Forbes: Templar History Shows Leaders High On Power Get Toppled

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Business chiefs listen up, especially in the world of big tech where egos are becoming rather inflated.

There's a vital message for those who get too powerful tucked into a new book: One day you'll draw the ire of someone more powerful, and they will attempt to destroy you.

The caution, although not explicit, comes in the epic story of the warrior monks known as the Knights Templar whose activities have given rise to much speculation and theories, some reasonable and some absurd.

Expert history writer Dan Jones digs deep for the facts and chronicles their history in his recently published book The Templars: The Rise and Fall of God's Holy Warriors. It is published by Viking in the U.S., and by Head of Zeus in the U.K. Read more here.

Forbes: How To Profit From "The Swamp"

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Ouch! Things aren't going quite as planned in the Capitol. But nevermind, there is a silver lining to the cloud, from which you can profit.

The issue is that so far President Trump hasn't "drained the swamp" of Washington D.C.'s ways, as he promised to do so. But you can take full advantage of the lack of reform by making some money for yourself. It is perfectly legal and relatively simple. Read more here.

Photo by James Morden on Unsplash

Constable Confidential: Speaking at Middle East Monitor Saudi Arabia Conference

Crisis in Saudi Arabia: War, Succession and the Future

Sat 18 November 2017

09:30 – 17:00 GMT

183 Euston Road, Bloomsbury

NW1 2BE

London

Sign up here.

Barron's: 3 Reasons Oil Prices Are Headed Higher

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Get ready for a surge in oil prices.

Three reasons point to substantially higher prices over the next few months, even though West Texas Intermediate crude already has rallied to a two-year high above $57 a barrel. One way to play the possibility that petroleum powers toward $90 would be to buy March-dated futures contracts for light sweet crude on the CME. Alternatively, try the United States Oil (ticker: USO) exchange-traded fund, which tracks near-term futures prices for crude. Read more here. 

Photo by David Thielen on Unsplash

Forbes: Ukraine's Famine Shows Deadly Socialism At Its Core

By SIMON CONSTABLE

One hundred years after the communist revolution of 1917, and how quickly we forget the horrors of the past.

A case in point is the third of millennials who support socialism, according to a recent survey from Harvard. These young people may not have forgotten just how bad such a centrally planned society is, probably because they never knew. But that's ok because a recently published book should help enlighten them.

Anne Applebaum's Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine describes in gruesome detail the plight of Ukrainians under the Soviet system starting in 1917. She then takes us through the 1920s to the famine of 1933 when an estimated 4.5 million, or more than one-in-10 of Ukraine's population, died directly and indirectly as a result of the catastrophe. Most of the deaths from the famine of 1933 came in the first half of the year, according to research cited in the book. Read more here.

U.S. News: Which Companies Spend the Most on Lobbyists?

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Can a company’s efforts in lobbying pay off on Wall Street? It sounds too easy of an idea, but there may be some basis in fact. In 2014, a team of researchers from Vanderbilt, Wake Forest and the University of Zurich drew a correlation between the amount of money spent on lobbying and market performance, outperforming their peers by 5.5 percent over a three-year period. Using data provided by OpenSecrets.com, here are the 10 publicly traded companies spending the most on lobbying in 2017. Read more here.

WSJ: How to Measure ETF Spreads

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Investors don’t always pay attention to bid-ask spreads. And those who do may find that comparing spreads between different exchange-traded funds can get tricky.

In essence, the bid-ask spread is the difference between the highest price that a market maker is willing to pay for an asset and the lowest price a market maker is willing to accept to sell it. The wider the spread, the more it costs investors for a round-trip trade—that is, to buy an asset and then sell it again. Read more here.