Welcome to the first day of trading in 2016

[sdw]

And as quickly as Oil went up, Oil went down.

The Japanese have invented a robot that is right 68% of the time. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/glob...for-calling-the-stock-market/article28781366/

On the 10th day of every month, Junsuke Senoguchi has just one thing on his mind -- the closing level of the Nikkei 225 Stock Average.

That’s because Mr. Senoguchi, an unassuming man in his late 40s, has built a machine that’s been predicting the direction of Japanese shares, and once a month he gets a progress report on its success. The model makes a simple call - whether the equity index will be higher or lower after 30 days - and over almost four years it’s been right 68 per cent of the time.

...

Mr. Senoguchi’s machine operates like a chess computer, poring over past data to identify patterns. He contrasts it with statistical analysis, which he says works in terms of lines on graphs, normal distributions and deviations from the mean. For him, that’s akin to forcing square pegs into round holes. His model harnesses big data to see what happened and decide if it will again.

...

It uses elimination to decide which set has been most predictive for stocks over the past 48 months. That becomes the model to forecast month 49. It then deploys a decision-tree process from artificial intelligence theory to make its guess.

Mr. Senoguchi says one strength is his model starts afresh each time. When there are big changes in the environment, such as central bank decisions, his model will compensate.

 

[sdw]

Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi Oil Minister made it clear - The Royal Saud Family won't be cutting Saudi Arabia's Oil Production. What is bad is going to get much worse.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/saudi-oil-minister-in-houston-1.3459539

 

[sdw]

Imperial Oil/Esso - owned by Exxon is exiting Canadian retail fuel sales. They have sold their airport fuel operations and their retail service station operations. http://calgaryherald.com/business/e...for-us135m-including-calgarys-avitat-facility

It's looking like Canada isn't viewed as a friendly place to do business. This is in addition to announcements by Sunoco, Chevron and Shell. We are now well over 185,000 Oil Industry job losses in Canada.

The reality is that many retail service station locations are more valuable as residential development land than their continuing potential to earn income as retail service stations.