Opening Bell: 4.7.17

JPMorgan Could Lose This 125-Year-Old Revenue Stream (BBG)
The good times for dealmaking may be ending, or at least slowing down, as GE’s new portfolio takes shape. Its bond sales -- and the fees those bring -- are also tapering off. The company paid only $96 million in debt-related fees last year, the lowest amount in 15 years.

Exclusive: Billionaire investor Julian Robertson pulls plug on protégés fund (Reuters)
Billionaire investor Julian Robertson is shutting a portfolio that let outsiders bet with him on would-be star managers and has exited entirely from former protégée Nehal Chopra's Ratan Capital Management, according to recent regulatory filings. The closure of Tiger Management Advisors LLC's six-year-old Tiger Accelerator Fund comes after poor performance and sharp declines in assets at its underlying hedge fund firms.

Here's What Trump's Syria Strike Did to Markets, as Impact Eases (BBG)
“The markets will just be very jittery all day,” said James Audiss, senior wealth manager at Shaw and Partners Ltd. by phone from Sydney. “Markets have been looking for a reason to sell off. The uncertainty that surrounds this gives them a definite cause to do that and there’s absolute spillover into the South Korean market because of the North Korean situation.”

A trip to Barclays archives shows the value analysts can bring (FT)
Up until 1969, Barclays, like all British banks, was able to use “inner” or hidden reserves to smooth their annual results. Pierce found that in the postwar period in particular, smoothing gave way to outright understatement of both equity and profitability — so much so that in 1969, when full disclosure finally arrived, Barclays’ stated equity more than doubled. For whatever reason, Barclays had wanted to keep its outperformance secret.

How Hackers Hijacked A Bank's Entire Online Operation (Wired)
The traditional model of hacking a bank isn’t so different from the old-fashioned method of robbing one. Thieves get in, get the goods, and get out. But one enterprising group of hackers targeting a Brazilian bank seems to have taken a more comprehensive and devious approach: One weekend afternoon, they rerouted all of the bank’s online customers to perfectly reconstructed fakes of the bank’s properties, where the marks obediently handed over their account information.

Would You Buy an ETF Without Knowing What’s In It? (BBG)
Eaton Vance wasn’t shy about pointing out its rival’s difficulties. It used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a letter the SEC sent about its concerns to McCabe’s lawyer—and published it. During a call with industry analysts, Thomas Faust Jr., Eaton Vance’s chairman, used it to question the viability of Precidian’s structure. “Nobody has ever done this in our industry before,” McCabe says.

Goldman Sachs: space-mining for platinum is 'more realistic than perceived' (Business Insider)
There is just one problem: That same asteroid would instantly tank the entire platinum market: "Successful asteroid mining would likely crater the global price of platinum, with a single 500-meter-wide asteroid containing nearly 175X the global output, according to MIT's Mission 2016."

Tesla fans, Barclays has a ‘reality pill’ for you (MarketWatch)
The analysts on Thursday used the red pill/blue pill analogy popularized by “The Matrix“ to list all the ways a reality check (a red “reality” pill, they said) is needed for Tesla. Investors seem to be happy living in a constructed reality, swallowing the blue pill in their extended metaphor, in which pure momentum is carrying the stock, they said. Despite Barclays’ sell rating on the stock based on fundamentals, the analysts said they saw no data points in the near term that will reverse that momentum, thanks to the dedicated investors.

Don Rickles, Comedy’s Equal Opportunity Offender, Dies at 90 (NYT)
Mr. Rickles got his first break, the story goes, when Sinatra and some of his friends came to see him perform in 1957 — in Hollywood, according to most sources, although Mr. Rickles said it was in Miami. “Make yourself at home, Frank,” Mr. Rickles said to Sinatra, whom he had never met. “Hit somebody.” Sinatra laughed so hard, he fell out of his seat.