BETWEEN THE HEDGES: Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:

It Was the Best Week for Stocks in a Year. It always looks inevitable in retrospect. Why wouldn’t U.S. stocks rally, surging to the biggest weekly gain in a year, amid earnings euphoria like this? With no hint of fatigue, the S&P 500 Index spent the holiday-shortened week rolling past 2,700, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped over 25,000. Ninety-eight companies in the Nasdaq 100 rose. It happened as Wall Street stock analysts were jacking up profit forecasts. So fast that a measure tracking the frequency of upward earnings revisions to downward hit the highest level since 2011. The result was the best start to a year for the S&P 500 since 1999.

Trump Warns Democrats Again: No Mexican Border Wall, No DACA. President Donald Trump said Congress should enact a measure to provide legal status to young, undocumented immigrants, provided other proposals, including funding for a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico, are also adopted -- a compromise Democratic lawmakers have already rejected.

Cohen to Manage Outside Money Under Point72 Asset Management. When Steve Cohen takes in outside capital later this quarter, he’ll be doing so under the name Point72 Asset Management. Point72 was the entity created four years ago that housed Cohen’s family office when he returned client capital, after his former hedge fund firm SAC Capital Advisors pleaded guilty to securities fraud and paid a record $1.8 billion fine to settle a seven-year federal insider-trading probe.

Wall Street Journal:

Trial Over Theft of Wind Technology Spotlights U.S.-China Tensions. American Superconductor says Sinovel stole source code for turbine software.

Pfizer Ends Hunt for Drugs to Treat Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. About 300 layoffs to take place after once-promising compounds failed during testing.

In Praise of Hierarchy. Established, traditional order is under assault from freewheeling, networked disrupters as never before. But society craves centralized leadership, too.