Opening Bell: 9.21.17

SEC Discloses Edgar Corporate Filing System Was Hacked in 2016 (WSJ)
Mr. Clayton’s statement didn’t identify the precise date of the intrusion or what sort of nonpublic data was obtained. The agency said the hackers exploited a vulnerability in part of the Edgar system that allows companies to test the accuracy of data transmitted in new forms. Many corporate filings are made public as soon as they are received through Edgar, although other forms may have to be reviewed first by SEC staff.

ETF Graveyard Grows as Leveraged Funds Fall Victim to Calm (BBG)
By the end of September, 42 exchange-traded funds are set to close, the most ever in a single month, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Of those, 21 are leveraged or inverse funds, which tend to attract investors when prices are volatile but can fall out of favor when stocks are as calm as they have been all year.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Political Awakening (Businessweek)
At first it seems he’s being playful, but his expression hardens as he continues, his voice rising. “I also have an assistant who helped set up this meeting,” he says. “Does that mean I don’t do the meeting?” He continues: “My takeaway from that piece is, like, this”—meaning everything he posts on Facebook—“isn’t authentic. And that, I just felt, wasn’t accurate.”

Reuters survey: 10,000 UK finance jobs affected in Brexit's first wave (Reuters)
The findings suggest that the first wave of job losses from Brexit may be at the lower end of estimates by industry lobby groups and firms, which could mean London will keep its place as the continent’s top finance centre, at least in the short term.

Fall Guy (Macro Tourist)
Although I want to be bearish on the US dollar along with everyone else, I have learned the hard way that in today’s market, this is not the correct bet. Over the past decade, trading has transformed into a zillion hedge funds arranged in a circle shooting at the tiny piece of alpha in the middle. Often the best trade is to fade the hedgies, regardless of how compelling their reasoning sounds.

Valuation Debate: Shiller vs. Goldilocks (Yardeni)
The valuation question has been hanging over the current bull market. Valuation ratios such as price/earnings, price/sales, and market capitalization/revenues are uniformly bearish. On the other hand, valuation measures that adjust for inflation and interest rates, both of which are near record lows, suggest that the market is fairly valued. They are mostly in the Goldilocks range: Not too cold, and not too hot. I have been siding with Goldilocks. Not surprisingly, Yale Professor Robert Shiller strongly disagrees with Goldilocks...

“AI” and the human informational centipede (Locklin On Science)
Hell, I’ve even seen executives ask engineers for capabilities they heard about from reading their own marketing press releases, and being confused as to why these capabilities were actually science fiction. So when your read some cool article in tech crunch on the latest woo, you aren’t actually reading anything real or accurate. You’re reading the result of a human informational centipede where a CEO orders a marketing guy to publish bullshit which is then consumed by decision makers who pay for investments in technology which doesn’t do what they think it does.

Ideas aren’t running out, but they are getting more expensive to find (VoxEU)
A single-minded focus on the quantity of undiscovered ideas is unhelpful. It is not just how many ideas for productivity growth are left, but what it would cost to get them out of the ground – and, crucially, how much we’re prepared to spend to do it. For a long time, geologists have been forecasting ‘peak oil’, only to be surprised by new deep-sea discoveries and shale oil. We, likewise, see a continuing stream of innovations. But, just as newer oil sources are increasingly costly to extract, coming up with new ideas is getting more expensive.

New Yorkers Are Getting a 5-Story Chick-fil-A That ‘Pays Homage’ to 9/11 (Eater)
No plans as of yet to get a liquor license and sell $18 Heinekens to tourists, but the space will definitely make full, exploitative use of its prime location: Chick-fil-A says it wanted to “respectfully pay homage to the significance” of being just a few hundred feet from the World Trade Center site. This means — maybe sit down for this part — outfitting the restaurant’s façade with elements that “give a subtle impression of the Twin Towers — one on each side of the restaurant.” It will be a way of “honoring renewal after tragedy,” and, all of New York hopes, also selling tons of chicken sandwiches.