DailyEconomics Stock Market Digest Last Day Week of Feb 15

#DailyEconomics smarter personal finance by understanding how the world works through news and analysis.

Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor, you should never take my advice. These are my notes, my personal understanding as a part of daily / weekly stock investment researching. Feel free to get feel of what may be important or notable, but I am not making any recommendation here...

Morning MoneyBeat: Nasdaq Approaches Dot-Com Era Record (source: Wall Street Journal #MoneyBeat)

Now the tech-heavy index sits less than 3% from its record destination and few on Wall Street expect it to stall before it gets there. That’s because after outperforming the broader indexes in 2014, tech is leading the overall market again this year. And Wall Street largely forecasts the sector to lead for the rest of 2015.

The video above: Gilead Tractor Supply Keurig and Monster Beverages Has Been Leading the Record Nasdaq Surge. Nasdaq is hoping to break record. 4000%+ gain

Among Nasdaq 100 Best Formers: Gilead 4509%+, Tractor Supply Co 7489%+, Keurig 29547%, monster 44448%  (if existed in March 2000, otherwise adjusted to model as if existed). Since 2009 best performers include Regeneron Pharma Sirius XM Keurig Green Mountain, Starbucks, Netflix, Priceline, Baidu,

The above video also briefly mentioned Apple as a leader.

Mark Zuckerberg says Happy New Year in Mandarin (Source: CNN Money)

For unclear reasons why it is relevant, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wishes everyone a Happy Chinese New Year 2015 in awesome Mandarin Chinese language. Does this signifiy a new era of Facebook expansion into China... finally?

Analysts Respond to Pharmacyclics' Q4 Results - S&P Capital IQ

Pharmacyclics, Inc.(NASDAQ: PCYC) reported Q4 results on Wednesday and posted adjusted of EPS $0.96, above estimates of $0.76, on revenues of $290.2 million. The company also reaffirmed its fiscal 2015 outlook. JP Morgan analyst Cory Kasimov felt that the company's long-term future looked bright, however, the stock's valuation prompted the firm to "step to the sidelines." Kasimov downgraded the stock from Overweight to Neutral (the price is getting too high JPM starts to think it's overpriced). Nomura analyst M. Ian Somaiya, to a different view, upgraded the stock from Neutral to Buy. Somaiya added that "upside to consensus US revenue estimates combined with a strong launch in Europe and multiple clinical data readouts that could guide label expansion opportunities in the future support our upgrade." Stifel analyst Brian Klein stated that with "Zydelig's 4Q14 print of $16M in the U.S., we see the greater than 10-times comparative Imbruvica sales margin supporting our belief that Imbruvica is the established SOC for R/R CLL." Klein maintained a Hold rating on the stock and believed "that 2015 could be a transformational year for PCYC as it seeks to shift from the limited relapsed and refractory CLL market to the larger heme-onc space, including front-line CLL and NHL." Pharmacyclics recently traded at $170.51, up 0.18 percent. View More Analyst Ratings for PCYCView the Latest Analyst Ratings 2015 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. Acquire Media

Repost Launch Sublime Text Editor from Mac Command Line

Developer Shortcut Launch Sublime Text Editor or Open Files with Sublime from the Command Line on Mac (Repost from Udacity)

Love your Sublime and want to use it to open files right from the terminal? Follow the steps below. Better yet, it helps you set 'subl' as your shortcut, punch in subl <filename> to open text / code files with sublime right from the command line. Save you a few words of typing too - somewhat important for a lot of developers.

Launching Sublime from command-line

source: udacity learning wiki! Not written by me. I just need it so often, I am keeping the entire notes here.

Windows

1. Find the directory where Sublime is located for you.  For many people, this is C:/Program\ Files/Sublime\ Text\ 2/sublime_text.exe.  To test this, run ls C:/Program\ Files/Sublime\ Text\ 2 within Git Bash.  You should see sublime_text.exe listed.  If you get the errorNo such file or directory, Sublime is located somewhere else for you and you'll need to find it.  For example, it might be under C:/Program\ Files\ (x86)`.
2. Run the following command in Git Bash: echo 'alias subl="C:/Program\ Files/Sublime\ Text\ 2/sublime_text.exe"' >> ~/.bashrc If sublwas in a different directory for you in step 1, use that directory.
3. Close and re-open Git Bash.  Typing subl in Git Bash should now open Sublime.

Mac

1. Find where the subl command is located.
   subl comes with Sublime, so it should be in the directory where Sublime is located for you.  For many people, this is/Applications/Sublime\ Text\ 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin.  To test this, runls /Applications/Sublime\ Text\ 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin.  You should see the subl command listed.  If you get the errorNo such file or directory, Sublime is located somewhere else for you and you'll need to find it.
2. If you do not have a file named .bash_profile in your home directory, create it.  Because the name of this file begins with a period, it will not appear in most file navigators or when you run ls.  Instead, run ls -a to see if you have the file.
3. Add the line export PATH=$PATH:/Applications/Sublime\ Text\ 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin to the end of your .bash_profile.  If sublwas in a different directory for you in step 1, use that directory.
4. Close and re-open your terminal.  Typing subl in the terminal should now open Sublime.

Alternatively, you can create a symbolic link to Sublime.

1. Find where the subl command is located.
   subl comes with Sublime, so it should be in the directory where Sublime is located for you.  For many people, this is/Applications/Sublime\ Text\ 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin.  To test this, runls /Applications/Sublime\ Text\ 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin.  You should see the subl command listed.  If you get the errorNo such file or directory, Sublime is located somewhere else for you and you'll need to find it.
2. If you do not have a file named .bash_profile in your home directory, create it.  Because the name of this file begins with a period, it will not appear in most file navigators or when you run ls.  Instead, run ls -a to see if you have the file.
3. Add the lines export PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH and export EDITOR='subl -w' to the end of your .bash_profile. 
4. Save and exit .bash_profile.
5. At the terminal command prompt type: source ~/.bash_profile
6. At the terminal command prompt type: sudo ln -s /Applications/Sublime\ Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl /usr/bin/subl Note that if subl was in a different directory for you in step 1, use the path to that directory. If prompted for a password, use the same password you use to log into your Mac account.
7. Close and re-open your terminal.  Typing subl in the terminal should now open Sublime.

Hearsay Digest on Wall Street Week of Feb 16 - 20 2015

Stock market research and summary for my too-busy-to-research their own investments family members. All this digest is saying is these stocks may have more movements and volumes than usual. For investors seeking short term returns they should examine for call/short choices. Disclaimer: I am not a certified financial advisor, you should never take anything I write seriously. This is more like notes for myself and family, which I happened to publish. 

Technology Stocks featuring Google Apple Tesla

Google search numbers fell. Unlikely to cut spending, more investment will be spent on growth.  Return lagged behind Apple via Seeking Alpha.

Apple's growth defies the index (NASDAQ) and market it dwells in. It does so by moving into adjacent markets computer -> laptop -> personal electronics (iPod) --> PE iPhone --> now it's moving into watches and wearables! via Seeking Alpha

Tim Cook talks to Goldman Sachs about Apple's continual growth and defying  law of large numbers, beat Wall Street expectations. Apple saw strong iPhone purchase, Swift came out as a new development language, released kits to allow developers access to health data, potentially control home internet of things, build new stores, 50% growth in the emerging market (50 billion dollars, 30 billion is from China, partners with China Mobile), partners with IBM, new data center investments. Very importantly, Apple Watch will be released in April 2015, including a Gold jewelry luxurious quality edition. Retailers are found reluctant to change POS systems during the holiday season. Apple Pay gives a new platform of paying that's partnered with trust-worthy partners, but is also available for small business. Apple Pay is able to provide credit numbers by never providing it to the merchant. 80% of mobile payment at Panera Bread is via Apple Pay. IBM has a lot of field workers, and deep vertical knowledge. IBM is an outstanding partner given its deep industry knowledge. Apple has a mainstream desktop OS as well as a mobile OS, neither of its major competitor can do that (Google Microsoft).

Apple closed with 700 billion market capital setting a record - first American company to close 700 billion dollars +.


Tesla recent events and news indicates growth may be a concern and needs better management via Seeking Alpha Though Elon Musk remains confident for explosive Tesla growth and market dominance in the long wrong. It may not be a good purchase right now.

Intel looks okay on the fundamental side. May not be pessimistic via Seeking Alpha

While BOX had a successful IPO, it may be facing fierce competition from the likes of Google.

Biotechnology Stocks  featuring Gilead Pharmacyclics

Gilead expects to double HCV drug price discounts in 2015. At one point both Gilead and AbbVie (ABBV) were down 7-8% due to the competition -> lower revenue expectation.

Stanford David B. Miklos, M.D., Ph.D., Medical Director of the Blood and Marrow Transplantation-Cellular Therapy Facility at the Stanford University Medical Center gave an oral presentation regarding IMBRUVICA® (ibrutinib) Treatment Shows Efficacy and Tolerability in Heavily Treated Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Patients Following Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplant. He is also an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. These data were presented at the American Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation's 2015 BMT Tandem Meeting in San Diego, California. via Yahoo Finance.

Pharmacyclics' Imbruvica is doing well

Apparently Pharmacyclics revenue is growing at a healthy pace.

According to Pharmacyclics' company report it's imbruvica is doing better than most US cancer drugs with the exception of Avastin

In addition to working on the second generation Imbruvica, Pharmacyclics has a pipeline of hematology treatment studies geared for Imbruvica, which is already approved for CLL and MCL.

Motley Fools explains why Pharmacyclics stock may be doing well today / tomorrow thanks to the efficacy of Imbruvica, which is doing really well as a cancer treating drug across all hematology. 

5+ Big/Cool Things Built with PHP

This is not a technical analysis of PHP but more a narrative concluding that PHP still has a spot in modern development, and isn't going away soon. If you are already a PHP developer or getting started, you can seek out the sexy side of the moon and get on with modern PHP frameworks, Content Management tools like WordPress, and global e-commerce blockbuster like Alibaba.

Facebook was once built with PHP and so is WordPress

Alibaba Taobao.com uses PHP

While not the sexiest, Alibaba and its Taobao.com are the defacto industry standard for  e-commerce in China. Wanting to customize your e-commerce template? You will have to do a bit of HTML CSS JavaScript (not jQuery) and PHP.

Php language is commonly seen in chinese internet apps, including taobao.com 

WordPress is a PHP site

Writing that journal entry, press release, or even build a fully functional Content Management Site or just a powerful website, you can use PHP. WordPress built itself and its Content Management tool with PHP. May be PHP is a bit more poetic than we think.  

Beautiful Frameworks like Laravel

Laravel beautiful modern frameworks almost too good to be PHP

Laravel is the beautiful modern framework that actually uses PHP

Laravel is a modern, beautiful framework that actually uses PHP! It wants beautiful documentations too! GitHub deployment, hip conferences, minimalistic documentations, dependency manager, and rails like command line boiler plates, build-in database and rails-like authentication APIs... this is possibly the sexiest form of modern PHP possible.

MailChimp uses PHP for its blog and production environment

MailChimp crunched 30 million emails daily with PHP production environment

MailChimp team used PHP for almost everything development, even their blog, and definitely the production environment. 30 million emails were handled daily by the production environment programmed with advanced PHP frameworks and optimized with modern architecture. (2010 Source)

Accessible personal sites in a splash via cPanel and SQL database

Getting started with coding, just bought a domain and ready to set up your own site? Outsource the back-end to Parse for mobile or something fancy... or go old school and subscribe to a hosting service: generate a SQL database in the cPanel and connect it easily with the old and good connection.php with a bit of help of Filezilla and get your back-end in seconds. Unless your site goes viral... this may be just enough for your personal blog app, hackathon demo... etc.

Though not necessarily sexy, PHP is here to stay

Of course, popular APIs like MailChimp's API provides wrappers in many modern languages, not just PHP. Facebook was at first built with PHP, and of course still provides API access via PHP and other wrappers. The battle about how effective, efficient or NOT modern PHP is as a programming language is on-going, and often PHP is on the lower side of the balance, but it's definitely here to stay, it's supported in many cases. And yes being a PHP developer will not be out of a job ... yet. 

Getting started with programming? May be start with PHP and then Ruby / Python to appreciate the more modern languages a whole lot better. 

Hotel at Home : W Hotel Lifestyle

Once a consultant, always a consultant. On the many nights spent in hotels, consultants have learned to accept brand hotels as their homes. It's a must to ensure sanity. Starwoods hotels and their loyalty program SPG are particularly popular among posh technology and business strategy consultants with shiny suits and a bit of tech savy modern twist. 

#SPGLife W Hotels really stand out in modern hotel culture. The brand like many other hotels offer merchandise for sale online for customers to "take the hotel home". Today I came across three interesting pieces of merchandise on a specialty W Hotel sales

Modern Tech Savy Lifestyle: W Hotel Take Home Merchandise that Really WOWs

W Hotel Room Scent Perfume / Home Fragrance

Marketing now employs scent to invoke memory and longing. W Hotel defines the scent of modern taste with this perfume like Westin defines its SPA like hotels with the scent of white tea.

W Hotel Room Accent - Pillow, Cushion and Throws

W Hotels strive to invoke a sense of youth, sexuality, modern urban lifestyle, this tiara beauty queen must have inspires a sense of wild youth and adventure - party life as the #SPGLife ?

Even for the symbol of modernism, this throw has too much of an electric blue for a bandana / bed throw.
But it really shines brilliant design when you take a close look at the pattern.

This brilliant throw has a unique W HOTEL Dallas pattern spelling out silhouette of oil drills, longhorns and hardcore machinery. It shines light on the life of the American south, the trucks, fields and the people, making this a unique piece worth a second look.

W Hotel Room Lifestyle Accessories - Tote

Just like the pillow, this "princess" beauty queen tiara tote is designed to shout we need "pampering", a bit modern sexy and the City? Urban cinderella? Such a rich kid of instagram tote #RKOI

How to get a job at Square? - Girl Geek Dinner Edition Part 1

This post includes my notes and researches on how to get a job at Square, the credit card reader and e-commerce company. Attending Girl Geek Dinner at Square tonight. Doing some due diligence and brushing up on programming skills. While I am not interested in a job at Square, I am a Square Market merchant and eBay store owner At Lotus Boutique, so e-commerce and tech topic of interests, tech career counseling - also topic of interest.

Having raised more than $300 Million dollars in funding (introductory read: how to get a job at square by +Mashable ), and having been founded by Twitter founders, Square hardly needs to convince people to join. Intersecting hardware, software, mobile, financial payment processing, and pushing the frontier of use of new frameworks (Ember.js D3 for its Seller's Dashboard), Square is hardly a easy pick for any dazzling ambitious souls. You can read about the development and wireframing process here. And engineer Allen Cheung decided to explain it in more details on Quora (why the framework?).

If you are applying for an engineering job, it's best to know the stack and mobile dev environment, here's Quora's take by the Engineering Manager, Zack Rock. And why not read the company's own words on how to get in? The Square Engineering Corner blog provides some insights into the nature of the job and how to get one here. You can learn about the pair programming interview, or the code challenges. What's on a company's website, is really a fair game to ask in any interviews.

In the Mashable article, Seth claims that Square engineering interviews start with a Skype call with a code problem to be worked out with a real engineer (read, this takes time and energy, submit a good solid application. These interviews aren't cheap to come by).  And if all goes well, then the candidate proceeds to a full day problem solving oriented interview to get a taste of what working here is really like.

Perks? You can have faith this place has amazing perks, so all the more reasons to beef up your raw talent or do lots of homework.

I will do a part 2 after the girl geek dinner, which usually provides valuable insights of what the process really is like and how to get into the door faster. Stay tuned. 

Last but not least, Square hires for plenty of business, finance related roles. With some due diligence, good talents and a strong professional background, really, any one has a chance. You don't have to code, but if you can, super. There's a strong engineering culture here

Bulletin:
Mashable article How to get a job at Square http://mashable.com/2013/02/17/square-jobs/
Square Engineering Corner blog Ember.js and D3 for dashboard http://corner.squareup.com/2012/04/building-analytics.html
Square Engineering Corner blog http://corner.squareup.com
Glassdoor talks about Square interviews http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Square-Interview-Questions-E422050.htm
(Quora links are embedded in the article)

Announcement: At-Lotus Top Brand Hosting Beijing International Design Week

One of the top brands that we carry at At-Lotus Boutique
At-Lotus Boutique eBay
At-Lotus Boutique Square
At-Lotus Boutique Shopify
is now hosting competitions in Beijing for the International Design Week.
This is exciting news for us, considering that China is our next market.

We are excited that Chinese designers will be featured in this competition.
We are also excited to continue to deliver the best products to all corners of the United States. Will be posting more Kikkerland products soon!

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