Bad day for bitcoin as it dives below $15,000 – as Ripple loses a third of its value January 8, 2018 What a difference a month makes. Having touched $20,000 in December, today bitcoin fell below $15,000 again, as fellow cryptocurrency Ripple lost a third of its value. Bitcoin’s almost 10 per cent fall, to just over $14,800, came a week before the first bitcoin futures were due to expire. In December the Chicago Board Options [...]
London’s investors are more worried about low interest rates than Brexit, reveals a Rathbones survey January 8, 2018 Savers and high-net-worth investors based in London are more bothered about low interest rates and overall economic uncertainty than Brexit, a new study has revealed. Only 26 per cent of investors in the capital claimed to consider Brexit as a substantial threat to their finances, a survey by Rathbone Investment Management found, while a hefty [...]
Santander partners with China’s biggest retailer JD.com to allow firms to sell products in Chinese market January 8, 2018 Santander UK is partnering with China’s biggest retailer, JD.com, to allow its business customers to launch products in the Chinese market. Small and medium-sized enterprise customers at Santander will now be able to launch stores on JD.com if they have international trading experience and a turnover of at least £10m. Read more: Liam Fox travels [...]
More than half of Heathrow’s 79,000 noise complaints last year came from 10 people January 8, 2018 Heathrow received 78,794 noise complaints last year, and 62 per cent of those were made by 10 people, according to new figures from the airport. The 10 people who made the most complaints last year accounted for 48,562 complaints, while 2,775 individuals filed a complaint over 2017. Some 1,566 complainants contacted Heathrow once, while 10 [...]
Joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin’s market cap just shot past $2bn January 8, 2018 The market cap of a joke cryptocurrency has doubled in less than a week, shooting past the $2bn mark in the latest sign of the craziness of the crypto world. Dogecoin, based on a Shiba Inus dog internet meme which first emerged in 2013, had already hit the headlines last week when it passed the [...]
Micro Focus share price plummets after putting “operational improvement plans on hold” January 8, 2018 Shares in Micro Focus, the UK’s biggest technology firm, dived this morning after the group reported sales had dipped. Micro Focus, which bought Hewlett Packard Enterprise Software last year, was the biggest faller on the FTSE 100, initially falling over 12 per cent before easing back. Shares are currently 9.45 per cent lower. Reported six-month [...]
Dialog Semiconductor share price rises as Apple supplier reports record Q4 revenue ahead of forecast January 8, 2018 Dialog Semiconductor has reported record revenue for the fourth quarter, beating its own forecasts. The figures The preliminary figures for the quarter came in at $463m, a rise of 27 per cent on the same time last year. In November 2017, the chipmaker had forecast revenue of between $415m and $455m. Full-year revenue is now [...]
DEBATE: Should we subsidise farmers for providing ‘public goods’, like protecting the environment? January 8, 2018 Should we subsidise farmers for providing ‘public goods’, like protecting the environment? Warwick Lightfoot, director of economics at Policy Exchange and lead author of Farming Tomorrow, says YES. Brexit presents a big opportunity to improve the way we support farming and put the consumer at the heart of food policy. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy [...]
The next frontier for insurtech is reinventing insurance itself January 8, 2018 In 2015, when I first invested in an insurance technology startup, the term “insurtech” hadn’t been coined, and the explosion of investment in insurance was yet to begin. Fast-forward three years, and the landscape has changed immeasurably. Over $230m was invested in insurtech globally in 2015, growing to over $500m in 2016. Despite the fanfare, [...]
London Stock Exchange Group’s LCH clearing arm enjoys record year January 8, 2018 The London Stock Exchange (LSE) Group’s LCH clearing arm processed a record volume of derivatives over the course of 2017, ahead of an expansion further into servicing growing Asian markets. The notional value of interest rate derivatives processed by LCH reached over $873 trillion during the course of 2017, according to data to be published [...]