid a similar fate of Swiss asset manager GAM Holding AG and famed U.K. stock picker Neil Woodford which both froze funds amid an investor exodus.

Between 2017 and the end of April, H2O’s assets doubled to $37.6 billion, according to an investor letter seen by Bloomberg.

What Bloomberg Intelligence Says

Natixis’ share-price slide and outflows across various funds reflect “fears of further withdrawals and loss of performance fees. Timely H2O action to boost liquidity for redemptions is key, and more may be required.”

--Jonathan Tyce and Georgi Gunchev, banking industry analystsClick here to view the research

“On this broader systemic point around the structure of these funds, this is a big deal,” Carney said. “You can see something that could be systemic.”

H2O has sold some 300 million euros of unrated private bonds and marking down the remaining ones. The firm dropped its entry fees altogether and said it would appoint an independent auditor to restore investor confidence.

The sale and a marking down of the non-rated corporate bond holdings across H2O’s range reduced the value of the rarely traded notes to 500 million euros, the company said in a statement on Monday, without elaborating on the size of the previous holdings.

The crisis is also weighing on Natixis’s share price, which lost almost 12% last week and has yo-yoed since Monday. This is partly because the funds have been lucrative for the bank. One strategy, H2O Multibonds, made more than 30% for its investors last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

H2O’s crisis started after the Financial Times showed the exposure of several of its funds to companies related to Lars Windhorst, a German financier with a history of troubled investments. Morningstar Inc., an influential research firm used by investors as a guide to buy or sell funds, subsequently suspended its bronze rating on the H2O Allegro fund on Wednesday over concerns about the “liquidity and appropriateness” of some of its holdings.

The Allegro Fund’s assets under management plunged by 42% from June 18, the day before the Morningstar note, through June 24. Assets in H2O’s Adagio fund dropped by 26.5% in the same period.

The move led jittery investors, still reeling from star stock picker Woodford’s decision to freeze withdrawals from his flagship fund, to start yanking cash from H2O. More than a dozen of the firm’s funds allow clients to invest or exit on a daily basis.

Until recently, H2O had been growing rapidly. Last year, the firm introduced entry fees of as much as 5% to slow the amount of new cash as several funds neared capacity. Between 2017 and the end of April, H2O’s assets doubled to $37.6 billion, according to an investor letter seen by Bloomberg.

--With assistance from Kateryna Hrynchak and Vivianne Rodrigues.

To contact the reporters on this story: Lucca de Paoli in London at gdepaoli1@bloomberg.net;Lucy Meakin in London at lmeakin1@bloomberg.net;Carolynn Look in Frankfurt at clook4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Vivianne Rodrigues at vrodrigues3@bloomberg.net, James Hertling, Patrick Henry

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

If your kids are off to day camp, you may be eligible for a tax break

Now that most schools are out for the summer, you might be sending your children to day camp. It’s often a significant expense. The good news: You might be eligible for a tax break for the cost.

The value of a credit

Day camp is a qualified expense under the child and dependent care credit, which is worth 20% to 35% of qualifying expenses, subject to a cap. Note: Sleep-away camp does not qualify.

For 2019, the maximum expenses allowed for the credit are $3,000 for one qualifying child and $6,000 for two or more. Other expenses eligible for the credit include payments to a daycare center, nanny, or nursery school.

Keep in mind that tax credits are especially valuable because they reduce your tax liability dollar-for-dollar — $1 of tax credit saves you $1 of taxes. This differs from deductions, which simply reduce the amount of income subject to tax.

For example, if you’re in the 32% tax bracket, $1 of deduction saves you only $0.32 of taxes. So it’s important to take maximum advantage of all tax credits available to you.

Work-related expenses

For an expense to qualify for the credit, it must be related to employment. In other words, it must enable you to work — or look for work if you’re unemployed. It must also be for the care of your child, stepchild, foster child, or other qualifying relative who is under age 13, lives in your home for more than half the year and meets other requirements.

There’s no age limit if the dependent child is physically or mentally unable to care for him- or herself. Special rules apply if the child’s parents are divorced or separated or if the parents live apart.

Credit vs. FSA

If you participate in an employer-sponsored child and dependent care Flexible Spending Account (FSA), you can’t use expenses paid from or reimbursed by the FSA to claim the credit.

If your employer offers a child and dependent care FSA, you may wish to consider participating in the FSA instead of taking the credit. With an FSA for child and dependent care, you can contribute up to $5,000 on a pretax basis. If your marginal tax rate is more than 15%, participating in the FSA is more beneficial than taking the credit. That’s because the exclusion from income under the FSA gives a tax benefit at your highest tax rate, while the credit rate for taxpayers with adjusted gross income over $43,000 is limited to 20%.

Proving your eligibility

On your tax return, you must include the Social Security number of each child who attended the camp or received care. There’s no credit without it. You must also identify the organizations or persons that provided care for your child. So make sure to obtain the name, address and taxpayer identification number of the camp.

Additional rules apply to the child and dependent care credit. Contact us if you have questions. We can help determine your eligibility for the credit and other tax breaks for parents.

© 2019

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Goldman Says to Pick Darlings of Both Mutual and Hedge Funds

It’s good to be a beloved stock. And even better if you’re loved by a couple of key investor groups, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Stocks fancied by both mutual and hedge funds have enjoyed higher annualized returns since 2013 than those liked by just one of the two investor types, strategists led by David Kostin wrote in a May 31 report, which noted that each of these three categories beat the S&P 500. Currently, stocks popular with both groups include Adobe Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc. and Visa Inc.

“Despite posing a tactical risk, concentrated ownership has generally been a positive signal for subsequent stock returns,” the strategists wrote. “Shared favorites (+18%) have outperformed our hedge fund VIP (+13%) and mutual fund overweight baskets (+15%) year to date.”

Investors often see crowded trades as a sign of an impending reversal. Indeed, crowded positions tend to fare badly in falling equity markets, the Goldman strategists wrote. But their long-term performance advantage found by Kostin et al. in the “wisdom of the crowds” challenges the idea that popular stocks ought to be avoided.

Citigroup Inc. was the only stock to enter the shared-favorites list this quarter, the report said, while Electronic Arts Inc. and T-Mobile US Inc. dropped out. Alphabet Inc. is the sole company to have made the list every quarter for the past five years, the strategists said.

© Copyright 2019 Bloomberg News. All rights reserved

Hedge-fund legend Paul Tudor Jones: ‘I’m very bullish on US stocks’

Hedge-fund manager Paul Tudor Jones said Monday he is bullish U.S. stocks this year, noting American equities will outperform their global counterparts.

“I think this year we’re going to continue to have U.S. exceptionalism and U.S. outperformance,” Tudor Jones told CNBC’s Bob Pisani in an interview. “The S&P 500 will outperform its peers, it will outperform emerging markets.”

“I think from that, you’ll have to take all the correlated trades. Rates won’t go down, they will probably go back up and I think the dollar stays firm,” Tudor Jones said. “I’m very bullish in the U.S. stock market.”

The has surged about 8 percent so far this year after a rip-roaring rally in January. That sharp bounce followed a massive decline in December that briefly sent the broad index into bear-market territory on an intraday basis.

“Last year, we walked into a situation with a lot of euphoria; a huge amount of long-equity positions both in the U.S. and globally,” Tudor Jones said. “We took those positions and we washed them into a trillion dollars in corporate buybacks. Fast forward to where we are today, all that leveraged positioning … that’s been washed out.”

Equities have gotten a boost this year as the Federal Reserve has signaled it will be patient in raising rates. Stocks have also gotten a boost as U.S. and Chinese trade officials try to strike a trade deal before an early March deadline.

Massive Solar-Storage Project Is Planned for the Nevada Desert

(Bloomberg) -- Nevada may be four years away from hosting one of America’s largest solar farms equipped with batteries.

8minute Solar Energy LLC is planning a massive 475-megawatt solar array with a 540 megawatt-hour lithium-ion storage system north of Las Vegas, according to an emailed statement. The California-based developer says it will be the largest solar-plus-storage projects ever built in the state.

Clean-power companies are racing to develop solar projects with batteries capable of providing grids with power after sundown. A key reason is more and more states -- including Nevada -- have committed to ban fossil fuels from power generation over the next several decades, but they’ll need more than intermittent solar and wind power to do it. Solar complemented by energy storage can help.

It helps that battery prices have fallen sharply. Plus, in some instances it’s cheaper to build a solar project with batteries than a new gas-fired power plant, including in parts of the U.S. Southwest.

8minute’s Southern Bighorn Solar & Storage Center is expected to begin construction in 2022 and be operational the following year if approved by the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada. It would be the fourth solar project developed on the Moapa River Indian Reservation.

Amazon, GE, and Boeing Strike a Deal That Could Only Happen in Paris

It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but it isn’t. Amazon.com (ticker: AMZN),Boeing (BA) and General Electric (GE) all were at the Paris air show this week, and the trio struck a deal there on Tuesday. Amazon agreed to lease 15 additional Boeing 737 cargo freighters from GECAS, short for GE Capital Aviation Services.

Amazon’s logistics ambitions are well known, as it shifts into more of a competitor to FedEx (FDX) and United Parcel Service (UPS) than a customer.

“These new aircraft create additional capacity for Amazon Air, building on the investment in our Prime Free One-Day program,” says Dave Clark, senior vice president of world-wide operations at Amazon. “By 2021, Amazon Air will have a portfolio of 70 aircraft flying in our dedicated air network.” ( FedEx , for context, flies 700 planes.)

Amazon also holds warrants to purchase up to 39.9% of aircraft lessor Atlas Air Worldwide (AAWW). Plus, the e-commerce company is building out its own express delivery hub in Kentucky. That’s one possible reason FedEx decided to end its U.S. Express relationship with Amazon in June.

This one deal, however, isn’t major news for GE. While presenting to analysts in Paris, GECAS officials called the current aircraft leasing environment “challenging,” with too many lessors chasing business. But they remain upbeat about the future because they believe they have the right kinds of planes in their portfolio. Analysts have speculated that GECAS could be sold to raise money to fund GE CEO Larry Culp’s turnaround efforts. The company said it has no plans to sell.

The deal isn’t major news for Boeing, either. Boeing’s biggest news at the Paris air show was clearly securing an order for 200 737 MAX jets from British Airways parent International Consolidated Airlines (IAG.London). It is the first order for Boeing’s troubled single-aisle jet since the tragic crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight in March. It signals—despite the intense scrutiny from regulators and customers—that the aerospace industry expects the plane to be fixed and to fly again in 2019.

The order “is a noteworthy shot in the arm for Boeing,” says Moody’s senior vice president and lead Boeing analyst Jonathan Root. “It underscores our belief in the long-term viability of the MAX program and our expectations for a full restoration of Boeing’s financial profile following the aircraft’s return to service.”

Even though all three companies made headlines in Paris, all three stocks are in very different places. Amazon is a Wall Street darling—every analyst covering the company rates shares Buy. Opinion on GE, meanwhile, is polarized, with bearish analyst predicting the stock will drop to $5 a share and bullish analyst predicting shares will hit $15. Boeing has been a great investment in the recent past, returning 26% a year on average for the past 10 years, 12 percentage points better than the Dow Jones Industrial Averageover the same span. But Boeing stock stumbled after the world-wide grounding of the 737 MAX jet in mid-March.

Stories like that don’t always overlap, but these did, at least for a day, in the city of lights.