Opening Bell: 3.16.17

Trump Adviser Carl Icahn Lobbies for Rule Change That Benefits Icahn (BBG)
Sipping a glass of pineapple juice in his 47th floor corner office, the 81 year-old says he’s surprised by all the controversy, which he sees as a fake issue generated by well-funded opponents. “I have a right to talk to the president like any other citizen,” he says. “Especially if I think he respects me, why the hell shouldn’t I call him?. It may sound corny to you, but I think doing certain things helps the country a lot. And yeah, it helps me. I’m not apologizing for that.”

Goldman Sachs Goes on Buying Binge for Delinquent Mortgages (WSJ)
The Wall Street giant’s loan-buying spree is one strange reverberation of the housing crisis. In ramping up a mortgage-buying operation that had lain low since the meltdown, Goldman is trying to make money even as it looks to fulfill terms of a government settlement that calls for it to help struggling homeowners.

Wells Fargo CEO receives pay bump despite sales scandal (Reuters)
Wells Fargo & Co's board of directors awarded Chief Executive Timothy Sloan $12.8 million for his work last year, a 17 percent increase, despite scrapping executive bonuses in light of an accounts scandal that rocked the bank last year, according to a proxy filing on Wednesday.

Fury Road: Did Uber Steal the Driverless Future From Google? (BBG)
Some former colleagues seem to think that even if Levandowski did what Google alleges, he doesn’t deserve to be punished. “Whatever Google may say about him stealing lidar trade secrets, he was the lidar team at Google,” says someone who worked at the company’s driverless car program. “This is like the Swiss patent office suing Einstein for inventing the theory of relativity while he worked there.”

The Biggest Myths in Investing, Part 8 – More Information Will Give me an Immediate Advantage

">The Biggest Myths in Investing, Part 8 – More Information Will Give me an Immediate Advantage (PragCap)
Since short-term prices are rather inefficient for long-term instruments then that creates more opportunity for alpha. While this is true it also exposes you to the paradox of activity – being more active in an attempt to capture alpha due to inefficient prices exposes you to higher taxes and fees which reduces your ability to capture alpha. In other words, there are more short-term opportunities in long-term instruments, but there are also more costs in long-term instruments that are used as short-term instruments.

Where are the Bulls in This Bull Market? (WSJ)
Corporations have spent hundreds of billions annually in recent years buying back their own stock. But what if, after netting out all the supply and demand flows in the equities market, the corporations are the only ones on balance buying their stock? That’s the conclusion, at least for 2016, of Ed Yardeni of Yardeni Research. “The bottom line is that the current bull market has been driven largely by corporations buying back their shares,” he wrote on Tuesday.

Hedge Funds' Lost Alpha Sends $750 Million Fund as Far as Seoul (BBG)
“Quite simply, it’s an overlooked country,” Tsai, 45, said in a phone interview. “If I could go back in time to the U.S. equity markets in the late ’80s and understand all the ways that hedge funds made money and kind of do it again, I feel that Korea is that same opportunity.”

Treasury Will Invoke ‘Extraordinary Measures’ as Debt Ceiling Looms Again (WSJ)
“The guys who have lamented and cursed the most against deficits and increasing the debt limit are in charge, and they’re going to have to vote for the thing they’ve said back home they would never vote for,” said Steve Bell, a former GOP budget aide who is now a senior adviser at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.

Watch a Speeding Train Blast a Bunch of Commuters With Snow (Gizmodo)
Here’s a free piece of advice should you ever find yourself waiting for the first train to roll into a station after a heavy snowfall: Stand as far away from the tracks as possible, assuming you don’t want to get blasted with a massive shitstorm of snow.