Looking to the financial markets it is always a human game. Fear and greed are always present. In these last periods we can note two human sentiments facing each other: on the one hand, increasing optimism, which is an anticipation of future greed: stock markets continue to rise steadily with such low volatility that the market’s fractality has been temporarily replaced by an incredible linearity.
The European equity indexes are delivering bullish signals in these early sessions of 2018, even if some weakness at the end of last year gave room to concerns regarding the persistence of the trend.
The European markets, which performances have been generally positive but much less euphoric than those of Wall Street, have been laggards in 2017. Rather than a linear uptrend, like that of the U.S. benchmarks, the main equity indexes in Europe were roller coasters along the year. A corrective wave during the summer corresponded to the sharp rally of the Euro against the U.S. Dollar and this is not a coincidence: a stronger currency, as everyone knows, does not help the stock market.
Syngenta AG announces that today it will file the relevant form with the Securities Exchange Commission (“SEC”) in order to voluntarily delist its American Depositary Shares (“ADSs”) from the New York Stock Exchange (“NYSE”). The delisting will become effective on January 18, 2018. NYSE has advised Syngenta AG that it will suspend trading of the ADSs prior to the market opening on January 8, 2018. As such, holders of ADSs will not be able to trade their ADSs on NYSE thereafter.
In 2007, Warren Buffett, the famed billionaire investor made a $1 million bet that an S&P 500 stock index fund would outperform a basket of hedge funds over the course of a decade.
The index fund returned 7.1% compounded annually over the 10-year period, easily beating the 2.2% average return of a basket of funds picked by asset manager Protégé Partners, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal reported that when the New York Stock Exchange closed on Friday, Dec. 29, Buffet, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., had won the bet – and it wasn’t close.
Brian Krzanich, chief executive officer of Intel, sold millions of dollars’ worth of Intel stock-all he could part with under corporate bylaws-after Intel learned of Meltdown and Spectre, two related families of security flaws in Intel processors.
While an Intel spokesperson told CBS Marketwatch reporter Jeremy Owens that the trades were "unrelated" to the security revelations, and Intel financial filings showed that the stock sales were previously scheduled, Krzanich scheduled those sales on October 30. That’s a full five months after researchers informed Intel of the vulnerabilities. And Intel has offered no further explanation of why Krzanich abruptly sold off all the stock he was permitted to.
I am closing this year with a piece dedicated to a promiseful but sneaky Supersector about which I have already discussed in two previous articles (see note 1).
Let’s start with the promiseful side: in mid May, I wrote about the STOXX Supersector Europe 600 Basic Resources Index, and the possibility for this Index to continue an intermediate uptrend after the end of a retracement period that started in late February (1).
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to clear the way for music-streaming service Spotify to go public using the unusual method of a direct listing. The successful music-streaming service Spotify will release its stocks to the public in 2018 through a direct offering instead of the traditional IPO.
Before Spotify can directly list its shares, the New York Stock Exchange must win approval from the SEC to change its rules. “The NYSE has applied for such a change and the SEC has indicated to Spotify it’s likely to approve,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
Cryptocurrency bitcoin tumbled below $14,000 briefly on the Bitstamp exchange on Friday, down roughly 30 per cent from its record top near $20,000 set at the start of the week.
The cryptocurrency which became sensational all over media reached as high as $19,666 on Sunday but dropped after the launch of giant CME Group’s bitcoin futures. The cryptocurrency was about $1,000 in the year’s beginning.
