IMF Chief: Closing The Gender Gap Makes Economic Sense

The International Monetary Fund on Monday released a new report on women in the workplace, which suggested that closing the gender equality gap and leveling the employment playing field would benefit not just women, but the global economy as a whole.

Christine Lagarde, the first-ever woman to serve as managing director of the IMF, joined Huffington Post Editor-In-Chief Arianna Huffington on HuffPost Live Monday to discuss how gender equality is an economic principle, not just a concept of female empowerment.

So why is it so hard for companies and governments to promote gender equality?

"It's change in process, and change is always painful," Lagarde said. "It's much more comfortable to stay within your comfort zone, to do things the way they were done."

Lagarde said we need to "accept that innovation can actually be profitable as a whole."

To hear more about the new report, watch the full HuffPost Live clip in the video above.

Walmart Gives 500,000 Workers A Raise

Walmart said Thursday that it will give about 500,000 workers a pay bump.

Minimum hourly wages will increase in April to about $9, a $1.75 increase above the federal minimum wage, the retail behemoth said in an earnings release. By February 2016, current employees will earn at least $10 an hour, it said.

More from the release:

Approximately 500,000 full-time and part-time associates at Walmart U.S. stores and Sam's Clubs will receive pay raises in the first half of the current fiscal year. Current and future associates will benefit from this initiative, which ensures that Walmart hourly associates earn at least $1.75 above today's federal minimum wage, or $9.00 per hour, in April. The following year, by Feb. 1, 2016, current associates will earn at least $10.00 per hour.

This story is developing...

Here's Proof You Don't Have To Sacrifice Sleep To Succeed

It's rare to get a company-wide email from your boss reminding you to sleep. But that’s exactly what happened last week to the employees at Lightspan Digital, a Chicago-based digital marketing agency.

Mana Ionescu, the president of the company, is a big fan of shut-eye and a devotee of celebrity fitness trainer Jillian Michaels. So when Michaels sent a message to her followers extolling the benefits of a good night’s sleep, Ionescu, 37, forwarded it along to her staff.

“I’m a huge advocate for sleep, and I prioritize it the same way I would prioritize going to the gym and seeing my friends,” said Ionescu, who aims for eight hours a night but estimates she gets closer to seven. “It’s so hard because it’s the thing that seems the easiest to sacrifice.”

Ionescu said she’s even been called lazy and weak after expressing her views about sleep. It’s easy to see why -- the American work culture seems to give more value to people who grind away at their jobs at the expense of sleep.

The business leaders who say they get by on very little sleep, such as Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne and Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi, seem to get a lot more airtime than those who say the opposite. Everywhere are headlines about “19 Successful People Who Barely Sleep,” “Do history's greatest figures owe their success to sleeping LESS?” and “The secret of success: Needing less sleep?”

But sacrificing sleep could be hurting more than just the executives in need of a good night’s rest. When people don’t sleep, they don’t function at their highest levels, research shows. In a work context, that means missing opportunities to make money. American companies are losing $63.2 billion a year due to sleep deprivation, according to a 2013 study from Harvard Medical School.

That may be why a growing number of bosses, like Ionescu, are waking up (pun intended) to this reality and extolling the virtues of a decent night’s sleep. In the most prominent recent example, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told ABC News earlier this month that he sleeps on average eight hours a night. Other renowned business leaders including Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg have told interviewers in recent years they’ve realized the value in getting a good night’s sleep if they want to operate at their highest levels.

These leaders follow in the footsteps of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who have been bragging about their eight hours of rest a night at least since 1999, when they discussed their sleep habits with a Wall Street Journal reporter.

More and more research indicates that they’re taking the correct approach. Bosses can get mean and workers less productive when they don’t get a good night's sleep, according to one recent study. Sleep is such an important predictor of the ability to get our jobs done well that getting one extra hour a night can increase wages by 16 percent a year on average, according to a study by economics graduate students at the University of California at San Diego. That’s more than the boost from an extra year of education.

“Sleep is as important as water and food,” said Pat Byrne, the founder of Fatigue Science, a company that works with athletes and companies to help them use sleep to increase performance. But many people struggle to prioritize it.

It’s hard for people who sleep very little each night to detect the consequences, Byrne said, because after a while their bodies “re-norm” so they can continue to go through the motions during the day, even while they’re getting just four or five hours of sleep a night. But that doesn't mean the sleep-deprived person is functioning as well as he or she could be.

“It’s very insidious in that it creeps up on you,” Byrne said of the effects of a prolonged lack of sleep. That dynamic may explain why executives and others think they’re operating just fine on a prolonged lack of sleep.

Of course not everyone has the luxury of a good night’s sleep. Parents of young children and people scraping by on multiple jobs may find it difficult to get eight hours a night. But why is it so common for some of the most powerful people in the world to deprive themselves?

“One common approach to sleep is ‘I’m too dedicated to my job and too important to spend my time sleeping,’” said Christopher Barnes, a management professor at University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. Barnes’ research finds that when bosses get less sleep, they’re meaner to their employees, who end up disengaging from their work as a result.

“They might be partially correct, they might be doing really important stuff, but they might not be appreciating the fact that if they’re not getting enough sleep,” they’re probably not at their highest level, Barnes said.

Sabrina Parsons, the CEO of Palo Alto software, has a more blunt term for business leaders’ tendency to claim they survive on just a few hours of sleep a night: “Bravado bragging.” Parsons’ experience raising three young children taught her that functioning normally on a few hours of sleep a night is nearly impossible.

Now, Parsons tries to get seven or eight hours every night. She encourages her 55 employees to do the same, and to take breaks during the day to exercise or do other activities if they’re feeling sluggish.

She does this to keep workers from getting burned out -- and also to “call bullshit on everybody else” who claims to do their job well despite being sleep-deprived.

“I don’t think you really have someone who sleeps four hours every night for months and months and years and years, who is a functional person,” she said. “You’re not doing that, and if you are, then you’re not being productive.”

Volkswagen Might Have Found A Fix For America's Youth Unemployment Problem

Amy Mitchum loves the way her daughter’s kindergarten classmates’ eyes light up when she tells them she works with robots.

The 38-year-old Volkswagen factory worker is a graduate of the automaker’s experimental apprenticeship program, modeled on the vocational training used to educate workers in Germany. In 2012 she left an unfulfilling career in real estate office management and enrolled in the Chattanooga, Tennessee-based Volkswagen Academy's three-year course.

She completed her training in August and now spends her workday overseeing an assembly line of spindly robots coating glossy paint onto the tempered-steel shells of what will ultimately become Passat sedans.

“When I tell the little kids I work on robots, they think that’s the coolest thing in the world,” Mitchum told The Huffington Post. “I go in the classroom once a month to and spend the day, and I wear my Volkswagen shirt.”

Mitchum is among the first wave of U.S. workers to graduate from Volkswagen's five-year-old, learn-on-the-job program, which operates in partnership with Chattanooga State Community College. Hoping its experiment can serve as a new paradigm for American workers, the German automaker pays a wage throughout the education -- starting at $10 an hour and increasing $1 for each completed semester -- and offers jobs to graduates.

Of the 25 who have completed the program so far, all but two now work at the Chattanooga plant: One opted for a job elsewhere; the other has a position reserved for him when he finishes the classes he is taking outside Volkswagen’s program.

Apprentices spend a portion of their education in classrooms, and the rest getting hands-on training on the factory floor.

Apprenticeship programs in the United States dropped 40 percent from 2003 to 2013, in part because of their blue-collar image and fear among businesses that workers will leave company-sponsored programs after getting their education, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis.

But the skills learned during such programs are crucial, and the demand for adequately trained workers is real. The U.S. manufacturing sector couldn't fill 600,000 jobs in 2012 due to a lack of skilled workers, according to a study by consulting firm Deloitte LLP.

Volkswagen is now ramping up marketing for its apprenticeship program and proselytizing the benefits of this approach to learning. Company executives crisscross the U.S., calling on leaders to advocate for apprenticeships as a means of educating more American youths, whose unemployment rate stood last month at 12.2 percent, more than double the national average.

“Right now we’re in a situation where, on the one hand, we have these high levels of youth unemployment and on the other hand, we have employers saying we can’t hire the people we need to hire,” Sarah Ayres-Steinberg, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Center for American Progress. “Clearly there’s some friction in the labor market -- and apprenticeship eliminates that friction.”

In Germany -- a country known for worker-friendly practices -- apprenticeships are part of the school system. Between the ages of 12 and 14, students choose between two educational paths: One is a vocational apprenticeship, the other leads to university. Labor unions, chambers of commerce and industry groups help determine the learning criteria for apprentices, to make sure they leave school with the skills needed to enter the workforce.

Just this week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon praised Germany’s apprenticeship programs for training students to get jobs out of school. Last December, the youth unemployment rate in that country was 7.2 percent, though standards for measuring unemployment rates vary from country to to country.

Volkswagen isn’t alone in trying to import Germany’s apprenticeship model. BMW and engineering giant Bosch, both German companies, have started similar programs at plants in South Carolina, where there is a state program encouraging apprenticeship.

But there are challenges to implementing U.S. versions of Germany's programs. Volkswagen has had a particularly tough time convincing parents that an apprenticeship is an adequate alternative to college.

A college degree generally translates to making more money. A recent study found that college grads can earn about $800,000 more than those with just high school degrees. But college isn't for everyone, and in a competitive job market, an apprenticeship may be a decent option.

“There is a negative attitude and a common behavior that everyone has to go to a college or a university instead of running to a vocational training or an apprenticeship,” Sebastian Patta, Volkswagen of Chattanooga’s vice president of human resources, told HuffPost in his thick German accent.

People, Patta said, have misconceptions about Volkswagen's factory floors. “They think it’s dirty, it’s dark, it’s loud, it’s crazy -- it’s a completely wrong picture," he said of the factory in Chattanooga. In reality, he added, the place is pristinely clean.

Apprenticeships could also make workers feel good about themselves. The sense of pride instilled in people paid to learn a trade boosts morale, says Robert Lerman, an American University economics professor who specializes in youth employment and family structure.

“These systems tend to convey a strong sense of occupational pride that too many of our middle-skilled positions don’t,” he told HuffPost. “They don’t have a strong sense that they’re part of a community of practice, and as a result, they don’t get sufficient respect or feel self-respect.”

Former Hooters Waitress Proves You Don't Need A Harvard MBA To Be A Successful Leader

NEW YORK -- The lobby of the Ace Hotel was bustling on a recent Monday afternoon. Twenty- and 30-somethings in scarves, chunky sweaters and jeans typed at laptops and huddled around French-press coffeepots at communal tables.

Not the typical hangout of a corporate executive. But then Kat Cole -- the former Hooters waitress who in 2011 became president of Cinnabon, Inc. -- is not the typical corporate executive. And that may be the key to her success.

In blue jeans, boots and a black top, Cole, 36, blended so well into the Ace Hotel’s hipster hive that she was difficult to spot. She was in New York promoting Cinnabon’s starring role in the pilot of AMC's eagerly anticipated “Breaking Bad” spinoff, “Better Call Saul.”

Cinnabon gave away mini-bons Monday in honor of the brand's appearance on the show.

A week earlier, after four years running Cinnabon, Cole had been given a bigger job, overseeing licensing, manufacturing and e-commerce at Focus Brands -- the company that owns Cinnabon and other chains.

She’s come a long way in a short time, and took an unusual route to get there. She started her career as a teenage waitress at Hooters. By age 20, she had dropped out of college and at age 26 she became a vice president at the wing chain. Cole eventually earned her MBA at Georgia State University, graduating shortly after she started at Cinnabon as the company's chief operating officer in 2010. But today she’s still a rarity in the highest echelons of corporate America, which are largely populated by middle-aged white men, many of whom have elite degrees.

This atypical career path has not hurt Cole. In a lot of ways, it seems to have helped. Cole thinks her background has made it easier for her to find solutions that somebody with a classic pedigree might have overlooked. And her experience has taught her that any one of her employees is worth consulting -- because, who knows? They too could be corporate-executive material.

Cole at an event in 2013.

“When you’re not used to having doors opened for you," Cole told The Huffington Post, "you will do things and have meetings with people and spend your time in places that maybe someone with a more traditional path would think is too small or not deserving of their time or their energy."

Cole said she has developed a “really tough skin,” a quality that she credits with helping her handle failure more constructively.

“When you have people who question why you are where you are, or who treat you very differently, as if you don’t deserve to be there because you’re young, or female, or in my case, a Hooters girl, it’s really interesting the muscle that that builds,” she said. “You have to develop that over time to not be totally shaken every time you walk into a boardroom, or every time someone is an asshole.”

Research suggests that traditional backgrounds don’t always help corporate leaders succeed. For example, CEOs with Ivy League degrees do no better than other CEOs when it comes to things like stock performance and profitability, according to a study from Brian Bolton, a finance professor at Portland State University’s School of Business.

Still, boards seem to love hiring alums of elite schools. Fifteen percent of CEOs at the nation’s 1,500 largest companies in 2012 had at least one degree from Harvard, according to Bolton’s research. More than one-fourth of the CEOs in the sample with MBAs got them at Harvard. And Bolton estimates that only 3 or 4 percent of CEOs lack a college degree. Less than 2 percent of the CEOs in the sample were women.

“It’s hard for boards or for executives to hire unknowns,” Bolton told HuffPost. “They default to what’s safe, and hiring an MBA from Harvard is safe. It’s going to be accepted by stockholders and employees.”

But if Cole’s success is any indication, the safe option may not always be the best one.

Cole took the reins of Cinnabon four years ago during what she calls a “really shitty” time. The sluggish economy was keeping people away from the malls and airports that are Cinnabon’s typical environs.

Her plan to turn the company around involved reaching out to others for partnerships -- a tactic she believes was heavily influenced by her background. She speculates that leaders with a more typical pedigree might have been less willing to look outside the company for help.

Cole approached it differently. She and her team pitched packaged-good companies and other fast-food chains on the idea of working together to create a line of Cinnabon-branded products, such as Cinnabon-flavored Green Mountain coffee, Cinnabon Air Wick and Cinnabon Vodka. (And in some cases the companies came to Cinnabon as well).

It worked. Sales of those products grew to more than $1 billion by 2013, and now they make up about 75 percent of Cinnabon’s total global product sales.

“We had this serious humility -- we weren’t too good for anything,” Cole said. “I’ve seen other leaders not be that scrappy and take much longer and spend a lot more money trying to turn something around.”

It turned out to be a trendsetting approach. Darren Tristano, executive vice president at the market research firm Technomic, said he expects McDonald’s and other chains to get more branded products into grocery stores down the line.

“That’s something we’re going to see a lot of,” Tristano said.

Cole’s experience has also given her a healthy respect for the rank-and-file worker. When she took over Cinnabon, instead of shelling out for consumer research, she spent 60 days visiting franchises all over the country, meeting with owners and workers, making Cinnabons and ringing up customers to get a feel for what the company needed.

“It hasn’t been that long since I’ve been that hourly employee," Cole told HuffPost. "I remember that people doing the work every day are the ones who really know what the answers are."

Cole’s days as a server are so fresh in her mind that it still hits a nerve when she sees a customer treating one poorly. She recalled an incident a few years ago, in the same Ace Hotel lobby, when a man sitting next to her berated a waitress for not bringing sugar with his coffee.

“As I was watching her and sitting so close, I just remembered it. I remember people yelling at me, I remember people being unnecessarily disrespectful and looking at me -- because I was in orange shorts, serving chicken wings -- like I was the scum of the earth,” Cole said, sipping coffee about a foot away from where the incident took place.

Cole said she scolded the man and gave the waitress “the biggest tip I think I’ve ever given in my life,” in the hope that it would encourage her to stay positive.

As her career advanced, more and more people began asking Cole to speak about her history, which included watching her mother feed her and her siblings on just $10 a week for three years after she divorced Cole's father who was an alcoholic at the time. A year or so ago, Cole, wary of overexposure, briefly considered taking a break from talking to the media. Then a mentor criticized her for not using her platform to inspire others. That mentor died just weeks after giving Cole that piece of advice.

Other executives may want to embrace aspects of their past that don’t fit the CEO stereotype, Cole said. She suggested that her story may not actually be that unique.

“A lot of executives were waitresses and bartenders and hostesses, but they don’t connect those things” to the success they’re having now, said Cole.

Raising her hand slightly above her head, she added, “It’s like they have to stay so up here."

Rush Of Obamacare Enrollees Expected Before Sunday Deadline

With only a few days remaining in the second-ever Obamacare sign-up season, the White House, insurance companies and enrollment workers expect a big rush as Americans hurry to get health coverage.

“Consumers should consider Feb. 15 as their last opportunity to get coverage,” said Andrew Slavitt, principal deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, during a conference call with reporters Wednesday. “Interest in signing up for coverage in the final week of open enrollment is beginning to increase,” he noted.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is the federal agency that oversees enrollment under Obamacare.

In the weeks leading up to the deadline, federal and state officials, the insurance industry and enrollment workers around the country have stepped up their outreach, marketing and assistance activities. They expect a wave of new sign-ups in the final days, as happened when the first Obamacare enrollment period wound down last April. Traffic to HealthCare.gov was 58 percent higher Wednesday than a week before, and calls to the hotline have increased 37 percent, Slavitt said.

“People are going to perk up and people are going to start paying attention close to those deadlines,” said John Gilbert, national field director for Enroll America, a Washington-based nonprofit that organizes sign-up campaigns.

After this Sunday's deadline, the next open enrollment period for private health insurance sold on the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges won’t begin until October. Anyone who starts an application prior to the Feb. 15 deadline will have time to complete it, Slavitt said. In addition, people can access the insurance exchanges during the year if their life circumstances change -- if they get married, for instance, or have a baby. Plus, there is no deadline for enrolling in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

The second Obamacare sign-up period has gone considerably more smoothly than the first, which launched with a thud in October 2013 amid confusion and near-catastrophic technological failures of HealthCare.gov and the websites of several state-run exchanges. The websites have been running much better this year, and the numbers of enrollees reflects that and the greater public awareness of the Affordable Care Act.

“In every respect, this is working not just as intended but better than intended,” President Barack Obama said at the White House last week. “I want everybody to get on HealthCare.gov. Find out what options are available to you in your state and in your community.”

The president may be overstating the case for his signature program, but round two of Obamacare is going much better from the perspective of those seeking to enroll people. “Certainly, it is much improved from last year,” said Kurt Kossen, vice president for retail markets at Chicago-based Health Care Service Corp., which operates Blue Cross and Blue Shield health insurance plans in Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.

Since this year’s sign-up period began on Nov. 15, almost 10 million people have enrolled in private health insurance plans selected via the exchanges. Those include the 37 sites run by the federal government via HealthCare.gov and the 14 operated by states and the District of Columbia, like Covered California and Your Health Idaho. About 3 million of those customers were new to the online marketplaces, and the remainder were individuals with exchange policies last year who had renewed, the Department of Health and Human Services reported last month.

If the last sign-up period is any guide, those numbers could jump after Feb. 15. Forty-seven percent of the 8 million people who enrolled for 2014 coverage did so during the final month of the campaign. Enrollments for 2015 already surged shortly before Dec. 15, which was the final day to choose a plan that would be in place at the beginning of this year.

More than 1,400 enrollment events are scheduled for the final two weeks of the sign-up period, according to HHS. Officials, workers and volunteers are stressing the availability of both health coverage and financial assistance for low- and moderate-income families.

People wait at the Baltimore Convention Center to enroll in health coverage this past Saturday. (Photo: Jeffrey Young/The Huffington Post)

Enroll America and its partner organizations arranged 1,110 events in 109 cities across 11 states in the three weeks leading up to Feb. 15, Gilbert said. The group’s “Countdown to Get Covered” bus tour will hit Alabama, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina in the final days, he said.

Health insurance companies also are gearing up for the deadline. Health Care Service Corp. ramped up its TV advertising in the middle of January, said Kossen. The company’s on-the-ground outreach includes mobile assistance centers across its home territory, like the “Destination Blue” recreational vehicle visiting numerous towns in Texas.

“We’re just starting to see indications of increased activity starting to come in, especially at our community events over the weekend,” Kossen said. “We anticipate seeing increased activity throughout the remainder of the week.”

An enrollment event in Baltimore on Saturday attracted more than 300 people looking for help. Some waited hours at the city’s convention center for an opportunity to sit down with one of 40-some enrollment counselors from HealthCare Access Maryland, which ran the six-hour event.

“It’s been very quiet and it’s been steadily busy,” Kathleen Westcoat, president and CEO of HealthCare Access Maryland, said of this year’s sign-up campaign. “We are seeing more people towards the end of enrollment period trying to enroll.”

The turnaround in Maryland since the last time may be even more striking than the improvements to HealthCare.gov. The Maryland Health Connection website was worse than HealthCare.gov, leading the state to scrap its system and use technology from Access Health CT, Connecticut’s exchange. As of Feb. 4, almost 101,000 people had signed up for private insurance for 2015 on Maryland’s exchange, 20,000 more than the number who enrolled for 2014 coverage.

Baltimore resident Harold Waters, 56, joined those ranks Saturday, when he spent more than two hours at the convention center getting help in choosing a subsidized insurance policy from Kaiser Permanente. The policy will cost Waters $74 a month because of tax credits that reduced its price from $434.

Melinda Jones and Harold Waters attended a health insurance enrollment event at the Baltimore Convention Center on Saturday. (Photo: Jeffrey Young/The Huffington Post)

Waters has been unemployed and uninsured since he was laid off as a grocery store manager in July. He suffered a minor stroke after that and was fortunate that Kaiser Permanente offered him a deep discount on his medical treatments, charging him only $962 of the more than $3,000 he owed. “I’ll be able to go see a doctor now,” he said.

Without insurance, Waters was afraid to run up medical bills, said his partner, Melinda Jones, 59.

“I have to scream at him to get him to go to the doctor, because he won’t go. ‘I don’t have any insurance. I don’t have any insurance.’ I don’t want to hear it!” Jones said. “If he dies on me, I’m digging him up and killing him again.”

Apple To Power New Headquarters With Solar Energy

Apple is going green in a big way.

CEO Tim Cook said Tuesday that the company would power its new corporate headquarters with energy from a 2,900-acre solar farm being built by First Solar. Apple committed $848 million to the solar project, which was approved for construction last month.

“We know at Apple that climate change is real,” Cook said at the Goldman Sachs’ 2015 technology conference in San Francisco, according to 9to5Mac. “The time for talk is past and the time for action is now.”

Apple spokesman Chris Gaither confirmed Cook's comments.

Steve Krum, a spokesman for the solar panel maker, also confirmed the partnership, telling The Huffington Post that Apple is "contracted to buy electricity from a plant that we are developing and building to power their new headquarters and data center.”

The iPhone maker is currently building its new, doughnut-shaped home base in Cupertino, California. When construction wraps next year, the headquarters will draw electricity from First Solar's California Flats Solar Project, slated to be complete by the end of 2016. Apple agreed to a 25-year contract with the company, making it the solar industry’s largest-ever commercial power deal, according to First Solar.

A drone video of Apple's new headquarters, currently under construction.

“Apple is leading the way in addressing climate change by showing how large companies can serve their operations with 100 percent clean, renewable energy,” Joe Kishkill, the chief commercial officer at First Solar, said in a statement sent to HuffPost. “Apple’s commitment was instrumental in making this project possible and will significantly increase the supply of solar power in California.”

Apple will use the majority of the Cholame, California, farm's electrical output, and the remaining energy will be sold to the power company Pacific Gas & Electric.

Environmental group Greenpeace praised Apple's move.

"Apple still has a lot of work to do to reduce its environmental footprint, but other Fortune 500 CEOs would be well served to make a study of Tim Cook, whose actions show that he intends to take Apple full-speed ahead toward renewable energy with the urgency that our climate crisis demands," Gary Cook, the group's senior IT sector analyst, said in a statement.

Apple's stock price closed at $122.02 on Tuesday, giving the company a market value of more than $700 billion -- making it the first U.S. company in history to reach that mark.

Meet The Man Who Wants To Build The ESPN Of Finance

Keith McCullough is nothing if not committed. “For better or worse, I’ll die here,” he says in reference to Hedgeye Risk Management, the independent investment research firm he founded in 2008. "Sink or swim, that’s what we have."

McCullough sees himself as fighting for the little guy over entrenched interests. He tends to describe his Stamford, Connecticut-based firm, which sells investment advice to institutions and individuals, in antagonistic terms: against traditional Wall Street research, against financial media, against pretty much every market pundit.

In turn, McCullough attracts antagonism. A former hedge fund manager, he is largely known in certain segments of the financial media for his social media feuds with certain segments of the financial media: CNBC’s Jim Cramer and Steve Liesman, their former colleague Ron Insana, blog ZeroHedge, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal, hedge fund manager Doug Kass and prospective-customer-turned-critic Carmine Pirone, to name a few. (The fight with Pirone escalated to the point where McCullough sued him for defamation.)

Through it all, McCullough has been called a self-promoter, a fraud, a charlatan and the P.T. Barnum of finance. But he's convinced that he's right, and that his critics are some combination of dead wrong and jealous.

It's that conviction -- along with McCullough’s frustration with CNBC, where he used to be a frequent guest -- that led him to focus on building his own ways to “tell the truth first in the most efficient formats.”

Hedgeye now has an online video channel aimed at individual investors, and has hired producers away from CNBC to run it. An outgrowth of work the company has been doing since 2010, the videos' combination of mass-audience appeal and high-level sources, McCullough says, “is our ESPN’ing of finance.”

The Hedgeye CEO likens the company's approach to that of Fox football commentator and former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman, who explains strategy on camera for a mass audience, then in the privacy of the locker room assumes the role of confidant and mentor to current players.

“I think what I have is more that pro-to-pro, buy it or sell it” dialogue with institutional clients, McCullough told The Huffington Post.

Polemics are part of the furniture at Hedgeye. Though much of the office looks like standard-issue Connecticut finance -- where young men in dress shirts and Vineyard Vines fleece vests sit at white desks and stare at multiple monitors -- the space also includes a Republican-themed conference room complete with club chairs, a cowhide ottoman, an antler chandelier, a silver-plated AK-47 table lamp and portraits of GOP leaders from Lincoln to Nixon. (There's a Democrat room as well.)

The tone of the firm's analysis is brash and conversational. The morning research note is probably alone in the industry in combining Bayesian analysis, hashtags like #globalslowing and #deflation and image macro memes. And Hedgeye is likely the only research firm that employs its own cartoonist.

A Hedgeye cartoon on falling U.S. government bond yields.

A Hedgeye chart showing U.S. utilities' performance against the S&P 500 in 2014.

Those who watch Hedgeye's video channel or pay to subscribe to its research won't hear the advice most retail investors need. They won't get someone calmly and cheaply telling them to trade less, ignore pretty much all short-term investing advice and just buy low-cost index funds. Instead, McCullough thinks it's his job to tell retail investors who trade frequently how to do it better, and to help institutions boost investment returns.

“We’ve branded ourselves as being Mac versus PC,” McCullough says. The PC in his analogy stands for both traditional Wall Street research, which he calls “conflicted, compromised and constrained,” and the financial media. Hedgeye is the Mac.

The main thing that attracts people to Hedgeye, though, is McCullough himself.

Jim, I am formally warning u - unblock or everything u say will be audited by Hedgeye Risk Mgt police @jimcramer

— Keith McCullough (@KeithMcCullough) June 14, 2013

@rinsana @CGasparino yeah, u were in the room - when I walked out, I said to the guys, Ronnie better have inside info b/c he's f'n clueless

— Keith McCullough (@KeithMcCullough) November 7, 2014

Talking with McCullough, it’s clear he enjoys being a Twitter pugilist.

“Yeah, I led Yale in points. But I also led Yale in penalty minutes,” he says, referencing the days when he was the captain of his college hockey team. “That’s who I am.” He’s energetic and direct, occasionally laughing boisterously at his own jokes and insights.

An equity hedge fund manager who has a very small ownership stake in Hedgeye described McCullough slightly differently.

“He’s bombastic, but it’s tactical. He’s doing it to get attention for Hedgeye, and hopefully that leads to more subscriptions,” said the investor, who asked to remain anonymous. Two other hedge funds and the seed fund 500 Startups also have small stakes in the company.

McCullough thinks Hedgeye's critics in the financial media overlook his ability to attract subscribers and talk to big players. That's because the critics usually come across Hedgeye through "our main marketing channel," Twitter, where they encounter McCullough at his most antagonistic.

"Sometimes when I’m on the ice punching you, I look a little more like the person that they want me to be, which is just another lying Wall Street scumbag, which is false,” he says, adding that investors who get to know him find out he's "self-effacing to a fault.”

Even if that's true, McCullough certainly isn't shy when he thinks he's right.

“Investigative research and investigative journalism, what’s the difference? We’re trying to get to the same point,” he says, comparing Hedgeye’s aggressive short calls against energy companies Kinder Morgan and Linn Energy to Ida Tarbell’s crusade against Standard Oil. Though Kinder Morgan stock is up about 16 percent since Hedgeye’s bearish call in September 2013, the bet against Linn has worked out better for McCullough. Linn is down about 70 percent since Hedgeye’s March 2013 short call on the back of an SEC investigation into the company’s accounting practices.

McCullough is also proud of his prescient call earlier in 2014 that bond yields would fall, a prediction that was out of the mainstream at the time.

He has had big misses too. In 2010, he predicted that the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program could, over an undefined period of time, lead to the collapse of the U.S. economy. So far, of course, it has not. A close analysis of his 2013 recommendations showed that if you’d traded only on Hedgeye’s suggestions, you would have made just 0.3382 percent. In contrast, the S&P 500 was up 31 percent that year.

But McCullough says his buy and sell signals shouldn’t be used to create a portfolio.

The portfolio he currently recommends is 52 percent in cash and just 6 percent stocks, an asset allocation that goes beyond conservative and into territory a financial doomsday prepper would appreciate. But even that's not McCullough at his most extreme: In 2012, he recommended a 100 percent cash portfolio.

The Hedgeye CEO is unperturbed by criticism about the quality of his product or how he presents it. He believes he has always accurately represented Hedgeye. “We have never said we are a hedge fund,” he says in response to allegations that language in his real-time alert product implied he was making trades, rather than recommending them. “I’m basically the journalist of the buy-side,” he adds.

Independent research is a business which has always seemed almost on the verge of being about to break through, but it's never really been able to stick. McCullough thinks Hedgeye’s mix of single-stock research, macroeconomic analysis and daily alerts can be different. “There’s no top to this, in terms of our ability to grow content,” he says.

Hedgeye currently has 23 analysts and 57 employees in total. The company says revenues grew about 25 percent to more than $12 million last year. McCullough sees those dollars as a vindication of his views.

Hedgeye has hired an executive recruiting firm to help attract new hires, and McCullough says his company has no problem luring in talent. Perhaps, he says, that’s because “we’re in Stamford, so we’re kind of the only game in town.”

Though Stamford is teeming with hedge funds, McCullough doesn’t seem to think he has much competition in building the ESPN of finance -- a point he makes with a reference to hedge fund giant Citadel and college hockey.

“If the captain of Cornell, who’s elected by his teammates, was running money at Citadel and decided to open up Hedgeye II, that would be my first very relevant competition.”

Wegmans Ranked No. 1 For Company Reputation

People love Wegmans.

The Rochester, New York-based grocer has unseated Amazon as the firm with the best corporate reputation among a list of 100 highly visible companies, according to an annual Nielsen poll released this week.

“To be recognized in this way is just incredible,” Danny Wegman, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement. “It always starts with our people, who thrill our customers every day and extend a family feeling in our stores across six states.”

In an age where social media anthropomorphizes products -- from toilet paper to body wash -- branding matters. And although Wegmans has only 85 stores, the company has built a cult following online. Fans applaud the supermarket's decent wages, wide selection of prepared foods and reasonable prices.

Amazon ranked second in the Nielsen poll, followed by Samsung, Costco, Johnson & Johnson and Kraft Foods. The company with the worst reputation on the list was Goldman Sachs.

To determine the rankings in the Harris Poll Reputation Quotient study, evaluated annually for the last 16 years, Nielsen conducted an online survey in English of 27,278 U.S. respondents between Oct. 20 and Dec. 18.

Comcast Says It's Working On Making It Harder To Change Someone's Name To 'A**hole'

This post originally appeared on Consumerist.

Last week wasn’t a good one for Comcast. It began with a report that someone at the company changed a customer’s name to “A**hole Brown” and ended with multiple customers claiming their names had also been changed for the worse. Now Comcast says it’s making an effort to curb this sort of rude and bizarre behavior.

“Each and every customer deserves to be treated with respect,” reads a statement that shouldn’t have to be made from Comcast. “We fell short of that and are taking immediate steps to make sure we fix this.”

The company says it has pulled the plug on its relationship with the vendor call center that was involved with the “A**hole” incident and that it investigating the other reports, which include changing one customer’s name to “whore” and another whose online profile read “dummy” instead of her actual first name.

In addition to apologizing to the affected customers, Comcast says it is making changes internally that it hopes can preempt rogue reps from acting like, well… a**holes.

“We’re also working with our billing partner on technology that will prevent this from happening and re-training our employees across the country,” reads the statement from Comcast. “Respecting our customers is paramount, and we need to do everything we can to make sure that this never happens again.”

Between the two name-change reports, former Comcast exec Frank Eliason wrote a lengthy open letter to his onetime employer, questioning what impact the corporate culture at Comcast had on employees.

“Why do we not hear many incidents like these from other companies?” he asked. “Companies do implement technology solutions to prevent these type of things, which Comcast has stated they are working on, but often other companies do not have the same issue because they hire people to fit within their company culture.”

Obamacare Sign-Ups Near 7.5 Million As Enrollment Deadline Nears

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration says sign-ups continue to build under the president's health care law ahead of a Feb. 15 enrollment deadline.

Nearly 7.5 million people enrolled as of last Friday in 37 states where the federal government is running insurance markets, which offer subsidized private coverage for people who don't have a job-based plan.

South Florida led other major metro areas, with more than 637,000 people enrolled from Miami to West Palm Beach.

Additionally, states acting in tandem with the federal HealthCare.gov site have signed up at least 2.4 million people through their own insurance exchanges.

Officials are preparing for a surge toward the end of next week, as supporters make a final push.

The goal is at least 9.1 million people enrolled and paying premiums for 2015.

Americans Are More Stressed About Money Than Anything Else -- And It's Taking A Toll On Their Health

The economy may be improving, but finances are still a stressful burden on Americans -- especially among young adults and parents, according to the American Psychological Association's new Stress in America survey.

The report highlights a growing health problem when it comes to well-being and financial security. Nearly three-quarters of participants reported feeling stressed about money at some point, with some respondents saying they went as far as sacrificing health care because of finances.

"When people are financially challenged, it makes sense their stress level could go up," Norman Anderson, Ph.D., the chief executive officer and executive vice president of the American Psychological Association said in a press conference Wednesday. "Many industries in the economy have shown improvement, but we still know many people aren't benefiting and are still concerned about economic well-being."

The 2015 report, which was conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of the APA, surveyed more than 3,000 American adults in August 2014. While the APA reports that stress is down overall, there are still some major health concerns. Below are some of the survey's biggest findings about financial anxiety, general stress and well-being:

• Money is the No. 1 stressor overall, but particularly for millennials, those in Generation X and for parents.

• Nearly 1 in 5 Americans say they have skipped or considered skipping going to the doctor in the last year when they needed heath care due to financial problems.

• Those who reported experiencing extreme money concerns were also more likely to resort to unhealthy behaviors to manage their stress.

• A third of Americans said a lack of money prevents them from living a healthier lifestyle.

• Women are more stressed than men overall, with 51 percent reporting that stress has kept them awake at night, compared to only 32 percent of men.

When financial worries become too much of a barrier to a healthy lifestyle, experts recommend seeking social support to mitigate stress.

"You may not be able to change your financial situation but you may be able to better manage it," said Katherine Nordal, Ph.D., executive director for professional practice at the APA. "I think having a support system -- some people who believe in you -- gives you that extra emotional strength to be able to get through the day and do the things you need to do to try to improve your situation."

There's ample research to support her claim, not to mention that emotional support is beneficial for issues beyond financial concerns. Studies show a close-knit support system can improve your longevity, encourage you to be active and even lower your risk for heart disease.

"Emotional support helps with managing stress from a variety of sources," Anderson said. "It's one of the most generally positive things one can do for their health and emotional well-being."

Shake Shack Soars In First Few Minutes Of Trading

Jan 30 (Reuters) - Shares of gourmet hamburger chain Shake Shack Inc soared 150 percent in their first few minutes of trading on Friday, valuing the company that grew out of a hotdog cart in New York's Madison Square Park at nearly $2 billion.

The sizzling debut follows the successful listing two months ago of Habit Restaurants Inc, highlighting strong appetite for shares of companies serving up premium burgers.

Shake Shack shares hit $52.49 in early trading on the New York Stock Exchange, way above their offer price of $21.

At the high, founder Daniel Meyer's 21 percent stake in the company was worth about $390 million.

Meyer, who also owns popular New York restaurants Blue Smoke, Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe, opened the first Shake Shack in 2004. Since then, the chain has won a near-cult following for its rich milkshakes, crinkle fries and hormone- and antibiotic-free burgers.

Shake Shack raised $105 million from its initial public offering. Underwriters J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley had originally set an expected price range of $14-16 per share, but later raised this to $17-19 due to strong demand.

SCORCHING GROWTH

Premium chains have been outperforming in the overall burger category, driven by demand from young, affluent consumers.

Shake Shack's customers spend roughly $30 for a meal for two - considerably more than diners spend at struggling fast-food giant McDonald's Inc.

Sales at premium chains including Five Guys and Smashburger rose 9 percent in 2013, according to restaurant consultancy Technomic Inc, while overall sales at all burger chains including McDonald's fell 1 percent.

The burger market, the largest dine-out segment in the United States, generated more than $72 billion in sales in 2013.

Shake Shack has 63 restaurants, more than half outside the United States, many of these in the Middle East. The company has said it plans to open 10 U.S., company-operated restaurants each year and could eventually grow to at least 450 locations.

The IPO market has been fruitful for so-called fast-casual restaurant operators hoping to replicate the scorching growth of Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. Chipotle's shares, which listed at $22 in 2006, closed at $714.53 on Thursday.

Private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners holds 26 percent of Shake Shack, while employee-owned hedge fund sponsor Select Equity Group holds 12.3 percent.

Shake Shack's net income fell 20 percent to $3.6 million in the 39 weeks ended Sept. 24. Revenue rose 41 percent to $83.8 million. (Editing by Ted Kerr)

McDonald's Will Soon Accept Hugs As Payment

McDonald’s is taking love as legal tender.

As part of a promotional offer from Feb. 2 through Valentine’s Day, the fast-food behemoth will be accepting expressions of affection as payment for food. Winners will be randomly selected at pre-designated times at participating McDonald's locations, and a McDonald's employee will instruct them to perform a "random act of Lovin'."

The company will announce the “Pay with Lovin’" campaign in a commercial slated to air Sunday during Super Bowl XLIX.

The ad, which hit YouTube on Friday, features peppy McDonald’s cashiers surprising incredulous customers by requesting they pay for their food by dancing, hugging their companions or calling their mothers to say “I love you.”

Terri Hickey, a McDonald’s spokeswoman, said the company expects about 1 million customers to benefit from the giveaway. Each participating restaurant will have 100 such deals, 55 of which are divided between the first two days of the campaign, according to the official rules.

This promotion comes at a rocky time for McDonald’s, which saw the abrupt departure of its chief executive this week amid slumping sales.

Super Bowl ad slots, which cost $4.5 million for 30 seconds, can be powerful tools for spurring sales. A study released this month by professors from Stanford University and Humboldt University Berlin found that advertisers’ return on the investment can be as high as 258 percent.

Amazon To Launch An Email Service

(Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) accelerated its efforts to win over corporate clients on Wednesday by announcing an email and scheduling service that will compete with Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Google Inc (GOOGL.O).

The service, dubbed WorkMail, will launch in the second quarter and has been developed by the company's cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS). It highlights Amazon's efforts to convince deep-pocketed companies, called enterprises in tech parlance, to shift more of their work to AWS.

Launching an email and scheduling service is likely the first step toward a broader suite of Amazon tools to gain corporate clients, analysts said. For example, Google's Gmail offers many other services beyond email and calendars including file-sharing and video conferencing.

AWS has spent the last couple of years trying to get corporate clients on board because big businesses spend more on data centers than startups, who were the initial focus of its business. But there are concerns that Amazon is spreading itself too thin, given its other sizeable investments in areas like Hollywood-style production and consumer devices.

"Email is a Trojan Horse into the enterprise," Baird analyst Colin Sebastian said. He added that email is a $1 billion opportunity for Amazon given the popularity of AWS and Amazon's willingness to sacrifice margins for volume.

If Amazon adds more services for companies, it could bring in about $10 billion more in extra revenue, Sebastian said.

(Reporting by Deepa Seetharaman; Editing by Christian Plumb)