miercuri, 22 iulie 2015

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


What $1,500 A Month In Rent Would Allow You To Live In Around The World

Posted: 22 Jul 2015 02:01 PM PDT

In some cities you could score a nice place to live for $1500 a month. Other cities you might be better off sleeping in a cardboard box.

















11 Popular Tourist Attractions That Might Kill You

Posted: 22 Jul 2015 01:33 PM PDT

These tourists attractions are truly unique and if you visit them you'll have a great story to tell. The only problem is you might not survive the trip. 

Kjeragbolten



This rock sits 3,245 ft in the air between two boulders in Rogaland, Norway. You don't want to be present when gravity decides to bring this down



Trift Suspension Bridge





This bridge sits 330 ft in the air and stretches 560 feet (only 3 feet wide) in the Swiss Alps. The view is spectacular, but you might want to avoid looking down.



Stolen Chimney, Fisher Towers 
This summit is a park of Utah's Moab National park and is noted as one of the most precarious peaks in the world. But why must people climb it?!



El Caminito Del Rey "The little King's Path" Malaga, Spain





Known as the Little Pathway of the King, this was built in 1905 and has had little to no repairs done until recently. Therefore, bold climbers enjoy braving the sections that are most dangerous and even completely disintegrated.



Devil's Pool, Victoria Falls





You'll have to travel to South Africa if you want to see this beautiful 355ft cascade. But get this, people literally die trying to get the perfect photo here, yet the tourists (and tour guides) continue to risk their life visiting this once in a lifetime view.



Hussaini Hanging Bridge





Located in Northern Pakistan, this is one of the most dangerous bridges in the world, as it has been poorly maintained and the elements have taken their toll on it's structure.



Cliffs of Moher



This dangerous Ireland (unofficial) bike trail was featured in The Princess Bride! But don't expect to this to be a cake walk. It's only about 4 feet (at it's biggest sections) and it's continuously crumbling.



Mount Huashan





The trek up Mount Huashan is considered one of the most dangerous, yet popular ascents in China. Hundreds of tourists flock to the nearly vertical staircases and creaky bridges of this location.



Huayna Picchu





There is no better view of Machu Picchu than from this summit. But getting there is the hard part. Unkept trails, steep staircases and the high altitudes make this trip a treacherous one. 



Trolltunga





Trolltunga, which stands for Troll Tongue, is one of Norway's most population outlook spots. It was formed thousands of years ago but glaciers that slowly chipped away at the rock. Do you dare visit it's edge? 



Yungas Road



This road in Bolivia is accurately named The Road Of Death, due the hundreds of lives that it has claimed. The roads of this mountain are poorly maintained, leading to numerous accidents on the most trafficked parts.

30 Years Later The Cast Of Back To The Future Reunited In London

Posted: 22 Jul 2015 11:58 AM PDT

It's been 30 years since the release of "Back to the Future" and the film is still just as popular as it ever was. Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson all get together for a panel at London Film and Comic Con over the weekend and they looked happy to be reunited.
























Raising the Bar: A Publishing Volume Experiment on the Moz Blog - Moz Blog

Raising the Bar: A Publishing Volume Experiment on the Moz Blog

Posted by Trevor-Klein

Content marketers hear regularly about how quality is far more important than quantity. You can publish a thousand blog posts in a year, but if only three of them are truly noteworthy, valuable, and share-worthy content—what Rand would call 10x content—then you've wasted quite a bit of time.

Here at Moz, we've published blog posts on a daily cadence since before almost any of us can remember. If you didn't already know, Moz began as SEOmoz in 2004, and was little more than a blog where Rand fostered one of the earliest SEO communities. He offered a bit more background in a recent interview with Contently:

"It's a habit that we've had since 2004, when I started the blog. It's one of those things where I was writing every night. I think one of the big reasons that that worked so well in the pre-social-media era was because the Moz comments and the Moz blogs were like the Twitter or Facebook for our little communities."

We've taken occasional days off for major holidays when we knew the traffic volume wouldn't be there, but the guiding philosophy was that we published every day because that's what our audience expected. If we stepped back from that schedule, we'd lose our street cred, our reliability, and a sizeable chunk of our audience, not to mention the opportunities for increased traffic.

It's now quite easy to have those discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Quora, and other networks, making our old approach an outdated philosophy that was based more on fear of the unknown and a misguided assumption than on actual data.

This May and June, we decided to change that. We're raising the bar, and we want to show you why.

It started with a tweet:

The ensuing discussion piqued the interest of Joe Chernov and Ginny Soskey at HubSpot, as they wondered what effects it might have to publish more or less frequently. We decided to collaborate on a pair of experiments to find out.

The setup

The experiments were simple: Set a benchmark of two "normal" weeks, then adjust the publishing volumes on each blog to (roughly) half the normal cadence for two weeks and double the normal cadence for two weeks.


One thing we should note from the get-go: We were always sure that Whiteboard Friday would continue to be a weekly tradition, so we didn't alter the publishing schedule for those. This experiment altered the schedule from Monday-Thursday.

We closely monitored our blog traffic and engagement metrics, as well as subscriptions to our emailed blog newsletter. HubSpot ran their experiment first, allowing Moz to learn a few lessons from their experience before starting our own.

The results from HubSpot's experiment were also published today; make sure you take a look.

The results

We had several central questions going into this experiment, and hypotheses for how each one would come out. There are six parts, and they're laid out below as follows:

  1. Effects of increased/decreased volume on overall traffic
  2. Engagement thins as volume grows
  3. Subscription slowdown
  4. Community complaints/backlash
  5. Trading quantity for quality

Important note: We know this is non-scientific. These results are intended to be directional, not definitive, and our takeaways—while they represent our best attempts at progress—are by no means perfect. We want this to be an ongoing discussion, so please chime in with your ideas in the comments!


1. Effects of increased/decreased volume on overall traffic

Hypothesis

Publishing fewer posts each week will lead to a significant decrease in overall traffic to the blog. Publishing more posts each week will lead to a significant increase in overall traffic to the blog. These changes will be proportional to the decrease/increase in publishing volume.

Results

Let's get the high-level overview before we dive into details. Traffic on the Moz Blog can obviously vary quite a bit depending on the traffic, but all things considered, it's remarkably steady. Here are total daily unique pageviews to all pages on the blog so far in 2015:

Spikes and dips here and there, but we're able to pull a pretty good benchmark from that data. Here's what that benchmark looks like:

Average weekday uniques:

38,620

Average weekly uniques:

227,450

Now, here's the traffic from the four weeks leading up to the reduced/increased publishing frequency, as well as the two weeks at half-cadence and the two weeks at double-cadence (I've also included a line for the average of 38,620):

There's a bit of a difference. You can tell the traffic during half-cadence weeks was a little lower, and the traffic during double-cadence weeks appears a little higher. I'd take the numbers highlighted above in green over the ones in red any day of the week, but those curves show far smaller variation than we'd anticipated.

Here's a look at weekly numbers:

That makes the dip a little clearer, but it's hard to tell from that chart whether the loss in traffic is anything to be worried about.

Let's dive a bit deeper into the two testing periods and see if we can't pick apart something more interesting. You might notice from the above daily charts that the blog traffic follows a regular weekly pattern. It peaks on Tuesday and falls gradually throughout the rest of the week. That's characteristic of our audience, which finds less and less time to read the blog as the week goes on. We wanted to take that variability into account when looking at each day during the testing period, and the following chart does just that.

It plots the traffic during the tests as a percent deviation from the average traffic on any given day of the week. So, the four Tuesdays that passed during the test are compared to our average Tuesday traffic, the four Wednesdays to the average Wednesday, and so on. Let's take a look:

This is a more noteworthy difference. Dropping the publishing volume to half our normal cadence resulted in, on average, a 5.6% drop in unique pageviews from those daily averages.

That actually makes perfect sense when it's put in context. Somewhere around 10-15% of our blog traffic comes from the most recent week's worth of posts (the rest is to older posts). If we publish half as many posts in a given week, there are half as many new pages to view, so we might expect half as many unique pageviews to those newer posts.

That's pageviews, though. What about sessions? Are fewer people visiting the blog in the first place due to our reduced publishing volume? Let's find out:


That's a bit more palatable. We lost 2.9% of our sessions that included visits to the blog during a two-week period when we cut our publishing volume in half. That's close enough that, for a non-scientific study, we can pretty well call it negligible. The shift could easily have been caused by the particular pieces of content we published, not by the schedule on which we published them.

Another interesting thing to note about the chart showing deviations from daily averages: Doubling the publishing volume did, on average, absolutely nothing to the number of unique pageviews. The average increase in uniques from daily averages during the double-cadence period is just a bit over 3%. That suggests relative saturation; people don't have time to invest in reading more than one Moz Blog post each day. (I'm not surprised; I barely have time to read more than one Moz Blog post each day!) ;-)

It also emphasizes something we've known all along: Content marketing is a form of flywheel marketing. It takes quite a while to get it up to speed, but once it's spinning, its massive inertia means that it isn't easily affected by relatively small changes. It'll keep going even if you step back and just watch for a short while.


2. Engagement thins as volume grows

Hypothesis

The amount of total on-page engagement, in the form of thumbs up and comments on posts, will remain somewhat static, since people only have so much time. Reducing the blog frequency will cause engagement to approach saturation, and increasing the blog frequency will spread engagement more thinly.

Results

Moz's primary two engagement metrics are built into each page on our blog: thumbs up and comments. This one played out more or less to our expectations.

We can get a good sense for engagement with these posts by looking at our internal 1Metric data. We've iterated on this metric since we talked about it in this post, but the basic concept is still the same—it's a two-digit score calculated from several "ingredients," including metrics for traffic, on-page engagement, and social engagement.

Here's a peek at the data for the two testing periods, with the double-cadence period highlighted in green, and the half-cadence period highlighted in red.

Publish Date Post Title 1Metric Score Unique Pageviews
25-Jun How Google May Use Searcher, Usage, & Clickstream Behavior to Impact Rankings - Whiteboard Friday 81 12,315
25-Jun How to Rid Your Website of Six Common Google Analytics Headaches 56 7,445
25-Jun How to Build Links in Person 36 5,045
24-Jun What to See, Do, and More at MozCon 2015 in Seattle 9 2,585
24-Jun The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Google Analytics 80 15,152
23-Jun Why ccTLDs Should Not Be an Automatic Choice for International Websites 11 2,259
23-Jun Brainstorm and Execute Killer Content Ideas Your Audience Will Love 38 5,365
22-Jun The Alleged $7.5 Billion Fraud in Online Advertising 85 44,212
19-Jun How to Estimate the Total Volume and Value of Keywords in a Given Market or Niche - Whiteboard Friday 78 15,258
18-Jun The Colossus Update: Waking The Giant 62 14,687
17-Jun New Features in OSE's Spam Score & the Mozscape API 10 1,901
17-Jun How to Align Your Entire Company with Your Marketing Strategy 44 7,312
16-Jun Dissecting and Surviving Google's Local Snack Pack Results 15 2,663
15-Jun Can You Rank in Google Without Links? New Data Says Slim Chance 81 15,909
15-Jun Study: 300 Google Sitelinks Search Boxes - Triggers and Trip-Ups Analyzed 23 3,207
14-Jun How to Choose a PPC Agency 14 2,947
12-Jun Why We Can't Do Keyword Research Like It's 2010 - Whiteboard Friday 90 22,010
11-Jun Eliminate Duplicate Content in Faceted Navigation with Ajax/JSON/JQuery 38 5,753
9-Jun 5 Spreadsheet Tips for Manual Link Audits 50 6,331
5-Jun Should I Use Relative or Absolute URLs? - Whiteboard Friday 79 15,225
3-Jun How to Generate Content Ideas Using Buzzsumo (and APIs) 50 10,486
1-Jun Misuses of 4 Google Analytics Metrics Debunked 51 9,847

The 1Metric scores for the half-cadence period (in red) average almost 60, suggesting those posts performed better overall than those during the double-cadence period, which averaged a 1Metric score of 45. We know the traffic was lower during the half-cadence weeks, which suggests engagement must have been significantly higher to result in those scores, and vice-versa for the double-cadence weeks.

Taking a look at our on-page engagement metrics, we see that play out quite clearly:

The number of thumbs up and comments stayed relatively level during the half-cadence period, and fell sharply when there were twice as many posts as usual.

We're incredibly lucky to have such an actively engaged community at Moz. The conversations that regularly happen in the comments—65 of them, on average—are easily one of my favorite parts of our site. We definitely have a "core" subset of our community that regularly takes the time to join in those discussions, and while the right post will tempt a far greater number of people to chime in, you can easily see patterns in the users who spend time in the comments. Those users, of course, only have a limited amount of time.

This is reflected in the data. When we published half as many posts, they still had time to comment on every one they wanted, so the number of comments left didn't diminish. Then, when we published twice the number of posts we normally do, they didn't spend twice as much time leaving comments; they were just pickier about which posts they commented on. The number of comments on each post stayed roughly the same.

The same goes for the thumbs.


3. Subscription slowdown

The Moz Blog is available via an email subscription through FeedPress, linked to from a few different places on the site:

We wondered, what would happen to those subscriptions during the half-cadence period?


Hypothesis

With fewer opportunities to impress people with the quality of the blog's content and earn a spot in their inboxes, subscriptions to the blog posts will drop significantly during the half-cadence period.

Results

As it turns out, there was minimal (if any) effect on email subscriptions. Check out the numbers for both periods below:

Here's a view that's a bit easier to digest, similar to the one for traffic in part 1 of this post. This shows daily deviations from the average number of new email subscriptions we get (about 34/day):

On the whole, this is a very uninteresting (and for that reason interesting!) result. Our subscription rate showed no noteworthy fluctuations during either of the two testing periods.

These numbers are based on the total number of subscribers, and with half as many emails going out during the half-cadence period, we can fairly confidently say that (since the total subscriber rate didn't change) we didn't get a decrease in unsubscribes during the half-cadence week, as we'd have seen an increase in the subscription rate. That's a good sign: If people were fatigued by our rate of new emails already, we'd likely see a reduction in that fatigue during the half-cadence weeks, leading to less churn. No such reduction happened, so we're comfortable continuing to send daily emails.

One important note is that we don't send multiple emails each day, so during the double-cadence period we were sending daily digests of multiple posts. (Were we to send more than one each day, we might have expected a significant rise in unsubscribes. That's something HubSpot was better able to track in their version of this experiment.)


4. Community complaints / backlash

This was another primary concern of ours: If we skipped days on the editorial calendar, and didn't publish a new post, would our community cry foul? Would we be failing to meet the expectations we'd developed among our readers?

Hypothesis

Having multiple days with no new post published in a relatively short period of time will lead to disappointment and outcry among the readership, which has grown to expect a new post every day.

Results

While we didn't proactively ask our community if they noticed, we were watching social traffic specifically for word of there not being a blog post on one or more of the days we skipped during the half-cadence period. We figured we'd find a bunch of "hey, what gives?" Our community team is great at monitoring social media for mentions—even those that don't specifically ping us with @Moz—and this is what we found:

A single post.

That's really it. Other than this one tweet—one that elicited a heartfelt "Awww!" from Roger—there wasn't a single peep from anyone. Crickets. This hypothesis couldn't be more busted.

We asked in our most recent reader survey how often people generally read the Moz Blog, and 17% of readers reported that they read it every day.

Even if we assume some statistical variance and that some of those responses were slight exaggerations of the truth (survey data is never squishy, right?), that's still a sizeable number of people who—in theory—should have noticed we weren't publishing as much as we usually do. And yet, only one person had a reaction strong enough that they posted their thoughts in a place we could find them.



5. Trading quantity for quality

This is a far more subjective hypothesis—we can't even measure the results beyond our own opinions—but we found it quite interesting nonetheless.

Hypothesis

If we post fewer times per week, we'll have more time and be better able to focus on the quality of the posts we do publish. If we publish more frequently, the quality of each post will suffer.

Results

As nice an idea as this was, it turned out to be a bit backwards. Publishing fewer posts did leave us with more time, but we didn't end up using it to dive deeper into revisions of other posts or come up with additional feedback for our scheduled authors. The Moz Blog is written largely by authors outside our own company, and even though we had more time we could have used to recommend edits, the authors didn't have any more time than they otherwise would have, and it wouldn't have been fair for us to ask them for it anyway.

What we did do is spend more time on bigger, more innovative projects, and ended the two half-cadence weeks feeling significantly more productive.

We also noticed that part of the stress of an editorial calendar comes from the fact that an artificial schedule exists in the first place. Even with the reduction in volume, we felt significant pressure when a scheduled post wasn't quite where we wanted it to be by the time it was supposed to be finished.

Because we ended up spending our time elsewhere, our experiment didn't focus nearly as much on the comprehensiveness of the posts as the HubSpot experiment did. It ended up just being about volume and maintaining the quality bar for all the posts we published, regardless of their frequency.

Our productivity gains, though, made us begin to think even more carefully about where we were spending our time.


Wrapping up

With some basic data clearly showing us that a day without a blog post isn't the calamity we feared it may be, we've decided it's time to raise the bar.

When a post that's scheduled to be published on our blog just isn't quite where we think it ought to be, we'll no longer rush it through the editing process simply because of an artificial deadline. When a post falls through (that's just the life of an editorial calendar), we'll no longer scramble to find an option that's "good enough" to fill the spot. If we don't have a great replacement, we'll simply take the day off.

It's got us thinking hard about posts that provide truly great value—those 10x pieces of content that Rand mentioned in his Whiteboard Friday. Take a look at the traffic for Dr. Pete's post on title tags since it was published in March of 2014:

See all those tiny bumps of long-tail traffic? The post still consistently sees 3-4,000 uniques every week, and has just crossed over 300,000 all-time. That's somewhere between 60-100x a post we'd call just fine.

60-100x.

Now, there's just no way we can make every post garner that kind of traffic, but we can certainly take steps in that direction. If we published half as many posts, but they all performed more than twice as well, that's a net win for us even despite the fact that the better posts will generally continue bringing traffic for a while to come.

Does this mean you'll see fewer posts from Moz going forward? No. We might skip a day now and then, but rest assured that if we do, it'll just be because we didn't want to ask for your time until we thought we had something that was really worth it. =)

I'd love to hear what you all have to say in the comments, whether about methodology, takeaways, or suggestions for the future.


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Moz Local Officially Launches in the UK

Posted by David-Mihm

To all Moz Local fans in the UK, I'm excited to announce that your wait is over. As the sun rises "across the pond" this morning, Moz Local is officially live in the United Kingdom!

A bit of background

As many of you know, we released the US version of Moz Local in March 2014. After 12 months of terrific growth in the US, and a boatload of technical improvements and feature releases--especially for Enterprise customers--we released the Check Listing feature for a limited set of partner search engines and directories in the UK in April of this year.

Over 20,000 of you have checked your listings (or your clients' listings) in the last 3-1/2 months. Those lookups have helped us refine and improve the background technology immensely (more on that below). We've been just as eager to release the fully-featured product as you've been to use it, and the technical pieces have finally fallen into place for us to do so.

How does it work?

The concept is the same as the US version of Moz Local: show you how accurately and completely your business is listed on the most important local search platforms and directories, and optimize and perfect as many of those business listings as we can on your behalf.

For customers specifically looking for you, accurate business listings are obviously important. For customers who might not know about you yet, they're also among the most important factors for ranking in local searches on Google. Basically, the more times Google sees your name, address, phone, and website listed the same way on quality local websites, the more trust they have in your business, and the higher you're likely to rank.

Moz Local is designed to help on both these fronts.

To use the product, you simply need to type a name and postcode at moz.com/local. We'll then show you a list of the closest matching listings we found. We prioritize verified listing information that we find on Google or Facebook, and selecting one of those verified listings means we'll be able to distribute it on your behalf.

Clicking on a result brings you to a full details report for that listing. We'll show you how accurate and complete your listings are now, and where they could be after using our product.

Clicking the tabs beneath the Listing Score graphic will show you some of the incompletions and inconsistencies that publishing your listing with Moz Local will address.

For customers with hundreds or thousands of locations, bulk upload is also available using a modified version of your data from Google My Business--feel free to e-mail enterpriselocal@moz.com for more details.

Where do we distribute your data?

We've prioritized the most important commercial sites in the UK local search ecosystem, and made them the centerpieces of Moz Local. We'll update your data directly on globally-important players Factual and Foursquare, and the UK-specific players CentralIndex, Thomson Local, and the Scoot network--which includes key directories like TouchLocal, The Independent, The Sun, The Mirror, The Daily Scotsman, and Wales Online.

We'll be adding two more major destinations shortly, and for those of you who sign up before that time, your listings will be automatically distributed to the additional destinations when the integrations are complete.

How much does it cost?

The cost per listing is £84/year, which includes distribution to the sites mentioned above with unlimited updates throughout the year, monitoring of your progress over time, geographically- focused reporting, and the ability to find and close duplicate listings right from your Moz Local dashboard--all the great upgrades that my colleague Noam Chitayat blogged about here.

What's next?

Well, as I mentioned just a couple paragraphs ago, we've got two additional destinations to which we'll be sending your data in very short order. Once those integrations are complete, we'll be just a few weeks away from releasing our biggest set of features since we launched. I look forward to sharing more about these features at BrightonSEO at the end of the summer!

For those of you around the world in Canada, Australia, and other countries, we know there's plenty of demand for Moz Local overseas, and we're working as quickly as we can to build additional relationships abroad. And to our friends in the UK, please let us know how we can continue to make the product even better!


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Seth's Blog : Are you ready?

Are you ready?

You're more powerful than you think. The altMBA is now accepting applicants for its second class. The program is working. We're helping accelerate the impact people are making in the world, and I hope you'll forward this post to someone in search of transformation.

Are you ready to grow, to see, to be transformed?

One way to get to where you're going is to surround yourself with people on a similar journey. That's what I set out to create when I founded the altMBA, and it has dramatically exceeded all of my expectations.

This week, some extraordinary people are graduating from our first month-long intensive session, and the feedback from our inaugural class is even better than I hoped.

"The content is hugely applicable to so many different disciplines. I'm learning and growing at the speed of light, and it's very easy to see the changes within my peers as well. Honestly, this should be a mandatory for marketing graduates. Period."

-Kelli Wood

"Community feedback, peer support, shared beliefs in personal potential, and the right to pursue happiness make the altMBA a perfect place to prepare to leap. My creative confidence is growing immensely. This process confirmed for me that I could map out taking on a big project, stick to the plan, and have a completed product when I'm done with altMBA."

-Ryon Lane

"I literally feel transformed from each project. I have never experienced anything like this. I am surprised by the genuine personal connections. Seth talked about that as part of the MBA experience, but I didn't believe that would happen in 30 days."

- Chris Carroll

If you're ready for this sort of change, I hope you will check out this page profiling our graduates (the peer-to-peer interactions among our students are the most important part of the program). Then, check out this quick overview of what we've built and how it can help you get to where you're going. Here's the FAQ.

The altMBA is designed to transform professionals—to assemble a talented cadre of people and give them a platform to push each other to make real change happen. 

The biggest insight: it was a group effort. It's about the student-to-student connection, the reciprocal challenges of discovery and growth and quality that created an environment that worked. We are as good as the people we hang out with.

Applications are now open for the next session.

The altMBA is an important step in the evolution of online learning, but way more important than that, it's a huge step in how you develop yourself and your career.

There's a free informational audio webinar about the course, held tomorrow at 12 pm NY time, and archived if you can't watch it live. I think it may help you decide if this is the right opportunity for you.

We're selective in who is admitted, curating the class to improve its impact. Priority is given based on your work history as well as the date of your application. I hope this is something you'll consider, and I apologize if we're not able to admit everyone who applies.

In many ways, the altMBA is the culmination of much of what I've been teaching over the last two decades. I hope you can join in.

If you're ready for this, we're ready for you. Here we go.

       

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marți, 21 iulie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


SuperBull Club: RBC Ups Morgan Stanley, Says Bull Market to Continue 6 Years; Sobering Alternative View from GMO

Posted: 21 Jul 2015 01:42 PM PDT

SuperBull Club

RBC Capital Markets chief U.S. market strategist Jonathan Golub joined the SuperBull Club today. Golub says Years Left to Go in S&P 500 Bull Market.
The U.S. economy's slow recovery may extend another six years, potentially doubling the duration of the bull market in equities, according to RBC Capital Markets chief U.S. market strategist Jonathan Golub.

Bull markets tend to continue until an economic cycle runs out, usually after about seven years, Golub said in an interview with Bob Moon on Bloomberg Radio. Given the pace of the current economic expansion, he said the cycle could last 12 years or longer, providing investors with reason to continue buying stocks.

"We're going to see a lot more upside to the stock market," Golub said. "This is going to go on for long enough that many Americans are going to be able to participate in the run higher."

The Standard & Poor's 500 Index has more than tripled during the current bull run, which at 76 months is the second longest in the past 60 years.

He forecasts the benchmark index will end the year at 2,325, the fourth-most bullish forecast in a Bloomberg survey of 21 strategists.
Upping Morgan Stanley's 5-Year Prediction

Gulub upped the forecast of Adam Parker, Morgan Stanley's chief U.S. equity strategist.

On Monday, Parker stated his belief: Another 5 Years to Bull Market.

I commented "The bulls are attempting to outdo each other as often happens at or near market tops. But who's to say this is a top? Why stop with a 5-year rally? Why not 10 or 20 years? Why not forever? There's plenty of room for more optimism, and this bull market won't end until we see every ounce of it."

It seems fitting that it took only one day for RBC to up the forecast of Morgan Stanley. Surely, someone can outdo six more years.

SuperBulls, it's time to strut your stuff.

Sobering Alternative View from GMO

In contrast, to the SuperBulls, I present the 7-Year Real Return Forecast of GMO.



*The chart represents real return forecasts for several asset classes and not for any GMO fund or strategy. These forecasts are forward‐looking statements based upon the reasonable beliefs of GMO and are not a guarantee of future performance. Forward‐looking statements speak only as of the date they are made, and GMO assumes no duty to and does not undertake to update forward‐looking statements. Forward‐looking statements are subject to numerous assumptions, risks, and uncertainties, which change over time. Actual results may differ materially from those anticipated in forward-looking statements. U.S. inflation is assumed to mean revert to long‐term inflation of 2.2% over 15 years.

Rain on the SuperBull Party

Note that GMO expects negative real returns in US stocks, on average, for a full seven years.

I hate to ruin a SuperBull party with forecasts that have been historically among the best in the world, but so be it.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Total Gridlock: 25,000 French Farmers Face Bankruptcy, Block Roads, Dump manure, Rotting Vegetables

Posted: 21 Jul 2015 11:10 AM PDT

25,000 French Farmers Face Bankruptcy

In France, no matter how inefficient the business, the proposed solution is typically higher prices rather than to let weak businesses go under.

And so it is again. Hollande's remedy for farmers facing bankruptcy is not to preach against overproduction, inefficiencies, or the inane trade embargo with Russia, but rather to encourage shops to raise prices.


Prices went up, but farmers are upset that middlemen took most of the cut. In response Angry French farmers protest low meat prices with manure, road blocks.
French livestock farmers, furious at falling prices for dairy and meat, used farm vehicles to block access to the tourist hotspot Mont Saint-Michel and two towns in Lower Normandy Monday in a bid to push officials to address the crisis.

French Agriculture Minister Stéphane Le Foll described the situation as an "agricultural crisis", stating on Saturday that one in ten of all French livestock farmers (some 25,000 farms), are now facing bankruptcy.

A large protest began Sunday in Lower Normandy, and grew in momentum Monday, with protests spreading across the region and to neighbouring Brittany.

Almost 300 tractors and farm vehicles, including skips filled with manure, blocked access Monday to the cities of Caen and Lisieux, both located in Lower Normandy. Protestors also blocked access to Mont Saint-Michel, one of the most-visited tourist sites in France.

Some protesting farmers in Caen targeted supermarkets, who they accuse of keeping prices low, and left buckets of manure in front of other businesses in the meat production sector, including a slaughterhouse, a distribution company and a meat-processing plant, who they also believe are part of the problem.

Le Foll offered to meet with the Norman farmers on Thursday in Paris after examining a report on the prices of agricultural products but the angry livestock farmers declined the invitation, saying that they are waiting for the minister to come to them.

There are numerous factors behind the low prices of French meat. Supermarkets want to keep prices low and French farmers are facing increased competition from foreign producers, who have lower production costs.

On June 17, retailers and representatives from the food industry agreed to raise the price of meat and dairy so they could pay more to hard-up livestock farmers, enabling them to cover their ever-increasing production costs. However, farmers say they haven't benefited from the price hikes.

Attendees at the June meeting agreed that a kilo of beef would be revalued by 5 cents a week, yet only 7 cents have been gained in an entire month.

Is buying 'Made in France' the answer?

Two days ago, French President François Hollande launched an appeal to supermarkets to "offer consumers quality, and offer farmers a [good] price." He also announced a new "made in France" label for meat and called on French citizens to do their bit by buying French products.

On July 20, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls called for "dialogue" between the actors and said that he felt for the farmers.

"We understand the anger and distress of the livestock farmers. They must know that the government will stand side-by-side with them as we seek a solution."

For their part, these angry farmers say they will continue to block traffic and leave buckets of manure on factory doorsteps until someone pays attention.
Total Gridlock

Agriland reports French farmers block roads as '25,000 face bankruptcy'.
French farmers have caused total gridlock in northwestern France in recent days, by blocking the roads with their tractors and machinery in protest against the low prices they are receiving for their produce.

These protests are not a new occurrence in France, in November last year farmers staged what they called a 'Grand Mobilisation' protesting across the country due to poor prices for their produce.

Organised by the French Farmers Union (FNSEA) and the Young Farmers Union (YA), last year the day saw tonnes upon tonnes of manure and rotting vegetables dumped on French streets.

French farmers have been holding protests for weeks, including a national "night of distress" earlier this month.

More manure was dumped outside French supermarkets, tyres were set on fire and roads were blocked.
The four-point solution to this madness is surprisingly simple.

 Easy Solution

  1. Lift the embargo on Russia that is hurting France as much or more than it is Russia.
  2. Let small, inefficient French farms go bankrupt.
  3. Fine farmers dumping manure and blocking streets.
  4. Charge farmers cleanup costs.

The problem would vanish in a week were France to adopt common-sense measures.


Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com