In this week's Barron's cover story, Sandra Ward profiles Schlumberger, the oil and gas equipment and services provider, which is set to see profits grow. 

Schlumberger, Ward notes, is also focusing more of its efforts on the North American energy market, where smaller rivals Halliburton and Baker Hughes derive more of their profit, with Schlumberger's North American operating profit margin topping that posted by Halliburton during the second quarter. 

Schlumberger, the 29th largest component of the S&P 500 with a market cap of $138 billion, is trading at a historical discount to its future earnings expectations, writes Ward.

Bill Herbert of Houston-based investment-banking firm Simmons & Co. told Ward that for Schlumberger, "The value proposition has never been higher," with Hebert seeing the shares gaining more than 30% to $145 per share. 

Ward also highlighted some of the company's cost-cutting and capital-return goals:

"Overall, the company is targeting a return of capital of 20% by 2017, up from the current 16%. Capital spending is expected to drop to 10% of revenue from the more typical 12%, which will free up more cash flow to return to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. Indeed, Schlumberger expects to convert 75% of earnings to free cash flow, up from the current level of 55%. An estimated 60% to 65% of that will be given back to shareholders."

Schlumberger CEO Paal Kibsgaard told Ward that Schlumberger isn't focused on being the best-run company in its industry, but said, "We have the potential to be the best-run company in the world, and that's what we are trying to do."

You can read Ward's full profile here. 

In pre-market trade, shares of Schlumberger were up 1.6%.

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Google isn't afraid to shell out a boatload of cash for the right acquisition. Just ask the smart thermostat company Nest, which it bought earlier this year for $3.2 billion.

In 2014 alone, Google has already made upward of 20 acquisitions. 

According The New York Times' Liz Grauman, CEO Larry Page uses the "toothbrush test" to determine whether a company is worth buying. He'll ask, "Is this something you will use once or twice a day, and does it make your life better?"

Instead of diving into the nitty-gritty of cash flow and earnings, Page cares about usefulness and long-term investment and benefits. Nest might not be reeling in a ton of money right now, but Google sees it as an entry point to a potentially gigantic new market. Nest's smart thermostats and smoke detectors use complex tech to solve simple problems that people have on an everyday basis. Toothbrush test: Passed. 

Like many other tech companies, Grauman points out, Google doesn't depend as frequently on big banks to decide whether a major merger or acquisition is worth it.  

"Larry will look at potential deals at a very early stage,” Google’s VP of corporate development, Donald Harrison, told Grauman. "Bankers can be helpful, but they’re not necessarily core to the discussions."

Once Google does acquire a company, it works hard to integrate it into the "Googley" culture while still leaving room for autonomy. Nest, for example, still has an independent management team and doesn't share its data with its parent company. 

Read the full New York Times piece here. 

SEE ALSO: 11 Crazy-Interesting Facts About Google

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1. Yahoo acquired ClarityRay, an ad fraud detection company based out of Israel, on Friday. The company is reported to have six full-time employees who will be integrated into Yahoo's ad team. 

2. Public ad tech companies continue to struggle in the stock market while the big players including Google and Facebook dominate, making it difficult for smaller companies to succeed. 

3. Tumblr will team up with Ditto Labs, a photo analytics company, to scan user's photos and find brand affiliations. The data collected will not immediately be used to serve people ads, but will be given to advertisers.

4. Greg Coleman, former president of Criteo, discusses his role as president of BuzzFeed with Ad Exchanger. Coleman says the company will rely heavily on video in the future and will focus on measuring the effectiveness of the site's native ads.  

5. Ad Age looks at how marketers can make sure the audiences they buy through programmatic platforms represent their target audience. The publication suggests owning your own data and looking at recent data are two important steps for reaching the right audience. 

6. Ethan Zuckerman, the man who created the first pop-up ad, apologized for creating these ads in an essay for The Atlantic called "The Internet's Original Sin."

7. The Washington Post placed a "buy it now" button into one of its articles about "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." The article discussed the controversial new cover of the book and the button took readers to a page where they could purchase the book.  

8. Digiday argues brands need to look into niche publications and social networks in order to talk to a more targeted group of consumers. Rather than run tons of promoted tweets to a huge group of people, Digiday says brands should find smaller groups of people and create unique content they can engage with.   

9. A second company has taken a stake in the advertising holding company Interpulbic Group. A Chicago based investment company, Harris Associates now owns about 3% of the company.    

10. A non-profit ad start up, Classify Advertising, wants to transform Craiglist ads into a more effective and profitable form of advertising.  

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In her final tune-up tournament before the U.S. Open, Maria Sharapova lost to Ana Ivanovic, 6-2, 5-7, 7-5, in controversial fashion in the semifinals of the Western & Southern Open on Saturday night.

Sharapova won the second set by 7-5 and was serving in the second game of the third set when Ivanovic called for an injury timeout. She had her blood pressure taken during the delay:

Ivanovic said after the match (via SI): "I think I ate something bad today. When my coach was coming out, I kept telling him I don't feel good, like my stomach is really upset. Then it really build up in the third set and I was not feeling fine.”

Sharapova wasn't buying the legitimacy of the injury. Serving at 4-3 in the final set, Sharapova appeared to yell, "Check her blood pressure," at the chair umpire.

 Ivanovic went on to win the final set, 7-5, advancing to the final, where she eventually lost to Serena Williams.

After the match, Sharapova questioned if Ivanovic had anything wrong with her, and said the injury timeout disrupted the match (via Tennis Now):

Reporter: What were your thoughts on the time that she took early in the third set?

Sharapova: I never actually got a clear answer on what it was, but, I mean, I don't know. Could have been something like an anxiety or something. I'm not really sure what you take blood pressure for. We played a pretty long point afterwards, and she seemed to be doing well. Not really sure what was going on there.

Reporter: ESPN has some video of you tapping your shoulder and saying, 'check for blood pressure,' middle of the third set. Were you angry or put off by what she had done?

Sharapova: It was just a strange timing. I'm not sure kind of how it happened. Just kind of came out of nowhere. Just don't know what to do in that situation, because you either sit down, are they going to take a medical timeout, but then they don't and you got to get up and then you got to serve and it's 15 All. The timing was a bit strange, but she looked OK.

Sharapova started the 2014 season well, winning three tournaments in the first five months of the year, including the French Open. Her semifinal run at the Western & Southern Open is her best result of the summer, and it should give her some confidence going into the U.S. Open, despite the Ivanovic controversy.

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London-traded Brent crude futures were down nearly than 2% Monday morning, breaking below $102 for the first time in more than a year. 

Brent has now declined more than 3% in August and 11% since a June surge to just under $115. 

We've recently written about the issues that have put crude futures into bearish territory: flagging demand from Europe, surprisingly abundant supply from the Middle East and booming production out of America. 

In a note this morning, Morgan Stanley's Adam Longson said prices are likely to be around these levels for the next few months. 

"While we don’t view this dynamic as structural, until dislocations are resolved, we see modest downside risk, particularly approaching expiry. By 4Q14, we expect to see a more balanced global crude market."

New York-traded West Texas Intermediate futures were also down more than 1%.

SEE ALSO: Here's Why Geopolitical Chaos Hasn't Caused Oil Prices To Surge

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This past July, Universal Studios opened an expansion to its Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park with a new attraction called Diagon Alley.

We recently visited the park and unless you know where it's located (or have a park map), it could be slightly difficult to find. Universal must think so too, because an employee stands outside of the area at all times shouting and pointing to the attraction's entrance.

At least that was our experience during our 3-day stay at the parks.

Here's where the entrance to Diagon Alley is. Can you spot it?

It's right in there. 

This may sound like a problem, but it's not. The park entrance does a great way of staying true to the books, making fans very happy.

In the novels, one way into Diagon Alley is by tapping a specific brick in order to unveil a hidden alleyway.  

In the same vein, Universal’s Diagon Alley is hidden behind a giant brick wall in its London section of the park.

If you're a fan of the series you're blown away by the immense detail that went into recreating the scene. If you're a mere muggle (non-magical folk) who isn’t familiar with the world of Potter then you’ll probably wonder why Universal went to the trouble of hiding its biggest money maker in the park. 

Here's what it feels like walking into the new park area:

Here's a quick GIF of what it's like to walk into Diagon Alley.

According to NPR, the first Harry Potter park, Hogsmeade, helped increase attendance by 30% and more than doubled visitors after it was added in 2010. 

NPR reports Diagon Alley cost Universal around $400 million, according to analyst estimates. 

It appears well worth the investment. The area is the most popular attraction (other than a new Simpsons' ride close by) in the parks. Both are so crowded it's often difficult to walk down the streets.

SEE ALSO: I bought a $47 interactive Harry Potter wand and it was totally worth it

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The NAHB's August housing market sentiment stats crossed the wires well ahead of their scheduled release at 10:00 a.m. ET.

The headline index climbed to a seven-month high of 55 in August from 53 in July.

This was stronger than the 54 expected by economists.

"After leaping decisively into positive territory in July, home builder sentiment pulled another surprie in August," wrote CNBC's Diana Olick in a post published at 9:45 a.m. ET.

"Confidence among U.S. homebuilders rose in August to the highest level in seven months, showing the industry is making more headway after weakness earlier this year," reported Bloomberg's Vince Golle in a story published at 9:50:03 a.m. ET.

“As the employment picture brightens, builders are seeing a noticeable increase in the number of serious buyers entering the market,” said the NAHB's Kevin Kelly. “However, builders still face a number of challenges, including tight credit conditions for borrowers and shortages of finished lots and labor.”

Markets continued to move higher after the report was released. The S&P 500 is up 0.7% in early trading.

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The world's most successful people are known and celebrated for all different things.

Some are famous for their skills and talents, while others are distinguished for their courage or profound impact on society.

But one thing many of the world's most successful people have in common is their ability to inspire others.

Here are 101 inspirational quotes from highly successful people:

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."—Mahatma Gandhi

"Success is most often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable."—Coco Chanel

"Courage is grace under pressure."—Ernest Hemingway

"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning."—Albert Einstein

"Sometimes you can't see yourself clearly until you see yourself through the eyes of others."—Ellen DeGeneres

"It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop."—Confucius

"Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago."—Warren Buffett

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."—Dr. Seuss 

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."—Mae West

"Once you choose hope, anything's possible."—Christopher Reeve

"There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires."—Nelson Mandela

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched — they must be felt with the heart."—Helen Keller

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."—Mahatma Gandhi

"The difference between winning and losing is most often not quitting."—Walt Disney

"When you cease to dream you cease to live."—Malcolm Forbes

"May you live every day of your life."—Jonathan Swift

"Failure is another steppingstone to greatness."—Oprah Winfrey

"If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon. And if you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve."—Jeff Bezos

"In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different."—Coco Chanel 

"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."—Wayne Gretzky

"The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain."—Dolly Parton

"The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes."—Frank Lloyd Wright

"You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them."—Michael Jordan

"You can't please everyone, and you can't make everyone like you."—Katie Couric

"I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine."—Neil Armstrong 

"Don't limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve."—Mary Kay Ash 

"If you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything."—Malcolm X

"The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why."—Mark Twain

"It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong."—Abraham Lincoln

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again."—William Edward Hickson

"As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others."—Audrey Hepburn

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader."—John Quincy Adams

"If you are going through hell, keep going."—Winston Churchill

"The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate."—Oprah Winfrey

"A dream doesn't become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work."—Colin Powell

"The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that's changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks."—Mark Zuckerberg

"Do one thing every day that scares you."—Eleanor Roosevelt

"The purpose of our lives is to be happy."—Dalai Lama

"Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great."—John D. Rockefeller

"Don't worry about failure; you only have to be right once."—Drew Houston 

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."—Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Keep your face to the sunshine and you can never see the shadow."—Helen Keller

"One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody."—Mother Teresa

"Identity is a prison you can never escape, but the way to redeem your past is not to run from it, but to try to understand it, and use it as a foundation to grow."—Jay-Z

"If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased."—Katharine Hepburn

"All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them."—Walt Disney

"I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward."—Charlotte Bronte

"Don't count the days, make the days count."—Muhammad Ali

"Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen."—Michael Jordan 

"Life is short, and it is here to be lived."—Kate Winslet 

"Everything you can imagine is real."—Pablo Picasso

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."—Barack Obama 

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."—George Eliot

"If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it's within your reach. And it'll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build."—Steve Wozniak

"Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud."—Maya Angelou

"In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you."—Deepak Chopra 

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."—Thomas A. Edison

"We should remember that just as a positive outlook on life can promote good health, so can everyday acts of kindness."—Hillary Clinton

"As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others."—Bill Gates

"There are no mistakes, only opportunities."—Tina Fey (from her book, "Bossypants")

"We can't help everyone, but everyone can help someone."—Ronald Reagan

"Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."—Oscar Wilde

"In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity."—Albert Einstein

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."—Nelson Mandela

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."—Steve Jobs

"But you have to do what you dream of doing even while you're afraid."—Arianna Huffington

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace."—Jimi Hendrix

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."—Maya Angelou "If you can do what you do best and be happy, you're further along in life than most people."—Leonardo DiCaprio

"Success isn't about how much money you make. It's about the difference you make in people's lives."—Michelle Obama

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."—Warren Buffett

"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."—George Bernard Shaw

"The best way of learning about anything is by doing."—Richard Branson

"Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction."—John F. Kennedy 

"Don't let the fear of striking out hold you back."—Babe Ruth

"Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world."—Harriet Tubman

"What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve."—Napoleon Hill

"A champion is afraid of losing. Everyone else is afraid of winning."—Billie Jean King

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."—Benjamin Franklin

"If you live long enough, you'll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you'll be a better person."—Bill Clinton

"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."—Martin Luther King, Jr.

"As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent."—Arnold Schwarzenegger

"Find out who you are and be that person. That's what your soul was put on this Earth to be. Find that truth, live that truth and everything else will come."—Ellen DeGeneres

"Your voice can change the world."—Barack Obama

"The more you dream, the farther you get."—Michael Phelps

"You must do the things you think you cannot do."—Eleanor Roosevelt

"Every moment is a fresh beginning."—T.S. Eliot

"A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom."—Bob Dylan

"If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes."—Andrew Carnegie

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress."—Frederick Douglass

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference."—Robert Frost (from his poem "The Road Not Taken")

"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."—J. K Rowling (from "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets") 

"If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward."—Martin Luther King, Jr. 

"The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don't wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope."—Barack Obama

"If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it."—Elon Musk

"Be fearless. Have the courage to take risks. Go where there are no guarantees. Get out of your comfort zone even if it means being uncomfortable. The road less traveled is sometimes fraught with barricades, bumps, and uncharted terrain. But it is on that road where your character is truly tested. Have the courage to accept that you're not perfect, nothing is and no one is — and that's OK."—Katie Couric 

"Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right."—Henry Ford 

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."—e. e. cummings

"Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious."—Stephen Hawking

"Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty; it stems rather from love and devotion towards men and towards objective things."—Albert Einstein 

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."—Robert Frost

SEE ALSO: 11 Inspirational Quotes From Legendary Billionaires

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New York has banned PriceWaterhouseCoopers from accepting consulting work from New York-regulated firms for two years after charging the "Big 4" accounting firm with removing a warning about financial information from countries facing U.S. sanctions.

The state's Department of Financial Services says the firm caved to pressure from Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi to strip wire transfers of information that would have triggered sanctions compliance alerts.

In June 2013 BTM paid a $250 million fine for violating U.S. sanctions.

"When bank executives pressure a consultant to whitewash a supposedly 'objective' report to regulators — and the consultant goes along with it — that can strike at the very heart of our system of prudential oversight,” DFS Superintendent Ben Lawsky said in a statement.

DFS accuses PwC of having first acknowledged that data manipulation would comprise the integrity of an ongoing "historical transaction review," but then deleting the information anyway.  

"At the Bank’s request, PwC ultimately removed the original warning language from the final HTR Report the Bank submitted to regulators and, in fact, inserted a passage stating the exact opposite conclusion: '[W]e have concluded that the written instructions would not have impacted the completeness of the data available for the HTR and our methodology to process and search the HTR data was appropriate,'” DFS says.

One PwC director, now retired, warned against doing a more thorough review of the wires because doing so would "open up a whole other can of worms,” DFS says.

PwC has also agreed to pay a $25 million fine. Here's the full consent agreement: 

PwC Full Agreement

SEE ALSO: 30 Years Ago Warren Buffett Gave Away The Secret To Good Investing And Correctly Predicted No One Would Listen

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Students will begin their first day of business school over the next few weeks, starting the intense and rigorous path to an MBA.

We spoke with Alex Dea, a second-year student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School, about the lessons he learned in his first year.

Dea is a vice president of his school's MBA Student Association, served on the admissions advisory board, led the visitation weekend for accepted students, and will serve as a career mentor this fall, helping first-year students connect with the right internship.

Here are some of the things he wishes he'd known before he started business school:

There are not enough hours in the day to do everything you want to do.

It's impossible to arrange a daily schedule where you can give your full energy and focus to all of the things you'd like to get done, Dea says. He found that he split his time among academics, internship-hunting, networking with alumni and other professionals, and clubs and activities. Every day he needed to set his priorities.

"There will be a situation where you'll have a big company info session on the same day that you need to get an assignment done that's due the day after," Dea says. "You'll have the opportunity to either miss that chance at networking with recruiters and get an excellent grade on your assignment, or you can go to the info session and spend just enough time on the work that it turns out 'good enough.'"

Dea says that it's fine if you go into business school without concrete goals, but once you determine your priorities, it's essential that you adjust your schedule in a way that lets you pursue them with everything you've got.

A herd mentality is tempting but dangerous.

Dea says that because he had so many decisions to make in a single day, he struggled with a "fear of missing out." For example, sometimes he'd feel like all of his friends were going to a certain event and would second-guess his priorities.

You can recover from making the mistake of neglecting your work to follow your friends to an '80s throwback party, but it's much harder to recover from neglecting your happiness to follow your friends into a profession.

It can be easy to fall into the trap of ignoring your passions to pursue a popular career path, or to latch onto a brand name company or high salary rather than the job description. "Not everyone is meant to be an investment banker, consultant, marketer, or entrepreneur. You need to do what you want to do, and not what you think you're supposed to do," Dea says.

You deserve to be there. Stay confident.

Starting at a top business school is difficult. The first few months of core classes are difficult and exhausting, and your classmates are highly talented and driven people. It can all be very intimidating and discouraging, Dea tells us, "but obviously you wouldn't be there if they didn't think you were capable."

There will be classes and activities that come easy for you and those that present a big challenge. "Find opportunities to show your strengths and ask for help in areas of weakness," Dea says. Participate in class, and don't be afraid to ask questions.

Business school is difficult and your classmates will be competitive, but you can handle it. Plus, Dea adds that in his experience at UNC Kenan-Flagler, business school at its best is built on teamwork and collaboration. "Everyone wants to succeed but most won't put down someone else to get to the top, since it's better to bring them up with you," Dea says.

SEE ALSO: The World's 50 Best Business Schools

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The market is open and stocks are higher. 

The Dow is up 130 points, the S&P 500 is up 12 points, and the Nasdaq is up 25 points.

The economic calendar is light, with just homebuilder confidence from the National Association of Homebuilders on the schedule. 

The report, which came out earlier than anticipated, showed that the headline index climbed to 55 from 53 in July, also stronger than the 54 expected by economists. 

In stock news, Dollar General bid $9.7 billion for rival Family Dollar, topping the $8.95 billion bid made in late July by Dollar Tree.

Dollar General's bid is worth $78.50 per share of Family Dollar, and in morning trade on Monday shares of Family Dollar were up more than 4% to above $79 per share.

Markets will be focused this week on the Fed, with the minutes from the latest FOMC meeting set for release on Wednesday, and the Kansas City Fed's Jackson Hole economic symposium set to begin on Thursday. 

You can read Sam Ro's whole preview of the week's big events here. 

SEE ALSO: Here's Your Preview Of This Week's Big Economic Events

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The two biggest truisms of short-selling are not actually true.

This weekend, Jim Chanos, famed short seller and director of Kynikos Associates, was a guest on Barry Ritholtz's Master in Business program on Bloomberg Radio.

At one point in their discussion, Ritholtz brings up the famous anti-short-selling argument that when you short a stock, the most you can make is 100%.

Chanos quickly rejects this idea. 

As Chanos explains:

If you start with a short position at $100 with no other cash in your account, and you short the stock and it goes down to $50, you can, without adding any more cash capital to the account, short additional shares. And if it keeps going your way, you can compound your return.

Ritholtz notes that you still face the same types of risks that many bring up when discussing short-selling, and which we’ve written about before, namely margin calls, short squeezes, and the like.

Chanos says that this is still the case, but as to the statement that you can’t make more than 100% on initial capital on a short position: “That’s not true.”

Chanos also takes on another accepted "truth" regarding short-selling: that short sellers face infinite losses.

For one, if you're short, you can put in stop-losses, or automatic price levels at which you cover your short, thus preventing the theoretically infinite losses. But Chanos also brings up another argument, which is that if you’re investing in a partnership, and you’re a limited partner, you can only lose what you put up.

Chanos and Ritholtz spend a lot of their conversation discussing psychology and behavioral finance, and Chanos wraps up the debunking of these two market adages saying:

"These are examples of thinking that that are accurate on their face, but in practicality they're inaccurate. Because you structure things to not let that happen and you can actually get protection through the structure of the investment vehicle to obviate those risks. But having said all that, they do play into behavioral finance."

Ritholtz's series is fantastic, and is required listening for anybody who wants to hear real talk from real market pros. 

You can download the whole discussion with Chanos, and the rest of Ritholtz's episodes, from Bloomberg here. 

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In lucid dreaming, every night offers up the ultimate choose-your-own-adventure—a dreamscape confined only by the limits of your imagination and entirely under your control.

The horizon-expanding results are often felt long after you've awoken. Which is why a growing number of LD practitioners aren't just having more fun in bed—they're using their dreams to get ahead.

I'm lost in the woods. It's nighttime. The light of a full moon shows me I'm surrounded by menacing-looking trees, curiously similar to the ones that pelted Dorothy with apples in The Wizard of Oz. Then I spot it, smack in the middle of the forest—a brightly lit office cubicle with a laptop inside. "That's funny," I say to myself. "You don't usually see office cubes in the woods." Suddenly it hits me: The cubicle is my dream sign, a signal to my subconscious that I'm actually asleep, that everything around me is a projection of my imagination. After weeks of practice, of studying ancient Tibetan dream techniques, of wearing a special sleep mask that flashed lights in my eyes in the middle of the night, of ingesting questionable subconsciousness-raising drugs purchased from untrustworthy sources over the Internet, I'm finally doing it. I'm having my first lucid dream.

RELATED: 5 Weird Signs That You're Vitamin-Deficient

This clarity hits me even within my dream state. I'm so thrilled by the revelation, I plop myself down in the cubicle and start typing. Yes, I wrote this story in my sleep.

This is merely one manifestation of the state of being known as lucid dreaming. You're asleep. You're dreaming. But you're aware it's a dream—unconscious but conscious (or is it vice versa?). On the one hand, this is a common enough phenomenon—one study concluded that as many as 70 percent of people experience lucid dreaming at least once in their lifetime. On the other, the ability to have lucid dreams on demand can be a difficult skill to acquire.

A growing army of LD practitioners are training their sleeping brains to take maximum advantage of that lucid state, learning to control it in search of a mind-blowing natural trip. Imagine turning the inside of your head into the ultimate virtual-reality chamber, living out your deepest, most daring fantasies and desires, all without ever leaving your bed. Go ahead, fly to Zanzibar in your underwear. Play guitar like Jimi Hendrix—with Jimi Hendrix. Steer yourself not to a cubicle but to the corner office. Have sex with a supermodel. Or two supermodels. Literally anything you can imagine is possible in a lucid dream, because you have the keys to your subconscious.

Of course, the desire to control one's dreams is as old as dreaming itself, and unlocking the secret to lucid dreaming has long been a goal of philosophers, theologians, and scientists. Aristotle was said to have dabbled in it. Saint Augustine wrote about it. Eighth-century Buddhist monks devoted lifetimes to teaching a form of lucid dreaming known as dream yoga. Your hippie parents might have experimented with it at Esalen in the 1970s. But unlike many other New Age fads, lucid dreaming has a strong scientific foundation. And over the past 30 years, study after study has shown that lucid dreaming can have a profound impact on waking life. Researchers in Canada are using LD as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

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Sleep scientists in Germany are studying its applications for sports training—to improve both focus and performance in athletes. Closer to home, a doctor at a VA hospital in Los Angeles published a paper in January detailing the case of a patient with a 22-year history of chronic pain who cured himself overnight with a single lucid dream. "I'm no expert on lucid dreams," says Dr. Mauro Zappaterra. "But the man woke up with no pain. He said it was like his brain had shut down and rebooted. A few days later, he walks into the VA pharmacy and actually returns his medication—300 tabs of levorphanol. To me that's pretty convincing evidence."

Outside the scientific realm, lucid dreams serve as an idea lab for creative types: Actors and admen, inventors and game designers, fine artists, musicians, and filmmakers—like Michel Gondry and Guillermo del Toro—have practiced lucid dreaming. As the buzz about LD builds, it's gotten to the point where you can't stay up late drinking in the bar at the Chateau Marmont without overhearing a group of English indie musicians on their way home from Coachella going on and on about having lucid dreams in the desert or a starlet and a former professional athlete nearby gushing that LD is "better than TM."

There are now scores of lucid-dreaming websites offering online courses and dozens of LD-training apps on iTunes (one of which was downloaded more than 500,000 times in its first six weeks) promising to prepare your mind for dream flight. There are weeklong workshops in Hawaii, seminars in the Hamptons, and—the obligatory indicator of an incubating trend—TEDxTalks. And why not? Who wouldn't want to be "the producer, writer, director, and star of your dreams," as the promotional copy for one lucid-dreaming meet-up in New York City promised.

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"Yeah, it is becoming trendy," acknowledges Charlie Morley, a 30-year-old British lucid-dream teacher and the author of Dreams of Awakening: Lucid Dreams and Mindfulness of Dream & Sleep (previously he was a rapper in a Buddhist hip-hop group). "But it's not just hipsters doing it. It's all sorts of people, because there's no equipment to buy, no club to join, no money you have to spend. Anybody can do it."

However, not everyone has the same aptitude for lucid dreaming. There are those who pick it up instantly—Morley taught himself at 16, with no training—zooming to the moon on their first trip, while lucidity-challenged dreamers plod along for months before achieving liftoff. The reasons elude scientists, though a recent—and perhaps unsurprising—study at MacEwan University in Canada discovered that gamers are more likely to experience lucid dreams than non-gamers ("Virtual reality is virtual reality," explains one of the researchers). Also, those who tend to remember their dreams seem to have an easier time mastering LD than those who wake with no memory of them. But another recent study, this one at Goethe University in Germany, holds out hope for even the hardest cases: Sleep researchers there found that a mild electric current delivered to the frontal lobe for 30 seconds during REM sleep triggered lucidity 77 percent of the time. Can it be long before wearable LD brain shockers start appearing alongside Google Glass and Oculus Rift?

The more people experiment with lucid dreaming, the more distinct manifestations of it we will find, yet there is a certain universality, too—almost all lucid dreamers have the impulse to do the same thing. They fly. "Oh, man, being able to fly," Morley says, smiling broadly at the memory. "Flying is amazing. The feeling of floating above the earth, free from gravity—it's so liberating. I used to go to bed early on Saturday nights just so I could fly in my dreams. I got stuck doing that for two years. All I did was fly around and go to orgies."

You'd think it would be addictive, but sooner or later boredom sets in. "After you've flown for the thousandth time, you start looking for other, less superficial applications," says Tim Post, the 30-year-old founder of the LD website Snoozon.com, who taught himself to lucid-dream after being inspired by The Matrix. "You start trying to bridge your lucid-dream experience with your waking life. You start asking, 'How can I learn from this? How can I use it to be a better person, or get ahead at work, or rehearse for a sporting event?' Eventually, you look for practical applications."

You don't have to look far. Like that case of the VA patient who cured his pain with a single lucid dream (involving beautiful musical tones and strands of giant DNA made out of cookie dough—hey, whatever works). It can be useful for coping with nightmares, overcoming shyness, or dealing with bereavement, and it can be helpful for practicing for a big presentation, pumping up one's confidence, or solving creative problems (Paul McCartney famously puzzled out the troublesome melody of"Yesterday" in a lucid dream). In many ways, LD is the perfect self-help trend for our super-busy, technology-obsessed times. Not only is it just the right mix of ancient Eastern philosophy and cutting-edge brain science, but it also lets you get twice as much done in a day by turning your sleep hours into a night shift.

Exactly how lucid dreaming works in the brain is still something of a mystery. Research shows that lucid dreaming stimulates the mind in the same ways as waking life. If you sing during a lucid dream, for example, the right hemisphere lights up, just as it would if you were awake. If you do math, the left hemisphere becomes active. And the effects reverberate through your body even after you wake up. It can, for instance, improve motor skills. Sleep researchers at Heidelberg University proved that practicing a task in a lucid dream—tossing a coin into a cup—makes the dreamer significantly better at it during waking hours. They're currently experimenting with more complex tasks, like running and jumping, to see if eventually athletes might be able to train in their sleep.

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But the real power of lucid dreaming, according to those who've mastered it, is how it alters your perception of, well, pretty much everything.

"When I'm flying in a dream, what's moving?" asks Robert Waggoner, the author of Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self and a popular speaker on the lucid-dream lecture circuit. "What's the nature of space in a lucid dream? It's just a mental construct. Early lucid dreamers, the Buddhists who practiced dream yoga, they wouldn't even bother to fly to the mountain in their dreams. They'd just pull the mountain to them."

"It does tend to blur the lines between reality and dream life," agrees Sean Kelly, a 27-year-old longtime lucid dreamer from California who studied perception and cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, and now splits his time between Thailand and India, studying yoga and consciousness. "Not to the point where you can't function. It's not like, 'Oh my God, I can't cook this egg because I don't know if it's real.' But when you start to experience a lucid dream—consciousness without being encased in a physical body—it starts to shift your idea of the world, of what reality really is. Reality in a dream and reality in the physical world—they're both constructs of your consciousness. You start to realize that we don't have any idea at all what reality really is."

If taking flight via lucid dreaming sounds like a different sort of trip, there's a reason.

• • •
"I was climbing K2 and there were snowdrifts all around," says Dr. Stephen LaBerge, recalling the dream that would ultimately bring LD into the mainstream. "But I was dressed in shorts. And I thought, 'Wait a minute, I'm not properly prepared to go to the top of a mountain. Of course, it's a dream!' I was so reeled by it, I just flew off the mountain."

Meet the godfather of lucid dreaming, the researcher who brought LD from the fringes of alternative psychology to the razor-sharp edge of modern sleep and dream science. LaBerge, who bears a passing resemblance to Christopher Lloyd's Doc from the Back to the Future movies (though he drives a Subaru, not a DeLorean), is 67 now, living in Arizona and leading seminars. His dream about climbing K2 in shorts came when he was a graduate student in chemical physics at Stanford in the late sixties. Like so many others of his generation, he was drawn to psychedelics—only in his case, as a subject for study. He was researching their effects on consciousness. The substances, though, were illegal, making research difficult. LaBerge's eureka moment—his mountain-climbing dream—"set the seed," he says. "I couldn't study psychedelics, but here was a state—one that happens naturally in the REM cycle—that had similar potential."

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The breakthrough came in the early eighties, while LaBerge was conducting research at Stanford's prestigious Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine. He had come up with an ingeniously simple study that proved once and for all the reality of lucid dreaming: Subjects with a history of lucid dreaming were given instructions to send specific signals—two pairs of left-to-right eye movements—once they slipped into the deepest level of REM sleep, where lucidity occurs. "That was something," LaBerge recalls proudly. "A communication from the dream world while it was happening."

He spent the following decades sharing his findings in books (Lucid Dreaming, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming), establishing the Lucidity Institute, and inventing devices like the NovaDreamer, a now-discontinued sleep mask designed to nudge dreamers into lucidity with light pulses powerful enough to penetrate the unconscious and alert dreamers that they're asleep, but not so disruptive as to wake them.

Whether you're delivered there by light or by luck, the moment you achieve awareness that you're in a dream is when it becomes lucid. LD practitioners train themselves to recognize dream signals—in my case, an office cubicle in the middle of a forest; in LaBerge's, inappropriate mountain-climbing attire—that tip them off to the fact that they're dreaming (think of them as unreality checks). Sean Kelly suggests giving yourself the finger: He pushes his middle finger into the flesh of his palm, and if it goes through, he knows he's dreaming.

During my first few unsuccessful weeks attempting lucidity, none of this worked. Nor did the Remee, a red-light-emitting LD mask made by a Brooklyn company, which just kept me from sleeping at all.

There is another, chemical option for those stuck on the lucidity launchpad, something that several lucid dreamers had quietly clued me in to: galantamine, a brain-boosting drug used as a treatment for Alzheimer's that's said to have powerful lucid-dream-triggering side effects. Like many other nootropics, a.k.a. smart drugs, galantamine requires a prescription in the U.S., but low-dosage capsules containing its active ingredient—derived from the flowers of the Galanthus causcasicus plant—can easily be obtained. You wake up to take it at three in the morning, then go back to sleep, perchance to lucid-dream.

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It didn't have an effect on me, at least not initially. But then, a couple of nights later, when I wasn't expecting it, I had my lucid dream. It may have been a delayed reaction to the galantamine. Or perhaps it was simply because I'd been concentrating on lucid dreaming so intensely (all the experts agree that a strong desire to lucid-dream is a key factor in achieving lucidity)—and on my looming deadline. But there I was, in a cubicle in the forest, typing these words into a laptop: This is exhilarating. Although next time, I want to try to dream bigger. I'm going to fly.

SEE ALSO: Scientists Figured Out How Magic Mushrooms Alter The Mind — And It Has To Do With Dreaming

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Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi has been known to heavily borrow from Apple's design sense in the past, and the same can be said about its new Android-based mobile operating system, called MIUI 6.

MIUI 6 will be the default mobile operating system for Xiaomi's upcoming Mi 4 smartphone, a phone which already looks a lot like the iPhone 5. The software features a flat design with an emphasis on simplicity and color, just like Apple's iOS7, which powers the iPhone.

While you can't say Apple invented colorful design or flat icons, there's no denying that some of the MIUI 6 apps look strikingly similar to those in iOS 7.

Take a look at a few examples below, where we compare how Apple's Compass, Calendar, and Settings apps look compared to Xiaomi's (iOS 7 apps on the left-hand side, MIUI 6 on the right.)

For a closer look at Xiaomi's MIUI 6, head on over to their official website.

SEE ALSO: I Moved To San Francisco — And Now I Have Apps Doing Everything For Me

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Rich Paul, LeBron James' 33-year-old agent and longtime friend, is one of the most influential people in sports.

He orchestrated LeBron's shock return to Cleveland this summer, holding talks with the Cavs while LeBron was on vacation and negotiating an incredibly smart contract that maximizes his client's earning potential in the long term.

Joe Drape of the New York Times wrote a profile of Paul, and it sheds some new light on just how far the agent has come in the last decade.

When Paul was 21-years-old he met LeBron, who was still in high school at the time, at the airport in their hometown of Akron. He hadn't gone to college and was trying to get his throwback jersey business off the ground when he ran into LeBron.

Here's how the NYT described their first meeting:

"James, captivated by Paul’s Warren Moon throwback jersey, asked where he got it. It turned out that Paul was selling jerseys out of the trunk of his car and was going to Atlanta to buy more. He gave James his connection in Atlanta, and he told him to drop his name for a discount, and then went on his way.

"'It was fate,' Paul said. 'I could have missed the plane. I could have taken an earlier flight. I could have not worn the jersey. I could have been having a bad day and not spoken to him.'"

The two became friends. After LeBron got picked No. 1 overall in the now-legendary 2003 NBA Draft, he hired Paul on a $50,000 annual salary. Over the years Paul learned more and more about the sports business and went from LeBron's glorified personal assistant to his full-time agent.

He now represents a handful of NBA players and runs an agency called Klutch Sports Group.

Paul told the NYT that he didn't just want to be a member of LeBron's entourage, "LeBron had no obligation to me. I was not entitled to anything. I wanted to be valuable."

Paul randomly meeting teenage LeBron James at an airport is certainly a stroke of luck. But what came after — Paul turning himself into a legitimate force in the NBA world — is all Paul.

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While the U.S. is still struggling to deal with a surge of unaccompanied child immigrants from Central America at its southern border, Europe is also dealing with a heartbreaking immigration crisis.

One particular problem spot is Morocco's border with the tiny Spanish enclave Melilla on the Mediterranean coast, where migrants attempting to flee poverty or persecution regularly face abuse from Spanish and Moroccan authorities, Human Rights Watch said Monday.

Morocco has estimated there are between 25,000 and 40,000 such migrants in the country. Many of them try to reach European territory by either climbing over three six-meter-high razor-wire fences separating Morocco from the Spanish enclave Melilla or by taking a raft or boat to Melilla. 

Last week, hundreds of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa attempted to scale the three fences, with 1,300 people making the attempt on Aug. 12-13 alone, according to HRW.

Video footage appears to show uniformed officers belonging to Spain's Guardia Civil paramilitary national police force beating migrants with batons as they scaled the middle fence, causing one to fall off. A Spanish judge recently affirmed the entire triple fence is in Spanish territory.

While three migrants were reportedly transported to Spanish hospitals Aug. 13, journalists at the scene claimed other injured migrants were left on the ground without medical attention for hours after they fell off the fence. 

The video also allegedly shows evidence of Guardia Civil officers marching two migrants from the Spanish side of the border back to the Moroccan side, which journalists present also confirmed. That would constitute a violation of Spanish law requiring Guardia Civil officers to bring migrants caught entering Spain to a police station for identification and the beginning of a deportation process that lets the migrants seek international protection, reported HRW.

You can watch the video here:

Over the two-day period of Aug. 12-13, Guardia Civil officers summarily returned 60 migrants to Morocco, and the fate of the hundreds of others was not known, according to HRW, citing reporting by El Diario. 

The migrants used makeshift ladders to scale the fence and threw rocks at police, the Associated Press reported Aug. 12, citing a Spanish Interior Ministry statement. Some stayed on top of the fence for several hours, although only 30 of 700 migrants made it across the fences that day, according to the Associated Press.

HRW is calling for Spain to stop summary returns of migrants to Morocco and investigate evidence that Guardia Civil officers have beaten migrants at the fence. “Spain’s right to secure its borders doesn’t give it carte blanche to abuse migrants,” said Benjamin Ward, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia Division at Human Rights Watch. “The government in Madrid and local authorities in Melilla need to stop these illegal pushbacks and take action against any Guardia Civil officers who use excessive force against migrants.”

Even before migrants attempt to cross into Melilla, they face abuse in Morocco, which has coordinated with the EU on border security and management since the 1990s. Moroccan police allegedly raid crude migrant campsites near the borders with Algeria and Melilla, burning shelters, beating occupants, and removing them from the country without due process, according to a February HRW report.

Of 67 sub-Saharan migrants interviewed by HRW for the report, 42 recounted frequent police raids allegedly involving arrests without charges, destruction of shelters, and theft of property by authorities. And 37 of the 67 migrants claimed Moroccan authorities violated national and international law by expelling them at the border with Algeria without considering their documentation, status as refugees or asylum-seekers, or granting them the right to an interpreter and lawyer. 

Those interviews also revealed alleged abuses by Spain's Guardia Civil officers. "The Guardia Civil summarily removed migrants who entered Melilla and handed them over to Moroccan border patrols at the Melilla-Morocco border, at which point the Moroccan authorities beat the border crossers, including children," the February HRW report said.

Several thousand migrants make their tent cities on the side of a mountain overlooking Melilla, reports RT. On multiple days each week, migrants rush down Gurugu Mountain in waves to climb the fence.

One migrant named Idriss had this to say to RT about raids on the mountain regularly carried out by Moroccan authorities:

Almost every day, at dawn, the Moroccan soldiers leave their base at the foot of Gurugu, come to our camp and destroy everything. They pull down the tents, set fire to them, throw away the food, steal the little money we have, our phones. And if they can catch anyone then they arrest him and beat him, and then take him to Rabat [the capital]. We fall over the cliffs, many of us fracture arms and legs, we are hurt and we have no medicine to treat us. Over the years we have stopped counting the dead.

SEE ALSO: Here's Where Each State's Immigrant Populations Come From

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The police leader with authority over the policing effort of the racially-charged protests in Ferguson, Missouri, thinks "a lot" of the media has played a part in enabling the violence.

In an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday morning, Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson accused reporters of swarming around agitators, giving "them a platform and glamoriz[ing] their activity."

"We have a lot of media that have not done a great job. Last night, when crowds were walking and small groups — and they got larger, and they were just walking — and then when a certain element — that criminal element, that got out here with masks on, that wanted to agitate and build up the crowd, would stop in front of the media — the media would swarm around them, give them a platform and glamorize their activity," Johnson said, according to a Mediaite video of the interview.

When the media promotes the disruptive protesters, Johnson argued, the more violent demonstrators rush to the scene.

"And then before we knew it, the crowd was 100. Now it’s 200. Now it’s 300," Johnson said. "And now those criminals began to start throwing things out of the crowd that was standing within the media."

Johnson was recently named to manage the police response to the protests, which began when 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed during an Aug. 9 encounter with police. The demonstrations have also resulted in an aggressive police crack down. Officers have repeatedly arrested journalists covering the event, including four reporters and photographers Monday night.

Johnson also made sure to praise another segment of the media — but "not all," he was sure to note — which he felt has been doing its job responsibly.

"We had a number of journalists — and not all, I want to say that now — the journalists have been on our side, they have been our partners in reporting," he said. "You know I get home each morning, I look at the news and I am really grateful to the media for what they’ve done."

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Urban Outfitters' namesake brand is struggling.

The brand's same-store sales plunged 10% in the second quarter over last year, marking the fourth straight quarter of comparable sales declines.

By comparison, same-store sales increased 21% at Free People and 6% at Anthropologie in the second quarter. 

The company blamed Urban Outfitters' poor performance on fashion misses and "what had become incessant promotional activity" in an earnings call with analysts Monday. 

President and CEO Richard Hayne outlined three key steps to returning to positive sales.

1. Raise average prices and improve fashion designs. As part of this goal, the company is planning to start selling more higher-quality fabrics.

2. Cut back on the "incessant" promotional activity that has ramped over the last year to clear out unpopular inventory.

To achieve that goal, the brand is reducing the risk associated with fashion misses by making leaner inventory orders, Hayne said.

"Given the difficult women’s apparel and accessory businesses at the Urban brand over the past nine months, those teams were rightfully very conservative when ordering initial back to school inventory," Hayne said, according to a transcript of the call. "Lean buys, combined with strong sell-throughs on a number of items have created more out of stock situations than normal."

"The merchants are now in chase mode," so improved same-store sales will be a "gradual process," he added. 

3. Better visual merchandising in stores and online. Urban Outfitters wants its stores to become a place where customers want to hang out, not just shop. The company used its newest Manhattan location in Herald Square as an example of this new store concept. The 57,000-square-foot Herald Square store contains a coffee shop, a bookstore, and a hair salon.

The company is also focused on better visuals online. Hayne cited one case where a couple items at Free People weren't selling well online, so the brand took new photos of the items.

"They went back and reshot those images and saw a fairly substantial lift in the selling," Hayne said. "It brought home to us how important the imagery is when we’re talking about web." 

SEE ALSO: Urban Outfitters Just Opened Its Most Outrageous Store Yet [PHOTOS]

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Several members of the Washington Redskins walked on to the field prior to their Monday Night Football matchup against the Cleveland Browns with their arms raised in support of Michael Brown and the city of Ferguson, Missouri.

According to CBS DC, the "hands up, don't shoot" gesture, used by citizens during protests in Ferguson, was organized by safety Brandon Meriweather (no. 31 above) and cornerback DeAngelo Hall.

“We just want to show our supporters what’s going on in St. Louis,” Meriweather told CBS DC. “We just wanted to show support.”

Here is a video taken from the stands as the players entered the field.

The tribute is reminiscent of the Miami Heat posing in hoodies to support Trayvon Martin.

While this latest tribute did not occur during the game and was not seen during ESPN's broadcast, it was on the field and while the players were in uniform. It will be interesting to see if the NFL cracks down on this and similar moves likely to occur in the coming weeks. The NFL is typically against players making statements of any sort unless organized by the league itself (e.g. wearing pink for breast cancer awareness).

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HTC makes the best Android phone. On Tuesday, it introduced what will likely be the best Windows Phone too.

Here's all you really need to know: The new device, called the HTC One M8 With Windows (what a mouthful!) is the exact same phone as the flagship device HTC launched this spring except it's running the Windows Phone operating system instead of Android.

It has the same cameras that let you change the focus of a photo after you take it. It has the same screen. The same processor. Same gorgeous metal design. The end. 

The HTC One with Windows is only going to be available in the U.S. on Verizon at first. It'll cost $100 with a two-year contract, or you can pay $30 per month for 24 months. It'll be in stores August 20.

But it's curious HTC decided to make a Windows Phone, especially when it's still struggling to make its Android phones sell at the same volume as Samsung phones. Windows Phone is still a tiny platform with less than 5% of the global smartphone market. Even though it's a decent OS, people simply aren't buying Windows Phones in large enough quantities to attract developers to the platform. That's why Windows Phone users don't get the best apps like iPhone and Android users do. If you like using the best, most popular apps, you're better off not getting a Windows Phone.

The new take on HTC's flagship will likely be the best phone running Windows — even better than Microsoft's own line of Nokia Lumia devices — but it's probably not going to be the best choice for most people. Windows Phone fans will love it, but that's about it. 

SEE ALSO: The best smartphones in the world

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