Opening Bell: 7.19.17

Morgan Stanley’s Earnings, Revenue Beat Expectations (WSJ)
Morgan Stanley said its second-quarter profit rose to $1.76 billion as the Wall Street firm’s traders delivered strong results, topping rival Goldman Sachs for the second straight quarter. Shares rose 2.1% premarket as earnings and revenue beat the expectations of Wall Street analysts.

Where Are the Dips? The Weird, Unsettling Rise of Global Stocks This Year (WSJ)
Three major stock-market benchmarks in the U.S., Europe and Asia have avoided pullbacks this year, commonly defined as 5% declines from recent highs. Never in at least the past 30 years have all three indexes—the S&P 500, MSCI Europe and MSCI Asia-Pacific ex-Japan—gone a calendar year without falling at some point by at least 5%.

Wall Street Efforts to Improve Its Image Fail to Sway Americans (BBG)
Despite efforts by Wall Street firms to regain trust since the 2008 financial crisis, fewer than a third of Americans view the industry positively -- unchanged from 2009, according to the latest Bloomberg National Poll.

Deloitte Thinks Diversity Groups Are Passé (Businessweek)
“We are turning it on its head for our people,” says Deepa Purushothaman, who’s led the WIN group since 2015 and is also the company’s managing principal for inclusion. Deloitte will still focus on gender parity and underrepresented groups, she says, but not in the same way it has for the past quarter-­century, in part because millennial employees—who make up 57 percent of Deloitte’s workforce—don’t like demographic pigeonholes. “By having everyone in the room, you get more allies, advocates, and sponsors.”

How Uber's Hard-Charging Corporate Culture Left Employees Drained (BuzzFeed)
“You were always on the clock,” said one former program manager. He said he never took a vacation day, though he did take a personal day once because of stress. When he came in the next day, his manager pulled him into a conference room and told him that “taking that personal day was really not a great idea,” he told BuzzFeed News. Someone else remembered being asked to work through a high fever for two days at the implicit request of a teammate, despite sending an email saying they needed to take the day off. “I never even thought of spending the weekend not working,” said one employee. Another said it “was a problem” with management that he left work at 6:30 or 7 to be with his family.

Chris Christie roasted by announcer and booed after catching foul ball at a Mets game (USA Today)
Chris Christie caught a foul ball with one hand from his seat at Citi Field during the Mets-Cardinals game on Tuesday night. If an ordinary fan did that, some of the crowd probably would’ve cheered, but the New Jersey governor didn’t get an applause. He was booed at the stadium. Then, the broadcasters poked fun at Christie on the air. “Nice to see him get from the beach here to the ballpark,” one said as the other laughed.

Ethereum Co-Founder Says Crypto Coin Market Is a Time-Bomb (BBG)
“People say ICOs are great for ethereum because, look at the price, but it’s a ticking time-bomb,” Charles Hoskinson, who helped develop ethereum, said in an interview. “There’s an over-tokenization of things as companies are issuing tokens when the same tasks can be achieved with existing blockchains. People are blinded by fast and easy money.”

It only took hackers 3 minutes to steal $7 million worth of Ether (Mashable)
As explained after the fact on the company's website, hackers managed to change one tiny but important detail on the CoinDash website just as the ICO was scheduled to begin: The Ethereum wallet address. That little change was all it took to redirect cryptocurrency slated for CoinDash into the wallet of the attacker. "It is unfortunate for us to announce that we have suffered a hacking attack during our Token Sale event," the company explained. "During the attack $7 million were stolen by a currently unknown perpetrator."

Peer-to-peer lender RateSetter took over 2 companies after £80 million of loans went bad (BI)
RateSetter, which is yet to be licensed by the FCA, shuttered its wholesale lending operation in December. Behrens says in the email to customers: "All stem from RateSetter’s wholesale lending which we discontinued in December 2016 and we do not intend to intervene like this again."

There are concerns that someone is leaking sensitive data to the markets ahead of time (BI)
The pound slid quickly on Tuesday in the minutes before the ONS released its monthly inflation data, which showed a substantial fall — from 2.9% to 2.6% — in the headline figure. Sterling dropped from roughly 1.3120 against the dollar around 45 minutes before the release to around $1.3040 as the inflation number came out, following a similar pattern to the one that aroused suspicion that there may be leaks earlier in the year.

Hedge Funds Performing Their Best Since 2009 (II)
This is the first time since 2007 that the $3 trillion industry has recorded positive returns for each month in the first half of a year, according to Preqin. Still, returns are subdued compared to historical results: During the first six months of 2009, hedge funds had returned 16.94 percent – more than triple what they are producing now.

Winter Is Here For Pornhub (Jezebel)
Porn purveyor Pornhub.com, which, as we know, keeps extremely granular records of its traffic analytics, reported on Tuesday that its site experienced a significant decrease in visitors during the Sunday night premiere of Game of Thrones’ seventh season on HBO. Traffic to Pornhub dropped a whopping 4.5% while an estimated 10.1 million viewers took in the latest in Westeros drama. A Pornhub publicist, Chris Jackson, remarked in a statement, “That’s a considerable change in visitors as Sunday night is one of the most popular times for people to visit Pornhub.”