Business

Just as an avalanche of SNAP sellside downgrades was unleashed by Wall Street analysts (JPM and UBS both downgraded to Sell with $15 and $7 price targets, respectively), the proverbial Hail Mary emerged early on Wednesday morning, when hours after reporting atrocious earnings which sent its stock crashing, in its just released 10-Q, Snapchat reported that Tencent, the company behind China's popular messaging platform WeChat, had built a more than 10% stake in Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, through open market purchases.

U.S. equity futures are little changed as European and Asian shares retreated, led by sliding bank stocks and a drop in the dollar as doubts over republican tax cuts and ongoing bond curve flattening hurt sentiment and prompted fresh questions over the viability of the US expansion.

During his trip to London this week, US Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, wasn’t only defending revelations in the Paradise Papers that he’d invested in a shipping company with ties to the Putin family. He also attended a “closed-door meeting” with executives from JPMorgan, Goldman, HSBC and other banks. The meeting took place over lunch in the exclusive St James’s District (hedge fund land these days) at Wiltons restaurant.

Authored by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

European GDP rose 0.6% quarter-over-quarter in Q3 2017, the eighteenth consecutive increase for the Continental (EA 19) economy. That latter result is being heralded as some sort of achievement, though the 0.6% is also to a lesser degree. The truth is that neither is meaningful, and that Europe’s economy continues toward instead the abyss.

We have some sympathy for John Cryan, but only to the extent that he has the near impossible task of putting the biggest German bank back on a sound footing regaining market share and generating some elusive revenue growth: a virtually impossible task as long as Europe is choked by NIRP. As we noted two weeks ago, Deutsche’s 3Q 2017 results confirmed that the situation is still getting worse: