A roundup of what The Globe and Mail's market strategist Scott Barlow is reading this morning on the Web.
The world's most famous oil investor – T. Boone Pickens – is suing the Ontario government for $700-million in a story that popped out of nowhere Friday morning. The New York Times' Dealbook site has the (somewhat salacious) details, such as they are now:
"Mr. Pickens is using his rights under the North American Free Trade Agreement to bring claims against the Canadian province of Ontario. He is seeking $700-million in damages for future losses related to bids that his power company, Mesa Power, lost in wind power auctions in Ontario… Mr. Pickens and Mesa Power contend that NextEra, a Florida company that is usually on Mr. Pickens's side when it comes to regulation and politics, was granted exclusive access through private meetings with important government officials. They have argued that $18,600 in donations that NextEra made to the governing Liberal Party in Ontario before elections in 2011 had undue influence on the auction."
These are serious allegations so I'll leave any opining to a future date:
"A Fight North of the Border for Pickens" – Dealbook, New York times
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CBC News reports on a high degree of oil patch anxiety ahead of Tuesday's Federal election:
"The Liberals and NDP have pledged to phase out oil subsidies to fossil fuel companies, which they say will bring approximately a quarter-billion dollars in revenue to federal coffers in the next several years…'At a time when our economy in Alberta is the worst that I've ever seen in 25 years, I need a federal government focused on a strong and healthy economy to help rebuild the energy sector,' said [Rafi Tahmazian, portfolio manager with Canoe Financial]."
"Oilpatch players feeling 'nauseous' before federal election" – CBC News
Related: "Canada's Election: The next prime minister will have to deal with a shaky economy" – The Economist
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Credit Suisse strategists completed a tour of portfolio manager clients and noted they had never seen professional investors so "lost" and "bearish":
"We met with many clients in the U.S., Europe and Asia. The wall of bearishness was extreme in the U.S. – roughly 80 per cent of meetings – but much more balanced outside the U.S."
"You had one job…" – FT Alphaville
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I've written previously that I'm a big believer in cloud computing and expect corporate use of the cloud to grow rapidly in future years. It isn't because I think the technology is better, but because it's much, much cheaper for Chief Financial Officers that hold corporate purse strings. Security has been a big issue in the past – companies are worried about sensitive data sitting outside their own facilities – but as we've seen, private networks are no guarantee against hacking. If you're going to get hacked anyway, why buy millions of dollars in hardware and pay millions annually in IT department wages for a corporate network?
"Shifting computer power to the cloud brings many benefits – but don't ignore the risk" – The Economist
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Attention-loving financier Kevin O'Leary is selling his ETF business to Canoe Financial but as the ROB's Tim Kiladze reports, it's not exactly a massive success story for Mr. O'Leary:
"O'Leary Funds caught fire after launching in 2008, raising roughly $1-billion in assets under management in only two years. Pounding his chest, Mr. O'Leary then suggested the company's assets would hit $5-billion within three years and even dangled the idea of going public. The fund company Canoe is buying is a fraction of that size. Mr. Wilson's firm is acquiring $800-million in assets under management (AUM) – one-third less than the $1.2-billion O'Leary Funds managed at the end of 2011, even though the S&P/TSX composite index has climbed 15 per cent since."
"O'Leary's 'dragon deal' is far from a home run" – Kiladze, Report on Business
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Tweet of the Day: "@timoreilly Forget "technological unemployment." Finance is the real culprit in the economic malaise. #WTFEconomy twitter.com/noblittje/stat…" – Twitter
Diversion: Star Trek economics, " 'You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century' " – Kaminska, FT Alphaville
Scott Barlow