Investment/Trends

Medical marijuana to start growing in South Texas

"Any day now, medical marijuana will legally start to grow in the state of Texas. It will be planted, grown and processed on a 10-acre parcel of land in Schulenburg, a small community east of San Antonio, now that the company that owns the property — Cansortium Texas — has received the state’s first license to do so. The low-level cannabidiol will be sold, under a 2015 law, to help Texans with intractable epilepsy if federally approved medication hasn’t helped."

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Dentists Find Tooth Root Pulp Can Become an Alternative Source of Stem Cells

"A team of dentists and scientists from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas has found a rich new source of stem cells. Tooth root pulps, they discovered, were home to both pluripotent and multipotent cells. The team also developed a way to extract them without damaging the cells."

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Severe flaw in WPA2 protocol leaves Wi-Fi traffic open to eavesdropping

"It affects the core WPA2 protocol itself and is effective against devices running the Android, Linux, Apple, Windows, and OpenBSD operating systems, as well as MediaTek Linksys, and other types of devices. The site warned attackers can exploit it to decrypt a wealth of sensitive data that's normally encrypted by the nearly ubiquitous Wi-Fi encryption protocol."

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Jamie Dimon labels bitcoin users ‘stupid’ as price heads to $10,000

"'The only value of bitcoin is what the other guy'll pay for it,' Dimon said. On Thursday, Dimon said during a post-earnings conference call with media that he's 'not going to talk about bitcoin anymore.' The executive called bitcoin a 'fraud' in September and said it 'won't end well.'"

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Spanish govt slammed over bizarre Catalan .cat internet registry cop raid

"The Spanish government has come under increasing criticism for raiding the offices of the .cat internet registry in the lead-up to a referendum on Catalans' independence. On Wednesday morning, police entered the registry's headquarters in Barcelona and seized all of its computers. The cops also arrested six members of staff, and held four of them for two days. Its CTO has been accused of sedition. The raid and arrest has sparked protests from the .cat company, as well as the Internet Society and the EFF."

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Goldman Has a New Product to Bet on the Next Banking Crisis

"The two financial giants are now offering trades in derivatives that enable investors to bet on or against high-risk bank bonds that financial regulators can wipe out if a lender runs into trouble. Others are also planning to start making markets in the contracts, known as total-return swaps, in the coming weeks, according to Max Ruscher, the London-based director of credit indexes at IHS Markit Ltd., which administers the benchmarks that the swaps are linked to."

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‘Peculiar’ Market Strikes Again With Sale of 100-Year Austrian Bond

"Investors placed almost 11 billion euros of orders for Austria’s first century bond, which had a yield of 2.1 percent. That’s less than the current yield earned on Treasuries coming due in just 10 years. The 'quite peculiar' bond market reflects expectations of a subdued investor response to when the European Central Bank decides to rein in its super accommodative monetary policy, according to Kim Liu, senior fixed-income strategist at ABN Amro Group NV."

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Homebuilder helping Millennials trade student loan debt for house debt

"Buyers of Lennar's homes could receive a payment of up to $13,000 toward their student loans, as much as 3% of the home's purchase price, from its subsidiary, Eagle Home Mortgage. The nation's collective student debt stands at an all-time high of $1.34 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York."

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Investors Buying Houston Homes for 40 Cents on the Dollar

"Those kinds of bets have often paid off. Buyers who snapped up co-ops and office towers when New York was near bankruptcy in the 1970s made a killing. More recently, companies including Blackstone Group LP and other marquee names bought foreclosed homes after the 2008 financial crisis and are sitting on billions in potential gains. The cycle begins with small-time investors such as Schild, who’s bought more than 30 waterlogged houses for an average $175,000 apiece. Then Wall Street swoops in."

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