Recent sell-off reason to buy oil, not short it February 8, 2010 AFTER a week where the price of crude oil futures slid to below $70 a barrel and oil giants disappointed the markets with poor earnings and weak outlooks, contracts for difference (CFDs) traders might be finding it difficult to justify going long on crude right now. The markets are still cautious – sovereign debt crises [...]
IT’S STILL TOO EARLY TO STOP THE STIMULUS February 8, 2010 WE ARE two-thirds of the way through the US fourth-quarter earnings season and 74 per cent of S&P 500 firms that have already reported have beaten analysts’ estimates. A further 9 per cent were in line while 17 per cent of companies fell short. The earnings season has not been good enough so far to [...]
Benefit from yield not price February 8, 2010 THE outlook for the FTSE 100 looks bleak. Lacklustre economic growth and the prospect of rising taxes have all helped push the index down by nearly a tenth since the start of the year. With massive profits unlikely to come from stocks themselves, investors should be looking for good dividend yields. Despite the gloomy outlook, [...]
CFD ANALYST PICKS February 8, 2010 TECHNICAL STRATEGIST JOEL KRUGER My pick: Buy oil at $68 Expertise: Technical analysis Average time frame of trades: 5-10 days Explanation: The oil price has more or less been trading in a choppy consolidation over the past several months, without moving too far in any one direction. While we still see room for additional falls [...]
Rallying miners offset weaker finance firms to help the FTSE 100 edge up February 8, 2010 BRITAIN’S top share index closed 0.6 per cent higher yesterday, as gains in rebounding miners and strength in defensive issues more than offset weaker financials, which were weighed by ongoing eurozone debt issues. The FTSE 100 rose 31.41 points at 5,092.33 in choppy trade. The index fell 2.5 per cent last week, its fourth straight [...]
Eurozone debt concerns push Dow below 10,000 February 8, 2010 THE Dow industrials closed below 10,000 for the first time since November yesterday as investors sold bank shares due to heightened concerns about the eurozone’s sovereign debt troubles. Bank of America shares lost more than three per cent, while JPMorgan slipped 1.6 per cent, and Citigroup shed 2.2 per cent. The S&P financial index dropped [...]
ECONOMIC DIARY February 7, 2010 AFTER the Bank of England announced that it would be pausing, at least for now, its quantitative easing policy, the big event in the UK this week will be the quarterly inflation report on Wednesday morning. The Bank is expected to revise down its growth forecast while revising up its inflation predictions and will give [...]
Lack of confidence a country’s biggest problem February 7, 2010 THE BIGGEST problem for any country or company is a crisis of confidence. During the peak of the global recession, we saw what a lack of confidence can do to the biggest financial institutions and the richest nations in the world. Although everyone may have hoped that those problems were behind us, the rapid deleveraging [...]
Toyota is wounded but in the long term the brand is strong February 7, 2010 LAST week was surely the worst in the history of the Japanese car-maker Toyota. A global safety recall of 9m cars was projected to cost the company $2bn. The potential damage to future sales can only guessed at, but we can get a hint from what happened to its share price, which fell by more [...]
New challenge will harness Twitter power February 7, 2010 IN RECENT months, spread betting and forex trading companies have begun to really make the most of the new technologies that are changing our lives. American firm GFT and London-based City Index both offer iPhone apps so that their customers can manage their investments while they are on the move. Many other financial news providers [...]