EDITOR'S PICKS

High-frequency trading is cuckoo
Alan Kohler
It's not known how much money high-frequency traders make but it's on the rise, and it's sucked out of other traders' pockets. The question is whether they should be allowed to get away with it.

Labor's historic SME assault
Rob Burgess
As the union movement struggles to act for workers who don't want 'representation', Labor is shifting its focus to the SME sector and in the process re-defining itself as a party, as Brendan O'Connor reveals on video.

BHP sets its market cement
Robert Gottliebsen
The closure of BHP's Norwich Park mine is an important signal of the company's patience and cautiousness in its quest to solidify its position as the major global supplier of coking coal.

Foxtel and Austar's sporting chance
Stephen Bartholomeusz
With the protracted approval process for the Foxtel-Austar merger finally over, the conditions of the deal allow for significant competitive opportunities – particularly in subscription-driving sports rights.

Facing up to the real Madrid
Karen Maley
Spanish bond yields have eased, but critics argue the ECB's cheap liquidity is making the situation worse and the size of Spanish bank losses may make a bailout inevitable.

Ten tentatively changes the channel
Stephen Bartholomeusz
With a weak advertising market and an uncertain future, James Warburton's turnaround of the Ten Network following a shocking first-half result may take time but looks to be heading in the right direction.

Facebook tags Instagram's photos
Charis Palmer
Facebook's purchase of photo sharing business Instagram looks to leverage the latter's success in the mobile channel, but will the pair be able to fend off new, nimbler, fast-growing social media players?

Solomon Lew's family affair
James Kirby
The billionaire's bitter family trust dispute highlights a controversial tax shelter just weeks before the federal budget.

Walking away from a carbon brawl
Keith Orchison
To achieve affordable energy solutions in a lower emissions world, we need to agree on the facts and muster some political decisiveness.

On the cusp of a China rebalancing
Michael Pettis
A reversal of Beijing's extraordinarily high investment levels is unavoidable, the only question is how this will affect GDP growth.

CLIMATE SPECTATOR: AGL FiT fight
Warwick Johnston
An AGL paper assessing the merits of feed-in tariffs makes some good points, but unfortunately they are lost amid a host of glaring errors and misleading language.

KGB: BCA's Tony Shepherd
Kohler, Gottliebsen & Bartholomeusz
The Transfield chairman and new BCA president says a budget surplus at the expense of growth and productivity is unwise, and Australia is far behind the eight-ball on delivering infrastructure projects.