Author: therawinformant

Software company Jamf is making a stellar debut on the Nasdaq, with the stock soaring over 50% on its first day. Jamf CEO Dean Hager joins Yahoo Finance’s Zack Guzman to discuss.

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Align Technology reported mixed quarterly earnings on Wednesday, after the bell. Align Technology CEO Joseph Hogan joins Yahoo Finance’s On The move panel to discuss the latest financial results.

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(Bloomberg) — Just three days after the Nasdaq 100’s biggest rally since April, those gains are history, and warnings are getting louder that tech stocks are in a bubble.Fifty-year Wall Street veteran Ned Davis added his venerable voice to the chorus of worriers, citing the speed of the index’s advance — before today — and surging share volume. The Nasdaq 100 was down 2.8% Thursday, wiping out its gain for the week.Of particular concern to bulls were plunges in Microsoft Corp. and Tesla Inc., right after reporting earnings that exceeded analyst forecasts. The very biggest internet and software companies, collected under the Fang umbrella, have now fallen in six of the last nine sessions, losing 4.6% over that span for their worst run since March.“The Nasdaq 100 looks bubbly to me,” Davis wrote in a note to clients of Ned Davis Research. “If this isn’t a sign of climbing up a high diving board for speculation, I don’t know what is.”He plotted the velocity of the advance against the S&P 500 and found the price ratio has exceeded the peak seen during the dot-com era in 2000. Similarly, trading among all stocks listed on Nasdaq has jumped to a record relative to those on the New York Stock Exchange as investors embraced speculative names.The drumbeat for such warnings has picked up in recent months as the S&P 500 has come close to erasing its bear-market decline, bouncing back even as a recession and pandemic rage. That rally has nothing on the Nasdaq 100, which, driven by internet and software companies seen benefiting from social distancing, has surged more than 50% from its March bottom, sending its price-earnings ratio to the highest level in two decades.Read: Tech’s Perfect Profit Record Fails to Impress Spoiled Bulls As dangerous as it all seems, market watchers like Canaccord Genuity LLC strategist Tony Dwyer are quick to point out some key differences now versus 2000. Back then, the Federal Reserve was tightening monetary policy, with its benchmark interest rates rising to 6.5%. Now, the central bank has cut rates to near zero and says it remains willing to combat the effects of the virus on the U.S. economy.Also supporting the current rally is a wider market participation, according to Dwyer. While it’s true that tech megacaps have dominated equity gains, other companies haven’t been completely left out. The cumulative advance-decline line for stocks listed on the NYSE, which represents the number of daily gains minus the number of daily declines, is hovering near an all-time high. By contrast, in 2000, market breadth had weakened for two years.“While many fear the current environment is like 2000 ‘dot com’ bubble, the macro backdrop suggests otherwise,” Dwyer said. “The very different macro backdrop vs. 1999 suggest any pullbacks should prove temporary.”Still, tech’s market dominance has raised some eyebrows. Should Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Google’s parent Alphabet Inc. be categorized as technology in the S&P 500, rather than communications or consumer discretionary where they currently belong, the tech industry’s index representation would have increased by roughly 10 percentage points to 37.5%, according to DataTrek Research. That’d exceed the industry’s peak weight of 32.5% during the internet bubble.That big of a share would not only be the largest for technology itself, it would also exceed all other sectors since at least 1980. The closest industry peak weight, DataTrek found, was 29% from energy in December 1980.“If prosaic oil companies were once 29% of the S&P, why can’t innovative tech one day be 50% of the index?” DataTrek’s Co-founder Nicholas Colas wrote in a note. “Yes, at that point I think we’d all agree tech would be in a bubble just like energy was in 1980. But we’re not there yet.”For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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Documents released during a High Court action reveal more offensive comments about financier Amanda Staveley.

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(Bloomberg) — Zhong Shanshan, whose schooling was interrupted during China’s cultural revolution, worked in construction, as a reporter and in the bottled-water business. Today, he’s worth $17 billion after his drug company went public in April and the shares surged 26-fold.Known as Lone Wolf by the Chinese media, Zhong, 65, has a made-for-movie story, but it’s far from unique in China. At least 24 people have become billionaires this year through June from the country’s raging market for initial public offerings, including former teachers, accountants and software developers, according to data compiled by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.Selling shares to the public has long been a lucrative channel for company owners in China to grow their fortunes, but 2020 should have been different after the coronavirus pandemic shut down large parts of the economy and slowed growth. Instead, buoyed by an army of retail investors looking for quick returns, the stock-market euphoria has been more apparent in the Asian nation than anyplace else in the world, with the benchmark index recovering from the virus-fueled crash and becoming one of the best performers.The 118 companies that went public in Shanghai and Shenzhen this year raised about $20 billion through June, more than double the amount in the first half of 2019, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Shanghai has become the world’s No. 1 listing venue, beating New York and Hong Kong.‘Strong Appetite’“Covid-19 has had insignificant impact on IPO activities in mainland China,” said Terence Ho, head of Greater China IPOs at EY. “Shares of new IPOs in China usually surge on the debut day. This develops a pool of investors with a strong appetite.”On China’s main stock venues, new listings often jump by the 44% limit on their first day of trading. Shanghai’s Star Board, which just celebrated its first anniversary, has no caps on how much shares can move on their debut.The outsized returns and demand from retail investors have sparked concerns that the market is in a bubble. China’s state media said in an editorial this month that fostering a “healthy” bull market is now more important to the nation’s economy than ever.The latest 2020 batch of Chinese IPO billionaires had a combined wealth of $70 billion as of mid-July, according to the Bloomberg index. Most are from the health-care and tech industries, some of the sectors that have done the best during the pandemic.“We are expecting companies from industries not impacted by the coronavirus will keep on dominating the IPO pipeline to next year — for example, tech ecosystem, health-care and online education,” said John Lee, vice chairman and head of Greater China at UBS Global Banking.Chinese entrepreneurs became the world’s second-largest billionaire group in 2018, overtaking Russia, with their wealth more than tripling in five years to $982.4 billion, according to a UBS Group AG report in November. The bank’s analysis from the previous year showed that the most-populous nation minted two new billionaires each week from both the public and private sectors in 2017.The number of Chinese billionaires among the world’s 500 richest has more than doubled to 67 since the beginning of 2017, with their combined net worth tripling to $840 billion, according to the Bloomberg index.Bottled WaterFor Zhong, the journey to riches began in the late 1980s, when he quit his reporter job to start a bottled-water business in Hainan, an island province in the south of China. In 1996, he founded Nongfu Spring Co., a beverage company now seeking a $1 billion offering in Hong Kong. He acquired a majority stake in 2001 in the pharmaceutical business of Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy Enterprise Co., the company that went public in April, regulatory filings show.Zhong is known for his targeted business strategies and ability to compete in challenging environments. He likes to be involved in the whole production process — from product design to name selection — and spent eight years studying how to best plant an orange tree to perfect the fruit’s drink, according to a 2015 interview in the Chinese media.Like Zhong, Gan Zhongru, a former Peking University teacher and senior researcher at Merck & Co., has benefited from the popularity of health-care related stocks this year. After debuting in Shanghai last month, his Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals Co. jumped more than threefold, and his net worth as of mid-July was $6.1 billion. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Hillhouse Capital Management were early investors in the company, according to the IPO prospectus.Wantai, Gan & Lee and the other companies that produced the 24 new Chinese billionaires declined to comment.‘Continuous Disruption’“A successful IPO is a process for both adding value to company stakes as people tend to give premium to liquid assets and releasing the hidden wealth of billionaires,” EY’s Ho saidChina has been boosting efforts to open its capital markets and make it easier to trade stocks, including measures to speed IPOs. On Shanghai’s Star board market, companies take an average of 288 days to go public, compared with 754 days on other venues at Chinese exchanges, according to EY.That’s likely to keep the list of billionaires expanding, even amid concerns that the stock market is overheating.“We expect the wealth of billionaires in China to continue growing,” said Marcel Tschanz, partner and head of wealth-management consulting at PwC Switzerland. “The key elements driving billionaires growth are the continuous disruption of business models and a large domestic market.”Here’s the crop from the first half of 2020:(Updates with analyst’s comment in fifth-to-last paragraph.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week for the first time in nearly four months, suggesting the labor market was stalling amid a resurgence in new COVID-19 cases and depressed demand. The weekly jobless claims report from the Labor Department on Thursday, the most timely data on the economy's health, also showed nearly 32 million people were collecting unemployment checks in early July. Relentless labor market weakness puts pressure on the U.S. Congress to extend a $600 weekly jobless benefit supplement, which expires on July 31.

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