US Continuing a monthly streak of surprises, after gapping down -0.66% immediately after Gary Cohn’s resignation as economic advisor of the current US administration, the S&P recovered, increasing 3.25% weekly. In particular all the major indexes rallied (Dow +1,77%, S&P +1,74%, Nasdaq +1,93%) on Friday as non-farm payrolls were 313k Read more…
Macro Environment 2018 is bound to be the point of inflection for the Greek economy. The Bank of Greece reports that GDP will grow 2.5% over the next two years, while the European Commission expects a 1.6% growth in 2017 – the economy’s best performance in a decade. Greece’s 10-year Read more…
The Theory Behind the Implied Vol Jump The classical Black-Scholes model for option pricing assumes that stock prices follow a Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM) with constant drift and, more relevant for the scope of this article, constant volatility (σ). Analytically: where r is the risk-free rate, q is dividend yield Read more…
US This week, the main events were the inaugural testimony by new Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell to the House Financial Services and Senate Banking Committees on Tuesday and Thursday, respectively, and the announcement that President Trump is planning to impose tariffs on steel (10%) and aluminium (25%) imports. Mr. Read more…
Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) – market cap as of 02/03/2018: $726.28bn Introduction Every time Amazon announces an acquisition, it is hard not to feel the excitement. All the more so considering that the online giant has had an uncertain relationship with M&A and has only in the recent years garnered the Read more…
Introduction The Direct Listing process, also known as Direct Public Offering (DPO), is a procedure by which companies can have their shares publicly traded on an exchange without the assistance of an investment bank. The company, indeed, will just have to submit the necessary documents for the listing, look for Read more…
Daimler AG (ETR: DAI) – Market Cap €72.05 bn Geely Automobiles Holding Ltd.(HKG: 0175) – Market Cap HKD 222.96bn (€23 bn) Introduction On 23rd of February, the Chinese car manufacturer Geely announced that it had gathered a 9.7% stake of the German automotive colossus Daimler. This came as a surprise Read more…
Temenos Group (SWX:TEMN) – market cap as of 23/02/2018: CHF7.60bn Fidessa Group (LON:FDSA) – market cap as of 23/02/2018: GBP1.47bn Introduction On February 21st, 2018, the boards of both Temenos and Fidessa have reached an agreement for the takeover of the former over the latter for £1.4 billion. The two Read more…
Rite Aid (NYSE:RAD) – market cap as of 23/02/2018: $2.22bn Introduction On the 20th February, Rite Aid Corporation, one of the leading US drugstore chains, entered into a definitive merger agreement with Albertsons Companies, one of the largest American private equity-backed grocery retailers. The deal will result in the creation of a Read more…
The Blackstone Group L.P. (NYSE:BX) – market cap as of 23/02/2018: USD41.1bn Thomson Reuters Corporation (TSX:TRI) – market cap as of 23/02/2018: CAD35.8bn Introduction On January 30, 2018, Thomson Reuters announced the agreement to sell a 55% stake in its Financial and Risk unit to the US private equity firm Read more…
History What made gold a unique asset is its shininess, its malleability and the property of endurable integrity over time. Thanks to these characteristics, it has been widely used in the history of mankind for two core aims: To celebrate the human power and wealth thanks to its magnificence, To Read more…
Introduction The purpose of this article is to analyse different futures markets on cryptocurrencies and try to find justifications for excessive premia and discrepancies in prices. Firstly, we are going to present a general overview on cryptocurrencies and futures, then a short analysis of premia and finally we’ll look at Read more…
US This week, the main event was the release on Wednesday of the minutes of the Fed’s January policy meeting. These confirmed the growing sense of confidence among policymakers over the outlook for the US economy and inflation giving further credit to the hypothesis that the FED will raise the Read more…
US On Wednesday some important economic figures were released. The Core CPI Index and the CPI Index went up respectively by 0.3% and 0.5% (MoM) in January fueling up US inflation expectations; the movement was larger than forecasted and was offset by the data on Retail Sales which went down Read more…
Introduction As we noted in our final publication of 2017, the year 2017 was characterized by very low volatility and stable positive returns on the majority of stock markets. This took place even despite the start of stimulus withdrawal by major central banks which was seen in the gradual increase Read more…