Written by Gary
DOW erases 400-point drop in Wall Street’s first trading session of 2019 (SPY +0.3%). Energy stocks outwardly lead comeback effort as oil prices spike.
Here is the current market situation from CNN Money | |
North and South American markets are broadly higher today with shares in Brazil leading the region. The Bovespa is up 3.60% while Mexico’s IPC is up 0.90% and U.S.’s S&P 500 is up 0.33%. |
What Is Moving the Markets
Here are the headlines moving the markets. | |
GM sold 200,000 electric vehicles in U.S. by 2018, triggering tax-credit phaseout: sourceGeneral Motors Co hit 200,000 total electric vehicles sold in the United States by the end of 2018, reaching a threshold that triggers a phase-out of a $7,500 federal tax credit over the next 15 months, a person briefed on the matter said Wednesday. | |
Stocks sag while bonds, yen rally to open new yearStocks around the world treaded water to ring in the new year while safe-haven assets including bonds, gold and the Japanese yen rallied on Wednesday as Chinese and European economic data bolstered concerns of a slowdown in global growth. | |
Wall Street erases losses as bank, energy stocks lead pullbackWall Street was little changed on Wednesday, clawing back from losses of more than 1 percent earlier, as gains in energy and bank stocks helped offset worries about a global economic slowdown. | |
Google wins U.S. approval for radar-based hand motion sensorAlphabet Inc’s Google unit won approval from U.S. regulators to deploy a radar-based motion sensing device known as Project Soli. | |
Netflix poaches Activision’s Neumann for CFO roleNetflix Inc said on Wednesday it had appointed media finance veteran Spencer Neumann from Activision Blizzard as its chief financial officer. | |
Oil jumps 4 percent, but demand concerns still weighOil prices rose 4 percent in choppy trading on Wednesday, but concerns remained about rising crude production and weakening global economic growth which could hurt demand for oil. | |
Tesla shares drop on price cut, disappointing Model 3 deliveriesShares in Tesla Inc dropped as much as 9 percent on Wednesday after the electric car maker cut U.S. prices for all its vehicles to offset lower green tax credits and fell short on deliveries of its mass-market Model 3 sedans in the fourth quarter. | |
Prosecutor drops insider trading case against former Deutsche Boerse CEOThe Frankfurt prosecutor’s office has dropped an insider trading case against former Deutsche Boerse Chief Executive Carsten Kengeter in exchange for payments of almost 5 million euros ($5.68 million). | |
Hyundai flags tough 2019 as U.S., China demand stays slowSouth Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group flagged another year of tepid car sales growth on the back of a slow 2018, saying trade protectionism adds uncertainty and major markets such as the United States and China remained sluggish. | |
Trump’s China Strategy Isn’t Working (And The US Is Ill-Prepared)Authored by Anne Stevenson-Yang, op-ed via Bloomberg.com, The administration’s scattershot approach is ineffective, if not harmful to U.S. interests. And it’s only amplifying Beijing’s nationalist tune. The Trump administration’s willingness to push the Chinese harder on trade has struck a bilateral chord. Beijing is listening. So far, so good. Now the question is what the U.S. wants to achieve. Answer: the total destruction of China as a competitor. That isn’t a trade goal, and the demands being made contradict one another. This aim also unnecessarily awakens Beijing’s deepest nationalist fears. Unsure what to offer next – and convinced that the U.S. effectively persuaded Canada to take an executive at Huawei Technologies Co. hostage – China is falling back on familiar jingoistic strategies and rhetoric. Things are likely to get much worse from here. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is incurring pain that the Trump administration seeks to alleviate wit … | |
Trump Blames December Stock Plunge On “Little Glitch”Speaking in a Cabinet meeting from The White House, President Trump suggested that December’s bloodbath in stocks was a “little glitch” and that as soon as he has the trade deal “fixed,” stocks will gain once again…
So Trump appears to have removed the blame for the collapse from Jay Powell’s shoulders and taken them upon his own – signaling that the “glitch” was due to his trade war… not rate-hikes? So, Trump’s trade war sparked the worst December “glitch” since the Great Depression? | |
Bizarre Repo Rate Surge Continues And Nobody Can Explain WhyYesterday we showed what was arguably the strangest move that took place on the last trading day of 2018, when the overnight general collateral repo rate shot up from 2.5% last Friday to as high as 6.125% on Monday, the biggest one day move on record, bringing overnight GC repo to the highest level since January 2001. While violent year-end moves are well-known in the overnight funding markets, the magnitude of yesterday’s surge was simply unprecedented, and commenting on the GC Repo surge, Scott Skyrm, EVP at Curvature Securities said that “the cash never came in,” noting that while “funding pressure should be about 50 basis points” and yet what we got was “350 basis points.” While clearly there was something amiss with year end liquidity – in a day in which the 1 Year yield closed above both 5Y and 7Y yields – the record spike in repo still left rates traders scratching their heads, with Skyrm warning that market participants may have to start pricing in the fact that if repo rates “spike up a bit, they could go much higher.” He was right, because one day after GC repo normalized on January 1 … | |
Former NY Times Boss Slams Newspaper Over Anti-Trump CoverageA former New York Times executive editor has slammed her former employer for being “unmistakably anti-Trump,” while invoking Steve Bannon’s claim that the mainstream media has become the “opposition party” united against the president, according to Fox News. Jill Abramson, who led the Times from 2011 to 2014, knocked the newspaper for exploiting financial incentives to bash Trump and says that the bias has eroded the paper’s credibility. In her upcoming book, “Merchants of Truth,” Abramson puts the news industry under a microscope – at times defending her former employer, while levying harsh criticism for her successor, Dean Baquet. “Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” writes Abramson – who says the Washington Post is no different. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.” Citing legendary 20th century publisher Adolph Ochs, Abramson said “the more anti-Trump the Times was perceived to be, the more it was mistrusted for being biased. Ochs’s vow to cover the news without fear … | |
Record number of British citizens seek Irish passports as Brexit loomsHolders of an Irish passport can continue to enjoy the benefits of EU membership, including the right to live and work in all member states without a visa. | |
Olive Garden parent Darden Restaurants, Chick-fil-A are names to watch in 2019Olive Garden may be the best known name in the Darden Restaurants Inc. portfolio, but it’s just one piece of what makes Darden an RBC Capital Markets top stock pick for 2019. | |
Grubhub is one stock that could more than double in 2019, Stephens saysOnline financial services provider Enova International Inc. has the most upside potential of stocks included in Stephens’ list of best ideas for 2019, with a stock price target that is 131% above its current trading level. |
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