BERNALILLO, N.M., April 4 (UPI) — Some residents of a New Mexico town said they were angered by an April Fools‘ prank using a fake city newsletter to tell them they would be microchipped.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at UPI Odd News
By The Huffington Post News Editors
In what might be the funniest, fake murder April Fools‘ fail ever, a Tennessee woman triggered a police response after she attempted to trick her sister into thinking she had killed her husband.
“I was doing an April Fools‘ Joke,” Susan Tammy Hudson, 52, told WKPT 19. “I said, ‘Helen, I shot my husband, I’m cleaning up the mess, let’s go bury him in Blackwater.'”
The joke worked a little too well, however, and a relative ended up calling the Kingsport Police Department.
By Arjun Sreekumar, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
Chesapeake Energy‘s Aubrey McClendon is no longer the company’s CEO. He left on April 1 and it was no April Fools‘ joke.
Now the inevitable question: Who will replace the man who founded and led Chesapeake through both the good times and bad?
Chesapeake’s temporary chief
In a statement released on Friday, Chesapeake said that Steve Dixon, the company’s chief operating officer, will serve as acting CEO until a permanent replacement is selected.
Dixon, who joined Chesapeake back in 1991, has held various senior positions at the company. His tenure culminated with his appointment as executive vice president and chief operating officer – positions he has served since 2006.
Chesapeake’s board has also established a three-man “office of the chairman,” which includes Dixon, as well as Archie Dunham, who currently serves as non-executive chairman of the board, and Domenic Dell’Osso, the company’s chief financial officer.
The members of this three-person team have been intimately involved in planning the CEO transition process, as highlighted in Chesapeake’s succession plan. They are “working closely to transition oversight of strategic, operational, and financial matters as well as certain day-to-day management responsibilities” from McClendon to whoever replaces him.
Could shares pop with announcement of new CEO?
The appointment of a new CEO is a huge deal for Chesapeake. One of the major reasons the company’s shares were so depressed last year was because of investors’ mistrust of McClendon – a stigma traders affectionately termed the “Aubrey discount.”
Since the company announced in late January that McClendon would be departing as CEO, shares are up a little over 7%. The next catalyst to drive them higher will almost certainly be the appointment of a capable and experienced CEO whose management style should be – ironically – a world apart from McClendon’s, at least when it comes to taking risks.
Though McClendon helped Chesapeake accumulate several choice oil and gas properties, he also oversaw the company’s detour into an abyss of debt – liabilities that threaten its future even to this day. If the new CEO is one with a proven track record of fiscal discipline – and can convince the markets that he or she will help turn the company’s worrying debt situation around – then shares are likely to pop.
If, on the other hand, the new CEO turns out to be a close pal of McClendon’s, or leads investors to believe that nothing fundamental has changed about Chesapeake’s management style, then shares are likely to decline.
In my view, it would probably be better for the company to appoint someone as far removed from McClendon’s personal life as possible, especially considering the outrage his close friend and Chesapeake co-founder Tom Ward has aroused over his management practices at SandRidge Energy.
Final thoughts
Chesapeake had reportedly been in talks with one promising candidate but those apparently fizzled out. As it stands, the company hasn’t singled out any particular individual as a frontrunner …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
By Dan Newman, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
While a large portion of the investing world has dismissed technical analysis, a new study shows that the method may actually have some merit. Will those who think it silly to invest based on lines drawn on charts go down in history as 21st-century flat-worlders?
Reviewing the charts
With all its funny lingo, charts with more annotations than the Bible, and headache-inducing context, technical analysis is an easy target for critics. The Motley Fool itself poked fun at such investing theory in its latest April Fools’ joke, warning of a “triple top” of the S&P 500 . Note that the index’s triple-top pattern was brought up last year, and the S&P has gained more 10% so far this year. The joke also included the chart below, described thus: “Delinquency rates are slumping, bitcoin values are rising, and the gold-dollar differential reflects a bullish pullback near the sustainable tail end of the post-Ford administration secular bear market‘s final wave”:
True technical analysis looks for trading ranges where a stock‘s price seems to be supported or resisted, as well as where the momentum will take the price next. Its focus is on the supply and demand of a stock‘s shares, and as such, it tends to appeal to shorter-term traders rather than long-term investors.
Where charts lead returns
According to a study out of SUNY Albany that reviewed 10,000 portfolios’ returns since 1993, managers who used technical analysis had a slight yet statistically significant advantage. The portfolios said to employ technical analysis also had a greater variability of returns, but even so, the returns were generally higher. The findings and the impact on investing can be summed up by the authors’ chart:
Source: Smith, Faugere, and Wang, “Head and Shoulders Above the Rest? The Performance of Institutional Portfolio Managers Who Use Technical Analysis.”
For a dollar invested in 1993, technical-analysis-fueled portfolio managers would have returned more, especially during bear markets.
What about the individual investor?
So should you go buy the latest statistical software and begin crunching numbers on the latest moving averages crossed with the lunar calendar? The data from this study says yes. But realize that these technical portfolios also employed the strategies that have worked for the life of the stock market: fundamental analysis of the financial statements, future growth potential, low price-to-earnings ratios, and the direction of industries. Also, the individual investor will likely have higher transaction costs than large portfolios, which could easily eat into slightly higher returns.
Further, this is one study of many. The famous Eugene Fama‘s efficient-market hypothesis states that all relevant information is incorporated into stock prices, and therefore studying past prices can’t give you an edge. Fama published a study on technical-based trading that tracked the 30 Dow Jones Industrial Average stocks between 1956 and 1962 and found that a buy-and-hold strategy worked better for 28 of the Dow components.
Add in the fact that individuals can’t compete with the computing power …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
Today, the good news far outweighs the bad. However, the bad news might be so heartbreaking for some that it won’t matter how many GTA V embellishments or Borderlands 2 content we have to reveal. See, what most thought was only a farfetched April Fools joke yesterday, is now confirmed to be real. The voice of Snake himself, David Hayter, said, very matter of factly, that he won’t be reprising his role in the upcoming Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. “But, he’s been voicing Snake for 15 years! He’s the only Snake I know,” you say? Yes, you might feel this way, but allow today’s episode to offer you some insight on why exactly this shocking news has come to pass. Still upset? The comments below are yours to vent in.
By Evann Gastaldo 
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Civil War (tag)
WVEC
…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at AOL
Looks like Tim is hosting The Fix again. Or, is he? You’ll have to click the video to find out. And what happens when a developer decides to release a game on April Fool’s Day? The obvious – a lot of people believing none of it’s real. But, we promise all of the news mentioned in today’s Fix is in fact 100% real and requires no acts of suspicion. Of course, the key word here is “most”. It wouldn’t be April Fools without some fooling, right? Let’s see if you can decipher what is real versus what isn’t by leaving comment a below. Did I say I was in the process of buying myself a wombat? Because I am totally in the process of buying myself a wombat.
Here are the stories covered in today’s Daily Fix:
…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at IGN Movies
Filed under:
Happy April, everyone. And we all know what this first day of the month means: April Fools‘ Day. Today is a national holiday for pranksters with the Internet acting as a serious enabler, and it’s always fun to see what kind of vivid imaginations exist out there in the automotive world. The abundance of fake news gets a little old as the day rolls on, but we did manage to get in a few chuckles thanks to a handful of major automakers and automotive news outlets that got into the pranking spirit this year
Some of our favorites this year includes Subaru showing what happens when you combine a bunch of rumors, a Corvette some may have already thought was a joke or Honda providing some in-car innovation circa the late 1980s. Honestly, we’re still waiting for official confirmation from Mitsubishi that the recently introduced 2014 Mirage is an elaborate April Fools‘ joke using a failed design intended for the 1995 Geo Metro. We dug up as much “official” OEM foolishness we could find, as well as some of our other favorites, and posted them all below.
Continue reading Automotive April Fools’ joke roundup [w/videos]
Automotive April Fools’ joke roundup [w/videos] originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 01 Apr 2013 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Autoblog
Twitter is doing away with vowels, Google has a “smell button” and the cast of “Wings” is launching a Kickstarter campaign. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
By Rich Duprey, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
Google staff apparently had a lot of time on their hands recently as the search engine launched not just one April Fools‘ joke — you did remember today was April 1, right? — but sprung more than half a dozen on unwary searchers.
From treasure maps and bringing fiber to the pole to shutting down YouTube and SCHMICK — an extreme home makeover on Google Maps’ Street View — the search engine king launched a bevy of belly laughs.
Being led around by the nose
One jape in particular I caught the scent of was a new beta option called Nose that offered the potential to bring scratch-n-sniff technology to the Internet. It promised that by typing in keywords like “lemon” or “new car smell” you’d get taken to a special page where you could get a whiff of citrus or your car’s interior when you first bought it, though some aromas like “wet dog” might have you turning your nose up at the option. As Google put it, “smelling is believing.”
Leveraging a database of more than 15 million “scentibytes,” the search engine declared the search for smell was now as easy as clicking your mouse. Just like its Street View cars, Google’s Street Sense mobile aroma indexing vehicles inhaled and cataloged millions of atmospheric miles.
The notion smelled good to me. Unfortunately, it was an April Fools‘ joke. It really stinks that despite decades of research, smell-o-vision isn’t yet a reality.
Others jokes among the plethora of pranks Google pulled include adding emoticons to photos, Google Analytics reporting 41visits (4/1, or April 1) to websites from the International Space Station, Gmail Blue, and the Levity Algorithm.
Use the comments section below to let your fellow Fools know which Google jokes had you going on this most Foolish day of the year.
The article Google Has a “Nose” for Good April Fools’ Pranks originally appeared on Fool.com.
Fool contributor Rich Duprey owns shares of Apple. The Motley Fool recommends Apple and Google. The Motley Fool owns shares of Apple and Google. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Copyright © 1995 – 2013 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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By Christopher Helman, Forbes Staff
It’s not an April Fools gag. Aubrey McClendon really is gone from Chesapeake Energy. In a tear-choked farewell speech to the gathered faithful on Saturday, McClendon assured employees that the company he founded would survive his departure. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
The first day of April is always a traditional time for pranks and puns, and astronomers and scientists aren’t above an April Fools‘ Day shenanigan or two. Hey, I gotta admit, as a freelance science journalist, even my radar will be up tomorrow as I’m sure that someone will try to slide some wowzers by the credulous media, as they always have in the past. If the aliens wanted to conquer the Earth it’s wide open to ’em on April 1st, I’m just sayin’. Who would believe the tweets were for real, as they landed ray guns ablaze on the White House lawn? Trust us; you won’t see such April Fools‘ hi-jinks from Universe Today. If you read it here, the alien invasion is for real, and you can begin stockpiling food and ammo appropriately in the best tradition of Falling Skies. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
By The Huffington Post News Editors
We wish we could tell you the red coloring in Swedish Fish was a sign of lots of antioxidants or that a glass of wine counted as a serving of fruit. But we know you’d catch our April Fools‘ joke right off the bat.
Instead, this April Fools‘ Day, we’re lifting the curtain on some other pranksters. While plenty of junk foods aren’t fooling anyone — everybody knows a bunch of sugar, gelatin and preservatives, for instance, doesn’t have much to offer when it comes to nutritional value — there are a number of other tricksy foods masquerading as beneficial bounty. Oatmeal? Granola? VitaminWater? The jig is up!
Check out the 12 jokesters below, then let us know in the comments what other foods are trying to trick you into thinking they have something nutritious to offer. Happy April Fools‘ Day!
Read More…
More on Diet And Nutrition
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