Trump campaign faces a reckoning, Wirecard fights for survival, and further increases in U.S. virus cases. 24 hours from TulsaPresident Donald Trump's re-election campaign has been left with more questions than answers after this weekend's sparsely attended rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Trump has fallen behind Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, in national polls and also lags in campaign fund-raising in May. Trump declared he would win in November, telling supporters in Oklahoma the "silent majority is stronger than ever." There was also controversy over the weekend when there was a standoff between Attorney General William Barr and Geoffrey S. Berman, the chief federal prosecutor in New York, that eventually ended in the latter's resignation. Down to the wireWirecard AG, a company once hyped as the future of German finance, said the 1.9 billion euros ($2.1 billion) that is missing from its balance sheet probably doesn't exist. Shares in the company dropped as much as 50% in trading this morning with the few analysts still covering the DAX member losing hope in its prospects. Also in German corporate news, Deutsche Lufthansa AG is facing a momentous week as a clash between the country's government and the airline's biggest shareholder threatens to scupper a 9 billion-euro bailout package. Cases riseThere was a spike in the reproduction rate of the virus in Germany over the weekend as more than 1,300 workers at a slaughterhouse tested positive. The death toll in Brazil passed 50,000 as the global total approached half a million. There were further signs of a second wave in California as new cases rose by a record there, while infections in Florida jumped again as a disease expert predicted a "forest fire of cases." Trump, who used a racist slur to describe the virus, claimed that increased testing had driven up the number of U.S. cases. Markets mixedGlobal equity investors are getting the week off to a slow start as continued concerns over the virus, international relations and the pace of recovery keep a lid on exuberance. Overnight the MSCI Asia Pacific Index slipped 0.1% while Japan's Topix index closed 0.2% lower. In Europe the Stoxx 600 Index was broadly unchanged at 5:50 a.m. Eastern Time as Wirecard and Lufthansa led losses. S&P 500 futures pointed to a strong open, the 10-year Treasury yield was at 0.695% and oil was slightly lower. Coming up...The Chicago Fed National Activity Index is at 8:30 a.m. Existing home sales numbers for May at 10:00 a.m. are expected to show continued weakness. President Trump is expected to announce new visa restrictions later today. Russia and the U.S. are holding arms-control talks in Vienna. Apple Inc.'s worldwide developer conference begins and Bloomberg's Invest Global conference starts its three-day run. What we've been readingThis is what's caught our eye over the last 24 hours. And finally, here's what Joe's interested in this morningOn Friday around the markets close, I checked out Dave Portnoy's trading livestream, where he was picking stocks by pulling Scrabble tiles from a bag to choose the ticker of his next purchase. I won't deny that I was highly entertained by the spectacle. Of course, most people would say this is a pretty bad way to invest your money. Other people, who consider themselves clever, might say there's no way to know a priori which stocks will do better than others, and that given efficient markets theory such an approach is just as likely to do as well as anything else.
But that's wrong. Picking stocks via a Scrabble bag is indeed risky, and the reason is that most are just bad. A 2017 study by Hendrik Bessembinder of Arizona State University looked at every listed stock between 1926 and 2016 and found that four out of seven actually performed worse than T-bills. Furthermore he found that the most common outcome for a stock is a complete 100% loss. And even more astoundingly, the study states that the entire net gain for the market since 1926 can be attributed to just 4% of all stocks. In other words, if you pick your portfolio this way, it's almost certainly going to be filled with a bunch of losers. Now of course, if you had 100,000 people all picking their own portfolios from Scrabble tiles, then on average, they would probably do fine because some people would land on those 4% of mega winners and do great. But you can't eat average returns. You can only eat your returns. And your returns are probably going to be really bad.
FWIW, there was a study that was done by Rob Arnott at Research Affiliates that claimed monkeys throwing darts at a newspaper did, on average, outperform the market. However, that study only used a pool of the 1000 largest and most liquid stocks for their sample, which is likely to be a different pool than tickers generated by a random ticker generator. (Or a semi-random one in the case of Scrabble tiles because the letters aren't evenly distributed.) A large, liquid portfolio, for one thing, is less likely to contain a bunch of dogs headed to zero.  Bottom line: Most stocks are bad, and if you pick stocks randomly, you personally will probably do badly. (Still, presumably most of the people who watch this are in on the joke because it is undeniably entertaining.) Joe Weisenthal is an editor at Bloomberg. Like Bloomberg's Five Things? Subscribe for unlimited access to trusted, data-based journalism in 120 countries around the world and gain expert analysis from exclusive daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close. | 
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