Trade Finance

The most widely monitored ‘fear gauge’ on Wall Street has fallen to its lowest level since 1993, helped by one of the strongest corporate earnings seasons in years, geopolitical risks around North Korea cooling off, and Emmanuel Macron’s French presidential victory removing a possible source of upset across Europe.

The CBOE Volatility Index, better known as the VIX and the most widely followed barometer of expected near-term stock market volatility, closed at 9.77, its lowest close since December 1993, according to Bloomberg data.

The index is the most widely followed barometer of expected near-term stock market volatility and tends to spike when there are potential sources of shock on the horizon. But analysts said this week that there are no obvious risky events immediately in the pipeline and macro-economic data has been relatively robust too.

Apple is the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, and it just broke its own record. Shares opened at $149.06 a piece on Monday, with 5.2 billion outstanding shares. Following a positive analyst report, Apple’s shares rose over 3% in midday trading to a record high of $153.70. At one point, the company’s market value rose above $800 billion before retreating below that barrier. Apple’s shares closed up 2.7% for the day at $153.01, good for a market value of $797.8 billion.

Continuous asset building requires a systematic concept of proven strategies that together form a trading system. In bullish market phases, we add to the portfolio high-quality equities, which have stable trends, while as few market profits as possible in bear market phases. We show you two profitable core strategies, based on a proven Relative Strength concept with an optimized trend filter in the equity sector. From numerous strategies we have made a selection and combined them into a trading system. This concept of asset building is referred to as "World Wide Stock" trading system, WWA for short. Only a predefined selection of international equities is traded. The entry and exit signals provide individual strategies. In this article, we will present the two main SIMA and SAKIR strategies and will present the underlying rules. Apart from these two Long-Strategies, the complete WWA trading system also consists of four other Short-Strategies. Each strategy is profitable.

…this market is like the old Barcelona playing tiki taka with me and my fellow value investors

JP Morgan’s corporate investment banking division CEO Daniel Pinto announced Tuesday that one of the bank’s clients used their cell phone to make a $100 million trade. One of the most respected senior executives in the industry highlights the changes that are coming to institutional FX trading at a time when his company invested $9.5 billion in new technology. Pinto’s announcement Tuesday may be proof the investments were worth the risk.

New cartoon animation on social media; actor sir Michael Gambon partners with Aberdeen Asset Management in “The fables of fixed income”

Will Robo Advisors ever replace the human work force, and what influence will this have on the markets?

Snap, the owner of messaging app Snapchat, filed public documents for a share offering Thursday, seeking to raise up to $3 billion in a keenly anticipated Wall Street debut.

The California-based tech firm, which allows users to send images that vanish within seconds, was expected to be one of the biggest tech company IPOs in recent years with a valuation likely to top $20 billion.
The company revealed in the documents that it made sales of $404m last year, but a loss of $515m.
In outlining its business plan, Snap said it generates revenue primarily through advertising and emphasized its willingness to take risks to drive user engagement at numerous points throughout the filing.