Good Morning,

U.S. equities closed higher on Friday, with the three major indexes posting weekly gains, following a disappointing employment report.

The Jobs report came in a bit below expectations but didn’t necessarily take a rate hike off the table for 2016 as the labor market still appears to be improving. The dollar as well as U.S. treasuries supported that view with the dollar trading higher and the yields on both the 2 year and 10 year moving higher.

Our take: Was bad news good news in this report pushing stocks higher? The fact that utilities rallied suggests yes. But with USD rallying and treasury yields rising it isn’t so clear. Let’s remember that August marked the 71 straight month with positive job gains, the longest on record.

Looks like the Fed is still faced with a conundrum. Mark Whitehouse for Bloomberg puts together an interesting chart showing where four indicators -- unemployment, prime-age employment, wage growth and inflation -- stand compared with where they were before the previous cycles.

Given the uncertainty, why would the Fed go ahead? Should she stay or should she go?

Thought of the Week

" A man who is a master of patience is master of everything else.” – George Savile

Logos LP in the Media

Logos LP will be presenting at this year’s MoneyShow Toronto Conference September 16-17, 2016 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. We will be presenting as a panel looking at family run businesses and whether the nature of their ownership can be an indicator of equity outperformance. Our Panel will be held at 2:45PM -3:30PM Sept. 17, 2016.
For more information on our talk please click here

There will be many other interesting speakers on both days so join us and Click here or call 800-970-4355 to register for your free spot at The MoneyShow Toronto! (please mention priority code 041782).

Ideas from Logos LP

Our CIO looks for out-of-favor investment ideas and here on The MoneyShow he discusses his strategy, his emphasis on "catalysts", and a trio of stocks he considered undervalued in the current market.

Stories and Ideas of Interest

Have we really learned our lesson since the financial crisis of 2007-2008? Maybe not. Rumors of leverage's death have been greatly exaggerated. Bloomberg looks at a bevy of derivatives investors are using to juice returns.

Why do business executives—people who already possess status and wealth—commit financial crimes? Eugene Soltes offers some interesting theories in his new book, Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal, including the notion that many senior business people operate in a moral "gray zone." An associate professor at Harvard Business School, Soltes posits that they step over the line—breaking accounting rules or making illegal insider trades—in part because they rely on intuition. And, it turns out, their instincts stink.

You don’t have to be an expert on digital currencies like bitcoin to be intrigued by the potential of the technology underlying them. Bloomberg looks at Blockchain, as it’s called, as something new in computing. It mashes up cryptography and peer-to-peer networking to create what amounts to a shared database of transactions and other information—which can be open to all, controlled by no one. It’s not just for securely recording payments in crypto-coinage; a blockchain can handle complex transactions, even entire contracts. True believers say blockchain could reduce the need for businesses to organize as companies, which get work done via command and control. Hype or not?
The explosion of the gig economy is real. One of the reasons Mustafa Muhammed finally broke down and bought a smartphone was because he needed to find a job. Why? Because there is an app for that. Bloomberg dives deep into the workforce trend of people wanting to choose their own hours. Human-resources startups raised $1.2 billion this year as “alternative work arrangements” -- including temp work, on-call work, contractors, and freelancers -- accounted for all the net employment growth in the U.S. from 2005 to 2015. That trend is widely expected to continue.

No but really real estate in Canada (Vancouver and Toronto) is getting silly (bubbly). Vancouver homeownership costs now eat up a record nine out of every 10 dollars of a typical family’s income. If you have to ask about upgrading from a condominium to a single-family home, you really can’t afford it. How does this end? No wonder fear of a housing crash in Canada is spreading…

If It’s Stability You Want, Then Rent, Don’t Buy. Anyone who got caught in the real estate bust last decade in the U.S. or U.K. probably knows this already, but now the economic data is in: home ownership can be bad for you. More accurately, it can be harmful to the financial stability of whole economies. That’s the evidence from a new study published this week by European Central Bank research economist Gerhard Ruenstler.

All the best for a productive week,

Logos LP