In recent years the idea that no person or fund can consistently outperform the wider stock market by skill alone has been fashionable. Emboldened by traditional investment houses haemorrhaging market share to automated passive funds, the once-maligned advocates of the efficient market hypothesis have revised their mantra: you can’t beat the market, so buy an exchange traded fund instead. Outsiders listening in to this debate may conclude […]
Barely a year ago, Vale, the Brazilian mining company, was reeling. Prices of iron ore, its principal export, were at an all-time low, investors were ditching its shares and China — the market on which it most depends — looked as if it was heading for a rapid and uncontrolled slowdown. Fast forward 13 months and iron ore is back in fashion. Vale is producing record amounts […]
French government debt has capped its best run since the aftermath of Britain’s vote for Brexit, underlining the rapid shift in investor sentiment towards the country’s presidential election which now looms over financial markets. The yield on the 10-year French bond dropped to its lowest in a month, as money managers and traders continued to take succour after centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron received the backing of potential […]
Success for banks selling large blocks of stock in the European market this year points to a supportive environment for new listings in the months ahead, bankers say. There have been 70 such accelerated offerings so far this year according to Dealogic, worth €11.3bn, more than double the €5.5bn sold in the same period a year ago when anxiety about the state of China’s economy prompted much […]
Emerging market equity funds attracted the most money from investors in six months, as resilience in commodity prices and signs of improvement across the world’s major economies sharpened investors’ appetite. The EM funds secured $2.7bn this week, with exchange traded funds pulling in $1.8bn of the total, according to data from EPFR. Interest in EM equities was mirrored by bond investors, who handed EM debt funds $1.3bn. […]
A striking feature of global financial markets since the crises of 2007 and 2008 has been the high propensity of many wealthy private investors to sit out all the turmoil, holding cash in bank accounts rather than in riskier assets. Might that be about to change? The word among bankers in conservative Switzerland — the world’s largest centre for cross-border private wealth management — is that it […]
As Comcast last year conducted secret talks about a potential acquisition of DreamWorks Animation, five Chinese investors — including an elderly couple in Beijing — acquired an enormous stake in the storytelling studio. Over a three-week period ending on April 25, those five accounts purchased more than 2.1m DreamWorks shares, amounting to nearly 17 per cent of all trading in the stock, according to the Securities and […]
Currency traders are in a bind. Has the dollar rally run out of steam and is it ripe for a big sell-off, or has bullish momentum paused ahead of another leg higher? Here are the pros and cons for the currency as we approach several key events in February. What’s bugging the dollar? Investors’ second thoughts. Dollar trading in recent months can be split into three phases. […]
The UAE’s non-oil foreign trade totalled AED1.172 trillion ($320 billion) for the first nine months of 2016, up by 0.1 percent on the same period in the previous year. Preliminary data of the Federal Customs Authority (FCA) indicated that the share of imports in the UAE’s total non-oil trade amounted to AED721.2 billion, a rise of 1 percent. Native gold and semi-processed gold topped the list of […]
If protectionism is about to be unleashed by Donald Trump on America’s closest trading partners, foreign exchange traders are acknowledging the threat in a funny old way. On Wednesday, when Mr Trump issued an executive order to build a wall on the Mexican border, the peso rallied more than 2 per cent. Since slumping to a record low of 22.03 pesos two weeks ago, the currency has […]
January 26, 2017 by: Eric Platt and Joe Rennison in New York The combination of rebounding commodity prices and hopes for faster US economic growth under Donald Trump is helping some of the riskiest corporate borrowers secure cheaper financing and underlines investors’ growing stomach for risk. An expanding list of companies with a triple-C rating — deep within speculative territory — have been able to lock in […]
Dow 20,000 is here at last. No regular reader — or indeed, any sentient and sensible human being — should base any investment decision on the Dow. Its methodological flaws are irremediable. And in any case, round numbers should not matter. One brief illustration of the Dow’s primitive methodology will suffice. Just five of its stocks — Goldman Sachs, IBM, Boeing, UnitedHealth and JPMorgan Chase — account […]
Bloomberg has gone where MSCI feared to tread, becoming only the second major index provider to include China’s onshore markets in widely-followed benchmark indices in a move that could prompt rivals to follow suit. China is home to the world’s second-largest stock market and the third-largest bond markets, but its tight control of onshore activity has made its inclusion in flagship indices contentious, with many investors arguing […]
Of the many quandaries investors must grapple with this year, high on their list is Donald Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin. Not far behind is this — should they throw off their instinctive caution about Russia and its president, and push the rouble a lot higher? The turnround in the Russian rouble’s fortunes largely reflects the recovery in the price of oil, the country’s biggest export. That […]
Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry saw its network of members grow by 9 percent, or 16,800 companies in 2016, bringing the organisation’s total membership to 201,000 by the end of the year. The increase strengthens the Chamber’s position as one of the largest membership-based chambers of commerce in the world, it said in a statement. It said the total value of members’ exports and re-exports amounted […]
Investor optimism faded in the week preceding the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president, with equity funds suffering their largest outflows since the surprise result of November’s election. Close to $2.5bn fled US equity funds in the week ending Wednesday, according to data from EPFR Global, extending outflows of $250m from the prior week and demonstrating that the investor demand that drove more than $60bn of […]
Investors have returned to the world of debt in a cooling of the Trumpflation trade that pummelled bond markets and propelled equities to record highs after the US election. The shift, which has included fresh inflows to municipal, Treasury and emerging market bond funds over the past week, dovetails with a near month-long rally in haven US Treasuries and fatigue in benchmark stock indices. Municipal funds, which […]
Rainfall records are being broken in the San Francisco Bay Area: six inches since the start of the year, the most since 1982. Local drivers react by randomly deploying wipers, brakes and lights; it is no surprise that autonomous cars are being developed here. Other Silicon Valley records look equally hazardous. The technology-dominated Nasdaq Composite index has set further highs this week and stands more than 10 […]
Theresa May, the UK prime minister, bookended a volatile week for sterling, prompting a sharp rise in the cost of hedging against falls in the pound as she prepares to set out more information about her Brexit negotiating strategy. The pound rallied against the dollar on Friday, at one stage rising 0.6 per cent to regain the $1.22 mark. But traders are positioned for sterling to fall, […]
Investors drew a line in the sand on Wednesday, forcing companies to rewrite bond documents in a stinging rejection of covenant packages that were seen as hostile to bondholders. Marketing material for bond offers by General Motors’ financial subsidiary, chipmaker Broadcom and the Brazilian pulp manufacturer Fibria Celulose dropped language that deprived investors of certain premiums should the companies breach their covenants and default, according to three people with knowledge […]
The debate about “fake news” has gripped politics since the election of Donald Trump in November and has entered markets as investors spar over a “great rotation” from bonds into stocks. Long predicted by some analysts, expectations of a pronounced rotation out of low-yielding bonds and defensive share sectors into areas of the equity market that prosper from faster economic growth have been heightened by the prospect […]
As the first battery cells roll off the production line at Tesla’s 1.9m sq ft Gigafactory in Nevada a scramble is under way to secure supply of the lithium that is their key ingredient. This week a small Australian mining company sold a lithium prospect in west Africa to a Chinese buyer for $78m — or more than 2,000 times the amount it paid for the deposit […]
After a near double-digit rally in US stocks since Donald Trump’s election victory, the question for investors is whether the outlook for corporate profits can begin to justify investors’ newfound optimism. Much of the rally has been underpinned by hopes that a Trump administration will boost corporate profits through lower corporate taxes, a more accommodative regulatory regime and a more confident US consumer. Corporate chief executives will […]
While 2016 was the year the unlikely became real, currency investors enter 2017 no better equipped to tell the difference between reality and illusion. Brexit and Trump made a mockery of assumptions, shredded investors’ best-laid plans and turned political risk analysts into the most in-demand advisers of the year. The two big themes of 2016 will feel palpable during the first quarter of 2017. Donald Trump takes […]
