Business

After investing nearly $80 billion into startups in 2015, Venture Capitalists, growing slightly weary of the $1 billion valuations being handed out like candy to every 22 year old with an app that can replace your face with that of panda, have pulled back a bit in 2016 resulting in a 10% reduction in equity capital for America's graduating snowflakes.  But as Bloomberg points out, that's not a problem as many of Silicon Valley's revenue-free startups see debt capital as a better alternative anyway...sure, what could go wrong?

So far, so expected. After earlier announcing the failure to attract any anchor investors for a private capital raise, Monte Paschi has announced that it will officially ask the Italian government for a "precuationary capital increase" - in other words a bailout. The funds will come from the newly decreed EUR20 billion bailout fund, and as Bloomberg reports will not trigger a "bail-in."

This is the third bailout in three years and reportedly the biggest nationalization in Italian history.

Another day, another market-moving tweet from Donald Trump.

Moments ago, the president-elect, following up on his recent spat with Lockheed over the F-35, which one week ago Trump said its "program and cost is out of control”, continued his crusade on over-budget government programs, when he tweeted that "based on the tremendous cost and cost overruns of the Lockheed Martin F-35, I have asked Boeing to price-out a comparable F-18 Super Hornet!"

In what, for the past seven years, has been an upside-down investing world where the opposite of what financial and economic theory - and certainly consensus - suggests should happens with centrally-planned regularity, what better trading recommendation list than one focusing on the "Costanza Trades" for the year ahead.

Conveniently, that's what RBC's Mark Orsley has put together, so for those who know what the right trade is, and need just that little bit of confidence push to do the opposite, here it is...

2017 Costanza Trades

Bernie Sanders has called for an investigation into Big pharma companies who make huge profits selling large amounts of highly-addictive opioids to rural communities in West Virginia. Big pharmaceutical companies have been pumping highly addictive and dangerous opioid based pain-killers into small towns in West Virginia, pushing up addiction and overdose fatality rates to epidemic proportions.