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Financial news and stock markets.

Started by scarface, February 26, 2015, 08:28 PM

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scarface

Here is a brief overview of the markets...

And we can see a marked decline in the French Stock exchange this morning.
https://www.boursorama.com/bourse/

scarface

The stock markets are crumbling today after Trump erupted about immigration with Mexico. The cac40 is declining by 1% and the Futures dow jones are losing 200 points.

scarface

The cac 40 is dropping nearly 1.5%. In French I would call that "une énorme baffe".


Note that I had to go to Firminy, a small town southwest of Saint Etienne, to change a tire. It cost me an arm and a leg.
Before going there, I did not know that Firminy was hosting the largest site of Le Corbusier in Europe. And I visited several sites. I will talk about them during an exceptional conference tonight. I'm sure that usmangujjar, aa1234779 or Maher will enjoy the photos.

scarface

Today, I'm going to tell you what happened yesterday at the Facebook shareholder's meeting.

'Fire Zuck' projected onto location of Facebook shareholders' meeting



They say visualizing your goal is the first step toward making it a reality.

The nonprofit Fight for the Future leaned into that belief hard on Wednesday night with a giant projection calling for the firing of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Oh yeah, and it projected said message onto the side of the hotel hosting today's 11 a.m. Facebook shareholders' meeting.

"There is no single silver bullet solution that will 'fix' Facebook," the group wrote in a Medium post documenting the protest. "But we can start by sending a clear message to its shareholders, corporate leadership, & the entire tech industry that we are fed up, and that no one should be immune from facing the consequences of their actions."

The outside call to fire the CEO comes on the heels of an April proposal by Facebook investors to oust Zuckerberg. Similar discontent with the CEO was shown by investors at the 2018 shareholders' meeting. In other words, this call for charge at Facebook's top isn't new â€" although it perhaps gets more urgent with each passing scandal.

According to a Fight for the Future spokesperson, the projection was up on the side of the Hotel Nia in Palo Alto from roughly an hour until 10 p.m. last night. "[One passerby] had a FB badge and as soon as he saw the projection put his head down and walked faster," the spokesperson told us over email.

At least one other, however, seemed more amenable to the call for change â€" agreeing with the nonprofit that Facebook treats its contractors poorly.

"[The] person came out of hotel and told us he worked with FB," the spokesperson continued. "He thanked us for doing what we were doing and said he agreed with us: 'It's actually not that crazy of an idea.'"

Fight for the Future wasn't the only group with plans to protest the annual meeting. The consumer group SumOfUs has partnered with the activist group Bend the Arc to attempt to deliver a giant inflatable "angry emoji" to Zuckerberg.

Notably, Zuckerberg has the majority voting share of Facebook, so it's unlikely that any proposal calling for his ouster or the company's fragmentation will be successful. At least, not today. But hey, you never get what you want if you don't ask for it first.

scarface

Here are 2 new articles about the US economy...

And they say that a recession could hit the US pretty soon.
In French: https://www.lecho.be/economie-politique/international/usa/une-recession-se-profile-aux-etats-unis/10132672.html
In English: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/28/morgan-stanley-says-economy-on-recession-watch-amid-bond-warning.html

In any case, I advise you to be cautious with the equity market.

scarface

#165
Tonight, I'm going to hold a conference about the stock markets, with an excellent article of the columnist Mark Hulbert.

According to this specialist, Stock bulls are telling themselves a lot of lies about this market.



The U.S. stock market is overvalued now, period.

That would be worth keeping in mind at any time, of course, but especially now with the major market averages significantly off their late-April peaks. If current valuations were reasonable, then we could count on them to provide a safety net below this market.

Unfortunately we can’t. Yet many stock-market bulls contend that such a safety net does exist. Some are arguing that the stock market correction in late 2018 worked off many previous valuation excesses. One adviser Humbert monitors contended that “valuation metrics [in late April] for the S&P SPX, +1.05%  [were] much lower than where they were last year.”

And Mark Hulbert disagrees: Though valuations did improve between the market’s late-September and late-April peaks, the improvement was so slight as to barely improve equities’ outlook. Consider perhaps the most popular valuation measure: The price/earnings ratio. At the S&P 500’s late-September peak, the P/E ratio based on trailing 12 months as-reported earnings stood at 22.5. At its late-April peak, in contrast, it stood at 21.9 â€" less than 3% lower.

To understand how modest a decline that is, consider a simple econometric model that uses the P/E ratio to predict the S&P 500’s inflation-adjusted total return over the subsequent 12 months. Hulbert constructed this model using data back to 1871 from Yale University finance professor (and Nobel laureate) Robert Shiller. The reduction in P/E from September to April translates into an increased forecasted return of just 6 basis points.

Good luck with that. The message of other valuation measures is similar. Consider five on which Hulbert also focused for this column: The cyclically-adjusted P/E ratio (or CAPE), made famous by Yale’s Shiller; the price-to-book and price-to-sales ratios; the dividend yield, and the Q-Ratio (calculated by dividing market value by the replacement cost of assets). The accompanying chart shows the percentage of past bull market peaks that had lower valuations than what prevailed at the market’s late-April high.



Notice that the market at that high was more overvalued than it was at anywhere between 86% and 100% of past bull market peaks (depending on which valuation measure used). The overwhelming message: Don’t look to valuations to cushion any decline.

This doesn’t mean that a bear market began at its late-April peak, of course. The stock market has been overvalued for a number of years now and, for the most part, has continued to produce impressive returns. What the valuation measures do mean is this: You’re on shaky ground if you have been giving the bull market the benefit of the doubt because of its allegedly reasonably valuation. You either need to find some other reason to be bullish, or to reduce your bullishness.

scarface

Today I'm going to talk about the financial markets.
Given the level of the overall markets, I advise you to sell your stocks. That's what I did this morning: I sold 35% of my societe general stocks at 23.40â,¬.
https://www.boursorama.com/cours/1rPGLE/

scarface

Note that I've been right concerning Socgen...for today. The next days will say if selling above 23â,¬ was the right thing to do. I'm expecting a correction on the markets pretty soon anyway. For Socgen, the first target could be 22.1â,¬, 3% below the current level.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJH-cM3glhc

scarface

The stock markets are crumbling today.
https://www.boursorama.com/bourse/indices/cours/1rPCAC/

Note that the biggest drops are the banks.
In this context, I advise Ahmad and Maher to buy a few gold coins and some goats.

scarface

Powell is currently speaking.
The euro as well as the US markets are crumbling.
https://www.boursorama.com/bourse/devises/taux-de-change-euro-dollar-EUR-USD/

In this context, gold should go up, but it's not the case.

Live stream for the conference here: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/31/watch-fed-chair-jerome-powells-news-conference-live-following-first-rate-cut-in-a-decade.html