Daily Archives: July 17, 2017

SHRM

Technology and Metrics Underused in Recognition Programs SHRM "Organizations have been slow to adopt recognition technology," said Mike Byam, managing partner at Terryberry, a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based provider of employee recognition solutions. A study by the firm, which polled nearly 400 HR professionals from a ...

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Technology and Metrics Underused in Recognition Programs - SHRM

What's the intellectual problem?

Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) has a $35 billion market capitalization. How can a few options, expiring on a weekly basis, affect such a large market cap? With an open interest of 508,889 call options and 235,174 put options expiring next Friday, July 21, 2017, we are about to find out. Since each option covers 100 shares, these outstanding options control 74,406,000 shares, or about 7% of Micron's outstanding stock. That's a big number for any company, and is the largest number I can remember in the several years I've been following Micron.

Intellectually, I ought to be equipped to handle the idea that the options tail can wag the underlying stock of a company. I have a business degree, and have heard all about my excellent finance professor's friends Fischer and Myron (that would be Fischer Black & Myron Scholes of the famous and much used Black/Scholes pricing model). I sat on the options desk during my brokerage training. I've read academic papers on the topic. And I've attended numerous classes with options guru John Carter of Simpler Options.

But it just doesn't resonate in my thick head. How can options drive the price of the underlying stock? Sitting through a large options expiration with a portfolio of affected securities and visiting the mailbox for the brokerage statement following such a large expiration brings the message home with a visceral gut punch.

And what exactly is "pinning" and "maximum pain"?

There's a good, if dated, discussion on the topic on none other than Seeking Alpha back in 2011. Prof. Pearson, interviewed in the article, defines pinning as follows:

Pinning refers to the phenomenon that on option expiration Fridays the prices of optionable stocks tend to close on or very near to option strike prices.

And he defines Maximum Pain as follows:

The theory of maximum pain goes further, saying that the stock price will tend to move toward the price where the total value of options contracts, both puts and calls together, is the lowest. This theory thus identifies the specific option strike price that will tend to attract the stock price.

A simple example of pinning for Micron for July 21, 2017, is that the stock may trend towards the nearest strike prices (particularly those with a significant open interest). It closed at $31.79 on July 14, 2017. Let's assume the unlikely scenario that the stock trades sideways between now and next Friday. The "pinning" theory would have the stock "pin" at one of the nearby strike prices: the $31.5 strike price (where there happens to be an open interest of 8,308 call contracts) or the $32 strike (where there happens to be an open interest of 45,908 call option contracts). I guess the $32 contract, covering 4.5 million shares of underlying stock, might have a larger magnetic pull.

What's the Maximum Pain for Micron for July 21, 2017? Spoiler alert: $27 per share.

There are various web sites that calculate Max Pain for different options expirations of different companies. One I like is the aptly named Maximum-Pain.com. You will need to type in the ticker of interest and the expiration date of interest. Here's their picture of the Max Pain for Micron for the July 21, 2017 expiration:

What are the nuts and bolts of why this matters?

As mentioned above, there are options on 74 million shares of Micron stock which expire next Friday. This is roughly $2.1 billion of underlying stock value. The theory goes that the buyers and sellers of options are going to try to move the stock towards the position that will give them maximum profits. But since there are almost 50 strike prices expiring, there's also going to be a lot of pain. Based on last Friday's close of $31.79, if that's the close for next Friday, all the call options with strikes at $32 and above will expire worthless and all the put options with strikes below $31.5 will expire worthless.

Much is made of conspiracy theories, like curiously timed bullish Goldman Sachs research reports and flakey negative Barron's articles. I don't think one needs to go on wild conspiracy witch hunts. Instead, the computers at options market makers are going to attempt to keep their hedging books in line, as this additional quote from Prof. Pearson in the cited article suggests:

Option market makers often have a lot of natural hedging in their portfolios, e.g. satisfying customer demand might lead them to buy some $55 strike calls, and write some $60 strike calls that partially hedge the $55 strike calls. But this natural hedging is not perfect, and to the extent that it is not, options market makers trade in the underlying stocks to hedge their options positions. When the stock price moves, or as time passes, or when they execute new option trades, they need to rebalance their hedges, that is buy or sell the underlying stock.

So what's to be done?

Any news stories that come out this week ought to be examined under a bright microscope. A good example of a "fake news" story was the Inotera stoppage of a week or so ago. Ask yourself whether any new story is biased, particularly this week.

The intellectual Electric Phred would just strap in and sail through whatever storms come up next week. My nearest long options expiry is October, and surely everything will be fine by then? And my stock doesn't expire and should just sail right through, right?

The visceral Electric Phred, still scarred by some past notable Micron options expirations, may sell a profitable position in one account, buy short-term puts in another account, and write barely out of the money short-term call options in another account.

I think the visceral, pummeled side will win out.

And while we are on options, here's a call to David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, who is back in the stock.

David: Call the fat-fingered traders at Nanya who don't seem to be able to get out of their Micron position fast enough. Write them a put option at $30 expiring in January. Have them grant you a call option at $35 also expiring in January. The aforementioned Black Scholes model tells me no cash should change hands in such a transaction. Nanya should be happy, because they know they have at least $30 to put in their pocket and have potential upside to $35. Greenlight might look very smart, controlling Nanya's remaining ~30 million(?) shares for no money down. Oh, and I guess I'd suggest a European exercise on the put and an American exercise on the call.

Conclusion

I remain very bullish on the supply and demand situation for Micron's DRAM and NAND chips over the short to medium term. But we have the Nanya constant downward pressure on the stock and this little 74 million shares of optioned stock to sail through. I expect this week will be very choppy for Micron stock, but I think that's the sun I see on the horizon.

Disclosure: I am/we are long MU.

I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

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Will The Options Tail Wag The $35 Billion Micron Technology Dog? - Seeking Alpha

By Caroline Chen, Bloomberg News

Technology giant plans mosquito invasion

A giant technology company will release up to 20 million bacteria-filled, buzzing mosquitoes this summer in Fresno, Calif.

Thats supposed to be a good thing.

The bug campaign, which was to start Friday, is part of a plan by Alphabet Inc.s Verily Life Sciences unit. Reared by machines, the male mosquitoes are infected with a bacteria that, while harmless to humans, creates nonhatching dead eggs when they mate with wild females hopefully cutting the mosquito population and the transmission of the diseases they carry.

The swarms target is Aedes aegypti, a mosquito breed that carries viruses like zika, dengue, and chikungunya. Theyre an invasive species in Californias Central Valley, first arriving in Fresno in 2013.

After becoming a standalone Alphabet division in 2015, Verily has grown rapidly, taking on numerous health technology projects, partnering with the drug industry and raising significant funds including $800 million from Singapore investment firm Temasek Holdings Ltd. While the mosquito project, called Debug, wont generate revenue in the near-term, its a chance for Verily to show off its technical prowess in the health-care field.

If we can show that this technique can work, Im confident we can make it a sustainable business because the burden of these mosquitoes is enormous, said Verily engineering chief Linus Upson, who helped create Googles Chrome web browser and now leads Debug.

Verilys mosquitoes arent genetically modified. Theyre infected with a naturally occurring bacteria called Wolbachia. When infected male mosquitoes mate with wild females, they create nonviable eggs, resulting in population decline over time. A bonus: Male mosquitoes dont bite, so Fresno residents wont spending the summer itching more than normal.

Verily isnt the first to use Wolbachia mosquitoes for disease control. Organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have been working on the bugs for more than a decade, running pilot projects in countries including Indonesia and Brazil. Verilys contribution has been to create machines that automatically rear, count, and sort the mosquitoes by sex, making it possible to create vast quantities for large-scale projects. The Fresno project will be the biggest U.S. release of sterile mosquitoes to date, Verily says.

A minimum ratio of seven Wolbachia mosquitoes to one wild male mosquito is needed to control the population, according to Steve Mulligan, district manager of the Consolidate Mosquito Abatement District, which includes the parts of Fresno in this project.

Verily is planning to release 1 million mosquitoes a week over a 20-week period across two 300-acre neighborhoods. The companys bug-releasing van will start traveling the streets of Fancher Creek, a neighborhood in Fresno County, on Friday.

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Technology giant plans mosquito invasion - CT Post

"We need to look at things from the point of the learners and mould the curriculum around that," said Hoernie.

Steven McKee, president of software company Labtech, said technology played a big role in education, but teachers often experienced difficulty in transitioning and becoming accustomed to gadgets and software. Teachers needed to be more engaged in how to use technology as a teaching tool, he said.

However, he warned against a one-size-fits-all approach as socioeconomic contexts differed across the country.

The Department of Basic Education announced earlier in 2017 that it would be looking East in a bid to improve SAs dismal education outcomes.

McKee said countries in the East had rapidly improved education and led the pack internationally but SA had to work with its available resources to achieve its own unique goals.

Brian Matthews, MD of Pearson, said South African pupils lagged their peers in other developing nations. Stakeholders needed to collaborate to ensure schools used technology to make education more solutions-oriented to tackle SAs unique needs, he said.

Rianette Leibowitz, CEO of SaveTNet, said theft of equipment remained a huge issue and she urged schools and parents to be vigilant and put security measures in place.

Access to technology also came with its own issues such as cyberbullying, she said.

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How technology stumps many local teachers - Business Day (registration)

Its the incongruities that perplex and provoke so many of us. The ideal versus the real. Its hard to look at the imposing U.S. Capitol, all that strong, gleaming marble, and realize at the same time how the nations elected representatives have failed at their primary job: improving the lives of those who elected them. We have learned that those who elected them doesnt even mean what the Constitution intended. Disgusting negative ads elected them. Money elected them. A minority of the eligible population voted inertia reelected them. Politicians are professional fundraisers who principally target swing voters. This is who we are now.

Our idealized democracy is obviously not even close to a perfect system for obtaining the wisest deliberator as president. The inordinately long, obscenely costly campaign process, imitating nothing so much as a repetitive TV miniseries, is, effectively, a register of party loyalty, not a measure of the viability of one or another policy direction. With all the talent that exists in the United States the scientists, engineers, artists, givers, problem-solvers look what we have now: an inarticulate man of limited imagination, who worships himself and appears to care about nothing and no one else, and least of all the truth. He convinced 63 million people to vote for him.

We the millions of us who voted a different way feel corrupted by his undeserved presence in our lives, his repetitive bad behavior, his pettiness, his petulance, his arrogance. Our values have been betrayed, and we are all somehow, in some way, complicit. We didnt do enough to help voters see through him. We allowed democracy to become a business in the hands of public relations firms, pollsters, financiers and advertisers. And tweets. Sad!

Just as Gerald R. Ford announced his presidency with the comforting words, Our long national nightmare is over, when he put Nixon and Watergate behind, Americans of both parties will, let us hope, realize a sensible solution to our Trumpian nightmare. This short essay seeks to give some context to our historic moment, and to suggest how to put behind us the conditions that allowed a boorish bungler with demagogic skills to subvert democracy and advance plutocracy.

To begin, every present feels unique, until we take the time to rediscover our historical literature. In 1952, the vigorous mind of a renowned theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, produced a book titled The Irony of American History. The irony Niebuhr saw lay in the contrast between the hopeful language of the nations founders and the political reality of his America. What were its moral responsibilities in the world? he posed. What did it owe itself? And where could it find political wisdom to chart a better future?

His concerns are our pronounced concerns, too. Hubris tops Niebuhrs list. When you endow any elite a moneyed elite, a Russian Communist Party with preponderant power, it comes to possess a fanatic certainty about the direction history ought to take. It is impatient in its directedness. Drawing contrasts between the 18th and 20th centuries, Niebuhr invoked the generally optimistic French Enlightenment philosophe, the Marquis de Condorcet, who was a friend of Thomas Jeffersons. Condorcet was convinced that the future held the destruction of inequality between nations, the progress of equality among the common people, and the growth of man toward perfection. In a world of monarchs, America seemed virtuous when it stood opposed to a monarchs willfulness and spoke of popular will instead. Humanity would improve the circumstances of all once a people applied its collective intelligence to the moral challenge of creating a cooperative society.

The future of the American Revolution bore with it Condorcets hopes and dreams of government that served the interests of all citizens and not only those with inherited wealth and privilege. So far, so good. Armed with those enlightened hopes and dreams, Niebuhr contended, the American people developed a Messianic consciousness about themselves. The founding generation conceived of the United States as the darling of divine Providence, he said, and the concept took hold. As the 20th century began, the original vision still allowed the political class to exclaim that Americans godly cause would make them the master organizers of the world, to establish systems where chaos reigns. Cold War America similarly believed that God blessed America, because the stark alternative to us was Soviet communism.

Niebuhr critiqued all dialectical views of history. He gently, sensibly protested: The American Messianic dream is vague about the political or other power which would be required to subject all recalcitrant wills to the one will which is informed by the true vision. He perceived that monopolies of power, whether in the hands of Red commissars or Red, White and Blue elected leaders, was potentially dangerous. The virulence of communism lay in its investment of a class and a party with a monopoly of power. But neither was the American way immune to a monopolistic moral calculus.

So, let us compare the political landscape Niebuhr wrote about in 1952 to that which we face in 2017. The theologian concluded his argument on an upbeat note, believing that the American nation had learned the lesson of history tolerably well. Though not without vainglorious delusions in regard to our power, we are saved by a certain grace inherent in common sense. A certain grace. Still, he warned, we had to rid ourselves of the pretentious elements in our original dream, and apply the stern understanding of prudent government that the founders bequeathed along with its messianic conceit. On preventing abuse of power, his go-to founder was James Madison. With the realists of every age, Madison understood how intimately mans reason is related to his interests. Government had to temper the very human tendency to abuse power. The most common and durable source of faction, Niebuhr quoted Madison, has been the various and unequal distribution of property.

Madison was no Marxist, of course, which served Niebuhrs purpose. He gloried that the two political parties in 1952 still contained sufficient diversity of interests as to be prevented from being unambiguous ideological instruments. Niebuhr referred to Americas progress in establishing a welfare state as an agreed-upon thing and at that time, it was because most Republicans felt that social welfare, social security and a regulated health system did nothing to deter capitalist expansion. The development of American democracy toward a welfare state has proceeded so rapidly because the ideological struggle was not unnecessarily sharpened, Niebuhr wrote. The free market was not one of the nations holy, self-evident truths. We have, in short, achieved such justice as we possess in the only way justice can be achieved in a technical society: we have equilibrated power to redress disproportions and disbalances in economic society.

Niebuhr looked about him. If there was social peace in America, he adjudged, it was only owing to a comparatively fluid class structure, whereby the privileged classes resigned themselves to being less intransigent in their resistance to the rising classes. In 1952, the wealthy paid their fair share in taxes, the incoming Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower regarded labor unions as a necessary balance and a positive good, and the G.I. Bill remained a proven means of developing a stronger middle class.

Today, on Capitol Hill, with the empowered lobbyist, we see nothing but intransigence on the part of big business, and weak excuses for taking from the poor to give to the rich. And yet, like Reinhold Niebuhr, a Christian who perceived his God as an ironic one that laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations, we do not believe that reason has been entirely extinguished in American political society. Town hall meetings bring out the real victims of Republican policies. The silent majority will meet its match in this affected majority, who increasingly demand a certain humility as well as responsiveness from their dissimulating congressmen. Like Niebuhr in 1952, they recognize that ideological rigidity is counterproductive. The forward-thinking who look beyond the empty and ignorant promises of the current president, and the empty and inactive poses of their Republican representatives, see that the mythical market cannot solve our problems without help from somewhere else.

Beyond the ballot box itself, then, where does hope lie?

As long as the practical-minded, improvement-oriented moral philosophy underlying the founders vision directs the liberal imagination (the same that Niebuhr refused to dismiss), an obvious scenario presents itself: computer technology. We are shopping and banking and filing taxes online; the military is operating drones in Afghanistan from a post in Florida. Robots build self-parking automobiles, and something so recently unimaginable as driverless cars are already present in our world. Biometrics and bionic organs will extend lives. IBMs Watson connects to a health care database that conducts and monitors the results of genetic testing and delivers precision medicine to patients with speed and accuracy. It will only get better. Medical science cant be stopped. We arent going backward to a coal-driven mining economy.

The sole uncertainty is political. Will only the super-rich enjoy the benefits of 21st-century technology? Will Republicans continue to be the party that denies life-saving medicine to the majority? Will the voters be so anesthetized that they allow it? Or will the emerging techno-curious majority oblige government to make universal health care the only possible solution, and for all social classes to participate in the self-evident advantages? People used to complain about being a number; eventually, your DNA will be part of a national database. The medical benefits will outweigh the privacy-sacrificing costs.

When put to use in politically novel ways, technology can improve governance and move us in the direction of less inequality. It only requires a modicum of political intelligence (and, of course, political honesty) for the gerrymandering of congressional districts to be done away with: A computer algorithm takes into account population patterns and natural geography, and voil! we have democratic change that delivers fairness, removing human corruptibility from the equation. We wont even get into the argument that has roiled Congress and the nation since the 1790s, as to whether a national popular vote or the assignation of electoral votes by congressional district (after the end of gerrymandering), would be preferable to the general-ticket plurality system in place today.

Despite hacking worries, uniform voting methods will at some point have to replace the current, antiquated means that make it possible for Republicans to fantasize voter fraud and enact voter suppression laws. Will it be politics only that lags, when green technologies expand rapidly and profitably? When sensors within roadways will stop traffic jams before they occur? Liberals need to run for office by touting the power of humane technologies.

Be assured that new technology will not be democratically applied in the near term. Innovation inevitably bypasses certain segments of the population. It will benefit some while hurting others one understandable reason why many Americans resist modernity. The quality of life in less populated areas needs to advance closer to that in urban and suburban areas. It takes will.

One problem with politics right now is that we have lost the ability to talk about what works as opposed to what sounds good. Part of what elects a Trump is the torture inflicted by politicos on the English language. Along with hate speech and attack ads, the political landscape has been awash in deceptive euphemisms. In 2016, the hapless Bobby Jindal was supported by the appropriately banal Super PAC Believe Again; there was Rick Perrys equally meaningless Opportunity & Freedom PAC; and the pro-Trump Future in America PAC. Then try out the conundrum that was Mitt Romneys 2012 PAC, Restore Our Future. But along with such emptiness comes the Koch brothers Americans for Prosperity: Whose prosperity are they specifically interested in, one wonders?

Innovation and entrepreneurship will continue to mark our century. Why not in political life? Google will be able, before long, to instruct a voter what slate of candidates best reflects his or her interests. Yes, that seems scary. What happens when you eliminate free choice at the same time as you counsel someone against a self-defeating vote? Privacy issues will continue to consume us.

Were not suggesting its inevitable. Trump ran on a rejection of modernity, captured in his infamous banality, Make America Great Again. Building his itll be something amazing border wall was hardly a Star Trek solution; he compared his Mexican barrier to the ancient Great Wall of China. Looking backward is a comfortable position for many Trump supporters. Evangelicals want the return of the patriarchal family, where father knows best and where womens sexual activities are geared for reproduction rather than pleasure. The same people who dispute climate change because it is a global concern and not of benefit to America alone are more willing to imagine that voter fraud is rampant than that corporations are exploiting consumers and literally killing workers with deregulation of safety laws and environmental controls, while producing foods that incontrovertibly make people unhealthy. Conservatives are strangely comfortable blaming people for demanding better: whether its the working poor, selfish women in need of abortions or Michelle Obama telling them how to eat better.

Not everyone embraces the future. Not everyone sees technological progress as a boon to society. Conservatives are more prone to see technology as something alien, invasive and morally neutral. They work with the old template of regulating vices rather than regulating Wall Street greed. They are afraid that bad or undeserving people will vote whereas in the freedom-loving, gun-restrictive nation of Australia, voting in elections is compulsory.

Theres another way to look at the Trump phenomenon, however. It is not just about the senseless symbolism of building a wall to solve Americas problems. It also reflects the increasing power of our entertainment media. How shocked should we be that a reality TV star was elected president? Hes a byproduct of dramatic changes in Americans use of technology, its underside, if you will: He belongs to the age of selfies, Facebook de-friending, sexting and rabid, instantaneous tweets of every cruel, impulsive thought. Innovation in communications has broken down the barriers that traditionally separated professional expertise from virtual (Trump-like, Kardashian-like) celebrity.

Technology is here and omnipresent. Rather than despair in the everyday embarrassment of President Trump, we are casting a vote for the good effects of technology as managed by fair and balanced humans committed only to the laws of science. Harnessed technology will help rescue the political future but we say this with one crucial caveat. As Niebuhr wrote in The Irony of American History: The evil in human history is regarded as the consequence of mans wrong use of his unique capabilities. The same species that built the gleaming U.S. Capitol created the atomic bomb.

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A vote for moral technology: Updating Reinhold Niebuhr to the age of Donald Trump - Salon