Photo Credit: ashokboghani This should be a brief article. I remember back in 1999 to early 2000 how P&C insurance stocks and other boring slower-growth industries were falling in price despite growing net worth, and reasonable earnings. I was working for The St. Paul at the time (a Property & Casualty Insurer), and for an investment actuary like me, who grew up in the life insurance business it was interesting to see the different philosophy of the industry. Shorter-duration products make competition more obvious, making downturns uglier. The market in 1999-2000 got narrow. Few groups and few stocks were leading the rise. Performan...
Shares of Juno Therapeutics (JUNO) are on the rise after the Wall Street Journal reported that the company is in talks to be acquired by Celgene (CELG). Several Wall Street analysts commented on the news, with Leerink’s Michael Schmidt saying a deal could make potential strategic and operational sense and his peer at Citi arguing that Juno could be worth $110 per share in a takeover. POTENTIAL ACQUISITION BY CELGENE: Following a report by The Wall Street Journal saying Celgene is in talks to possibly buy Juno Therapeutics, Wells Fargo analyst Jim Birchenough raised his price target for the latter to $63 from $54, while reiterating a Mar...
Have you been eager to see how U.S. Bancorp (USB – Free Report) performed in Q4 in comparison with the market expectations? Let’s quickly scan through the key facts from this Minneapolis-based popular bank’s earnings release this morning: An Earnings Beat U.S. Bancorp came out with adjusted earnings per share of 88 cents that surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 87 cents. Higher revenues and lower provisions were partially offset by elevated expenses. How Was the Estimate Revision Trend? You should note that the earnings estimate revisions for U.S. Bancorp remained stable prior to the earnings release. The Zacks Consensus E...
Photo Credit: Garrett Heath/Flickr.com Last year, Billion Dollar Unicorn club member MongoDB (Nasdaq: MDB) went public and became the first non-Hadoop Big Data vendor to do so. Since its listing, the stock has had a roller coaster ride, but despite the misses, has maintained its Unicorn status. Here is a quick look at its financials and performance so far. MongoDB’s Financials New York-based MongoDB was founded in 2007 by entrepreneurs Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz. It has developed the NoSQL technology that can naturally scale-out architecture. Its technology allows organizations to string together commodity hardware to handle inc...
Yesterday’s ‘spike’ in VIX – to its highest since Dec 1st – is continuing this morning… (note: this is highly unusual relative to the recent regime of instant reversion lower in vol) But what is most unnerving for many is relative to European volatility, this is the highest since August 2015… As U.S. stocks failed to hold a fresh record, VIX jumped 15% on Tuesday, while the VStoxx Index remained near a record low. The last time US VIX was this high relative to European equity VIX was in August 2015 – when the S&P crashed 11% in 4 days after China’s surprise devaluation… ...
The Mother of All Blow-Offs We didn’t really plan on writing about investor sentiment again so soon, but last week a few articles in the financial press caught our eye and after reviewing the data, we thought it would be a good idea to post a brief update. When positioning and sentiment reach levels that were never seen before after the market has gone through a blow-off move for more than a year, it may well be that it means something for once. Sloshed as we are… a group of professional investors prepares for a day of hard work on Wall Street. The tedium of a market that goes up a little bit every day, day in day out, is taking its t...
US-based researchers have established a link between a recent hacking operation targeting South Korean cryptocurrency holders and a Pyongyang-based hacker group. The hacker group, known as Lazarus, is the same outfit thought to have carried out the WannaCry attack and the high-profile assault against Sony Pictures Entertainment. Lazarus is believed to be at the heart of a state-sponsored hacking offensive, which has targeted financial institutions in order to raise funds for the cash-strapped North Korean government. It is known as Hidden Cobra by the US government, and has also launched attacks on US and South Korean websites. “This late 2...
At the beginning of every year, we update what’s typically one of our most popular pages, the Periodic Table of Commodity Returns. I encourage you to explore 10 years’ worth of data on basic materials such as aluminum, zinc and everything in between. A word of warning, though—the interactive feature makes the table highly addictive. Please feel free to share it with friends and family! It was a photo finish for commodities in 2017. The group, as measured by the Bloomberg Commodity Index, barely eked out a win for the second straight year, edging up 0.7 percent. Spurred by a weaker U.S. dollar and strengthening materials demand from fa...
During yesterday’s session silver moved back and forth in a volatile manner on volume that was the highest since April 2013. There were a few volume spikes in the meantime, but none as big as what we saw yesterday. The silver market is being very loud. But are you listening? It may be hard to notice silver’s signs with all that’s happening in the USD Index and given the rally in gold stocks, but it’s definitely worth it. Let’s investigate (charts courtesy of StockCharts). The volume in silver was epic. One could say that it’s because there was no regular session on Monday, but during the previous years there were also other c...
Shares of IBM (IBM) are on the rise after Barclays analyst Mark Moskowitz upgraded the stock two notches to Overweight, a buy-equivalent rating, as he believes the company could be entering a period of top-line stability and maybe even modest growth over the next 12 to 18 months. BUY IBM: In a research note to investors this morning, Barclays’ Moskowitz double upgraded IBM to Overweight from Underweight and raised his price target on the shares to $192 from $133. Moskowitz believes the technology giant could be entering a period of top-line stability and maybe even modest growth over the next year to year and a half. Furthermore, the an...