Seeking an apartment? There is 3-D software for that.Halstead Property, a brokerage with 1,200 agents in the New York metropolitan area, is using 3-D software to let apartment seekers take virtual walk-throughs of its listings, the Journal reports. In a sort of Google Street View for real estate, buyers may tour a property online, peer out of windows and check details from kitchen appliances to bathroom fixtures. Halstead says the software will become a feature for many of its Manhattan listings.
The cost of technology that substitutes for labor in factories has plummeted, displacing more and more workers. Chinese assembly lines today bear no resemblance to those of a decade ago. The best Chinese private companies are as capital intensive as an equivalent factory in the United States.
That’s because only about 4 percent of shale production needs $80 or more to be profitable. Most drilling in the Bakken formation, one of the main drivers of shale oil output, returns cash at or below $42 a barrel, the IEA estimates.
The investor’s biggest challenge in the U.S. is the fragmented market structure, which has driven up costs across as many as 52 trading venues, introducing a “latency overcharge,” Schanke said.
The market as he sees it “isn’t good enough for raising investor confidence,” which has been an issue in the U.S. since the financial crisis and was deepened by the flash crash of May 2010. While the solution isn’t necessarily public ownership of exchanges, he said a closer look at the existing regulation could help make markets less complicated.
“Some of the things that an exchange does are in a way a utility function,” Schanke said.
The fund in June said it supported Brad Katsuyama’s IEX Group Inc. exchange because it allows “all players to participate on the same terms.”
IEX, which the wealth fund uses for both direct and indirect trades, doesn’t pay firms to buy or sell shares, shunning a practice that many markets use to lure business from high-speed traders. It mandates a 350-microsecond delay between requests to trade and executions to prevent traders from pre-empting their moves through high-frequency maneuvers.
Photographer: Chris Goodney/Bloomberg
Norway's $860 billion sovereign wealth fund in June said it supported Brad Katsuyama's...Read More
IEX, made famous in Michael Lewis’s best-selling book “Flash Boys” could shield investors from the predatory habits of high-frequency traders, the fund said then.
What the fund needs is a way to make large trades without impacting the markets, something that Schanke said is easier to do in Europe, where rules are more relaxed.
“Trying to find liquidity without having an impact when you’re doing it is an over-arching challenge we will always have,” he said.
