Year: 2020

Top news and what to watch in the markets on Thursday, October 29, 2020. …read more […]

(Bloomberg) — Oil fell to a four-month low, deepening Wednesday’s slump as lockdown restrictions grow in Europe.Futures in London lost 3.9%, declining as the dollar reversed an earlier loss to trade higher. Germany and France, the European Union’s two biggest economies, will clamp down on movement for at least a month to try and curb Covid-19’s spread. There are already signs that road use in Europe is slumping, weighing on oil consumption.As the impact of the virus rears its head across markets once again, oil is also contending with supply issues too. American crude inventories rose the most since July …read more […]

Apple is set to report fiscal fourth-quarter earnings after market close on Thursday. …read more […]

Royal Dutch Shell on Thursday raised its dividend after easily beating quarterly profit forecasts and outlined plans to shrink its oil and gas operations as it presses forward with a transition to low-carbon energy. The Anglo-Dutch company hit record earnings from its vast retail division, despite the impact on demand of the COVID-19 pandemic, which it said continued to generate “significant uncertainty”. In a sign of renewed confidence, Shell said it would boost its dividend on an annual basis after it cut the payout in April for the first time since the 1940s. …read more […]

(Bloomberg) — Royal Dutch Shell Plc raised its dividend and pledged to grow the payout steadily, just six months after slashing it for the first time since the Second World War.Amid a painful year for Big Oil, the Anglo-Dutch energy giant offered investors some good news. It also reported a larger-than-expected profit for the third quarter, lower net debt and strong cash flow, even as most of its divisions continued to be battered by the coronavirus pandemic.Shell’s dividend for the quarter will increase by 4% to 16.65 cents a share and increase annually thereafter, the company said in a statement …read more […]

Nokia cut its full-year profit forecast on Thursday even as the telecom network equipment maker’s quarterly underlying profit met expectations in its first earnings under new CEO Pekka Lundmark. The Finnish firm also announced a new strategy under which it will have four business groups: mobile networks, IP and fixed networks, cloud and network services and Nokia technologies, from January. “We expect to stabilise our financial performance in 2021 and deliver progressive improvement towards our long-term goal after that,” Lundmark said in a statement. …read more […]

(Bloomberg) — Asian stocks dropped Thursday after shares tumbled in the U.S. and Europe, as rising coronavirus infections and tougher lockdowns added to worries about the economic hit from the pandemic. U.S. futures rebounded from the worst of the overnight declines.Losses were more modest across Asia than in the American session, with shares in South Korea and Australia faring worst, while Japan erased earlier declines. S&P 500 contracts climbed about 1% after the benchmark lost 3.5% Wednesday — its biggest drop since June. The dollar gave back some of its overnight advance and 10-year Treasury yields held at 0.78%. Oil …read more […]

(Bloomberg) — Central banks became gold sellers for the first time since 2010 as some producing nations exploited near-record prices to soften the blow from the coronavirus pandemic.Net sales totaled 12.1 tons of bullion in the third quarter, compared with purchases of 141.9 tons a year earlier, according to a report by the World Gold Council. Selling was driven by Uzbekistan and Turkey, while Russia’s central bank also posted its first quarterly sale in 13 years.While inflows into exchange-traded funds have driven gold’s advance in 2020, buying by central banks has helped underpin bullion in recent years. Citigroup Inc. last …read more […]

Britain believes that the vaccine, which Pfizer is co-developing with Germany’s BioNTech SE , could be ready to distribute before Christmas, the report said. Pfizer’s Chief Executive Albert Bourla has previously said the company could release data on whether or not the vaccine works as early as this month. The U.S. drugmaker said this week if trials are successful the company expects to file for emergency authorization of the vaccine candidate from U.S. regulators shortly after it has enough safety data in late November. …read more […]

Remdesivir brought in $873 million in the quarter, below analysts’ estimates of $960 million, according to Refinitiv IBES data. Gilead Chief Commercial Officer Johanna Mercier said that although the United States saw a surge in COVID-19 cases over the summer, many were younger people and hospitalization rates actually dropped. “Our assumption is in light of the surge this fall both in Europe and the U.S., those numbers will pop back up,” she said. …read more […]

(Bloomberg) — For fragile oil markets, the outcome of next week’s U.S. election poses yet another risk: the prospect that major producer Iran may regain its role in international trade.Challenger Joe Biden, leading in most polls, has signaled he’ll seek to bring Iran back into the 2015 nuclear accord the U.S. brokered when he was vice president under Barack Obama. That means the economic sanctions President Donald Trump imposed — and tightened further this week — could eventually be eased, opening the sluices for more than 2 million barrels a day of Iranian crude exports.The timing for the oil market …read more […]

More dilution could be on the way for beleaguered shareholders of Aurora Cannabis (ACB). The company gave note of a preliminary prospectus, which over the next 25 months authorizes the Canadian cannabis player to issue up to US$500 million in securities. The prospectus also noted exhaustion of the company’s ATM, through which it has raised gross proceeds of US$214.7 million since its fiscal fourth quarter.Aurora might have all sorts of issues, but it is an expert at issuing shares. Over the past 6 years, the share count has increased by almost 9,250%.Jefferies analyst Owen Bennett is not surprised by the …read more […]

(Bloomberg) — Taiwan’s United Microelectronics Corp. pledged “substantial assistance” to the U.S. in a high-profile trade-secrets prosecution of Chinese chipmaker Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co.UMC pleaded guilty Wednesday in San Francisco federal court in a deal with U.S. prosecutors, who agreed to drop serious charges of economic espionage and conspiracy for the alleged theft of proprietary information from Idaho-based Micron Technology Inc. UMC instead admitted to trade-secret theft and agreed to pay a $60 million fine.The guilty plea resolves one piece of a complicated, international prosecution of an allegedly illegal transfer of Micron’s memory design in a chip manufacturing deal …read more […]

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