• Is the CBA share price a buy right now?

    commonwealth bank CBA

    Is the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (ASX: CBA) share price a buy? The ASX bank sector has been roaring back to life in recent weeks.

    Since 25 May 2020 the CBA share price has soared higher by 22%. The market seems to think that the $60 billion jobkeeper overestimation means the economy will be in much better shape. That jobkeeper estimation error was due to overly pessimistic forecasts according to reporting by the Australian Financial Review.

    The performance of CBA’s earnings and share price is largely linked to the Australian economy. Indeed, every ASX bank relies on a solid national economy. CBA is exposed to the same sorts of systematic risks as Westpac Banking Corp (ASX: WBC), National Australia Bank Ltd (ASX: NAB) and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ASX: ANZ).

    Where to now for the CBA share price?

    The CBA share price is still down by around 19% from the level at 21 February 2020. So it’s not as though investors are pricing in a complete recovery for CBA yet.

    The major bank made a $1.5 billion additional credit provision for the potential impacts of COVID-19 in its third quarter update.

    If CBA’s provision is enough to account for all of the potential damage then it may in a much better position than investors were fearing a couple of months ago.

    However, there’s one big factor I’m wary of. The official Australian interest rate is now incredibly low. This will likely cause a negative hit to CBA’s net interest margin (NIM). The NIM is important because banks generate a lot of their overall profit from the money they lend out.

    I’m not sure how much higher CBA’s share price can go over the next couple of months. COVID-19 will cause a sizeable hit to the profit this year.

    It will be interesting to see what CBA does with its dividend. ANZ and Westpac decided to defer the dividend. NAB decided to pay a much smaller dividend. After the recent strong share price increase for CBA, I’d be inclined to go for other shares first.

    Specifically, I’m thinking about some of the best growth shares out there right now…

    3 “Double Down” Stocks To Ride The Bull Market

    Motley Fool resident tech stock expert Dr. Anirban Mahanti has stumbled upon three under-the-radar stock picks he believes could be some of the greatest discoveries of his investing career.

    He’s so confident in their future prospects that he has issued “double down” buy alerts on each of these three stocks to members of his Motley Fool Extreme Opportunities stock picking service.

    *Extreme Opportunities returns as of June 5th 2020

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    Motley Fool contributor Tristan Harrison has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool Australia has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. This article contains general investment advice only (under AFSL 400691). Authorised by Scott Phillips.

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  • 5 things to watch on the ASX 200 on Wednesday

    Female investor looking at a wall of share market charts

    On Tuesday the S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO) returned from the long weekend and recorded a stunning gain. The benchmark index jumped 2.45% to 6,144.9 points.

    Will the market be able to build on this on Wednesday? Here are five things to watch:

    ASX 200 to fall.

    The ASX 200 looks set to run out of steam on Wednesday and drop lower. According to the latest SPI futures, the benchmark index is expected to fall 91 points or 1.5% at the open. This follows a mixed night of trade on Wall Street which saw the Dow Jones fall 1.1%, the S&P 500 drop 0.8%, and the Nasdaq push 0.3% higher. The latter index hit a record high during last night’s trade.

    Oil prices mixed.

    Energy producers such as Oil Search Limited (ASX: OSH) and Santos Ltd (ASX: STO) will be on watch today after a mixed night for oil prices. According to Bloomberg, the WTI crude oil rose 0.5% to US$38.38 a barrel and the Brent crude oil price fell 0.4% to US$40.64 a barrel. Oil prices were notably higher at one stage on supply cut optimism, before giving back most of their gains.

    ANZ downgraded to a neutral rating.

    One leading broker thinks the Australia and New Zealand Banking GrpLtd (ASX: ANZ) share price may have peaked after its strong run. According to a note out of Goldman Sachs, its analysts have downgraded the banking giant’s shares to a neutral rating with a $20.02 price target. The broker made the move on valuation grounds.

    Gold price rebounds.

    Gold miners including Evolution Mining Ltd (ASX: EVN) and Northern Star Resources Ltd (ASX: NST) could be on the rise after the gold price rebounded. According to CNBC, the spot gold price rose 0.85% to US$1,719.00 an ounce ahead of the U.S. Federal Reserve meeting this week.

    Tech shares on watch.

    Tech shares such as Appen Ltd (ASX: APX) and Xero Limited (ASX: XRO) could defy the market decline today after their U.S. counterparts pushed higher. The Nasdaq index broke through the 10,000 points mark for the first time thanks to solid gains by the likes of Amazon and Facebook.

    3 “Double Down” Stocks To Ride The Bull Market

    Motley Fool resident tech stock expert Dr. Anirban Mahanti has stumbled upon three under-the-radar stock picks he believes could be some of the greatest discoveries of his investing career.

    He’s so confident in their future prospects that he has issued “double down” buy alerts on each of these three stocks to members of his Motley Fool Extreme Opportunities stock picking service.

    *Extreme Opportunities returns as of June 5th 2020

    More reading

    James Mickleboro has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool Australia’s parent company Motley Fool Holdings Inc. owns shares of Xero. The Motley Fool Australia owns shares of Appen Ltd. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. This article contains general investment advice only (under AFSL 400691). Authorised by Scott Phillips.

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  • Chewy tops Q1 revenue estimates, offers elevated guidance for Q2

    Chewy tops Q1 revenue estimates, offers elevated guidance for Q2Chewy released its first-quarter earnings results after market close on Tuesday, beating on its top line. The company offered guidance with stronger-than-expected estimates for its second quarter. Yahoo Finance’s Myles Udland breaks down the pet e-commerce company’s earnings on The Final Round.

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  • Apple’s Mac Chip Switch Is Double Trouble for Intel

    Apple’s Mac Chip Switch Is Double Trouble for Intel(Bloomberg Opinion) — It’s finally going to happen. Apple Inc. is on the verge of using its own chips over Intel Corp.’s for its Mac computers.Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that Apple is preparing to announce as soon as this month that it will use its own processors in Macs starting next year. The new Macs will incorporate the same internally-developed semiconductors, based on Arm Ltd. chip-architecture technology, that powers the iPhone. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple plans to move its entire Mac product lineup to its own chips because of their higher performance and improved power efficiency.The move will have multiple negative ramifications for Intel’s chip business. The most obvious is the direct impact of losing revenue as the sole processor supplier for Apple’s PC line. The Mac currently represents 12% of the U.S. PC market based on units sold, according to the latest Gartner data. And Bernstein estimates Apple’s laptop line accounts for 2% to 4% of Intel’s sales and mid- to high-single digit percentage of its earnings. Apple also will be able to leverage Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd.’s better chip-making technology going forward. Apple uses the Taiwan-based foundry to manufacture its chip designs. In recent years, TSMC has moved ahead of Intel in its ability to fabricate chips at smaller, more advanced chip nodes.  At first blush, the financial losses for Intel seem manageable. However, there are second-order effects that may prove more worrisome. First, if Apple is able to make better-performing and more power-efficient chips — an ability it has proven capable of in the smartphone market — then Arm-based Macs may be able to gain a larger share of the PC market on the back of its differentiated features. Further out, Apple’s move may pose a serious threat to Intel’s crown jewel server chip business. Here’s how.Currently, Intel dominates the high-profit-margin data-center business, where it sells server chips to cloud-computing providers and corporations. The segment generated sales of $23.5 billion for Intel in 2019, with operating profit of $10.2 billion. And according to IDC, the chip maker held 93% of the worldwide server processor market based on sales last year, versus Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s 5% share.While Intel has long been able to maintain its strong market position in the server space, the arrival of Arm-based Macs may change the game. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has long said the main reason Arm chips have struggled to gain traction in servers was because there weren’t any Arm-based PC platforms at critical mass. He cited the importance of developers being able to iterate and test their server code on local machines. There have been Arm-based Windows laptops on the market, but they generally have not sold well. Now, though, with Mac shifting to Arm-based chips, developers will have tens of millions of Arm-based machines at their finger tips, offering a thriving ecosystem for the up-and-coming chip architecture. Yes, it will take some time for Apple’s move to impact the market. Intel is currently enjoying strong demand as employees are forced to buy more computer hardware to outfit their remote-working home offices, on top of surging cloud-computing demand for its chips as internet services usage rises in the Covid-19 world. And applications must be ported to work well on Apple’s Arm-based chip architecture.But in coming years, Intel’s key businesses will be threatened by Apple’s move. The step is an important one and will likely prove to be a turning point for the chip industry.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Tae Kim is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. He previously covered technology for Barron's, following an earlier career as an equity analyst.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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  • Nano-Cap Drugmaker Surges 1,000% as Retail Enthusiasm Spreads

    Nano-Cap Drugmaker Surges 1,000% as Retail Enthusiasm Spreads(Bloomberg) — Nano-cap Immuron Ltd. saw shares surge more than ten-fold on Tuesday afternoon as euphoria for retail traders took to the biopharmaceutical industry.The Australia-based company, which was valued at roughly $9 million coming into Tuesday’s session, saw its American depository receipts change hands at a record clip as retail investors cheered and Twitter users were left confused. More than 74 million shares were traded Tuesday which compares to a one-year average volume of less than 100 thousand.The biopharmaceutical company disclosed earlier that the Naval Medical Research Center, its partner, requested a regulatory meeting with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration so it could test its drug for the prevention of acute infectious diarrhea. The pair will plan to start a pair of mid-stage trials sometime in the first half of next year if all goes well with regulators.Tuesday’s 850% gain marked the firm’s best single session since going public in 2017 and is an all-time high.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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  • Hundreds of Thousands of Tiny Buyers Swarm to Insolvency Stocks

    Hundreds of Thousands of Tiny Buyers Swarm to Insolvency Stocks(Bloomberg) — Just in the last week, 96,000 people on the Robinhood investing app opened a position in Hertz Global Holdings Inc. The number of users holding Whiting Petroleum Corp. grew roughly 10,000 in the last 24 hours.Two things the companies have in common: They’ve filed for bankruptcy protection. And each saw their shares double to start the week.It’s the same thing for Chesapeake Energy, as it prepares a potential filing. In the past, the court process usually wiped out equity shareholders. In this day and age, as small day traders salivate at any opportunity to get rich quick, a filing has apparently become a buy signal for many of them. There’s evidence retail investor actions have become a decisive driver of price.“Retail has a lot to do with it and I don’t think you’ve seen institutional investors buying those kinds of stocks,” said Christopher Grisanti, chief equity strategist at MAI Capital Management. “It’s too much risk. I would call it catching a falling knife.”The 2020 stock market has been full of peculiarities that nobody saw coming. The fastest drop for the S&P 500 into a bear market, followed by the fastest 50-day rebound in nine decades. Mom and pop scrambling to the right side of the recovery trade, while the advice of Wall Street legends falls flat. A health-care crisis forcing one of the deepest recessions, and in the midst of it, equities emerging unscathed.In a market as bizarre as this, it seems only fitting that the next step would be a growing affinity for companies that can’t pay their debts.According to website Robintrack, which uses Robinhood’s data to show trends in positioning but isn’t affiliated with it, individual investors on the app have been flocking to bankruptcy-protected companies in droves. (The site says it downloads popularity data each hour for every stock directly from Robinhood via a public application programming interface, or API. A Robinhood spokesperson declined to comment for this story.)Of course, interest in these stocks isn’t flowing solely from Robinhood clients. But the app is a lens into retail interest, particularly among younger investors, because unlike other popular brokerages, it’s possible to see holdings of its users in real-time. Some of the rallies in these shares may also be due to short covering.Robintrack’s data show 159,000 users now hold Hertz stock in some form. That’s a record high, and up from 37,000 users a month ago. Over the last three days, the car rental firm has seen the largest surge in popularity on the platform. Right now, more users on the investing app hold bankrupt Hertz than do Netflix Inc.Call it crazy, but don’t call it dumb. In the three sessions through Monday, Hertz shares surged 577%, just weeks after the company filed for bankruptcy. Trading volume in the stock has surged to an average of 197 million shares a day in June — more than 60 times what was typical in 2019.Chesapeake Energy has seen a similar turn. The oil company jumped 182% on Monday, and after markets closed, news broke that the firm was said to be preparing to file for bankruptcy. More than 20 million shares changed hands, the most turnover on record for the stock in a single day, Bloomberg data show. In recent days, Chesapeake’s popularity with users of Robinhood ballooned to 38,000 — a gain of 9,000.Same with Whiting Petroleum, a shale driller that went bankrupt in April. The number of users holding shares of the company rose to a record 50,000 this week. On Monday, the stock surged 152%, and more than 104 million shares traded.“It’s great that Vegas is open again, but who needs it when you have the stock market instead,” said Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer for Bleakley Financial Group. “After an incredible run since March, we now have clear froth in parts of the market. We know this level of speculation has coincided with a sharp increase in the activity of retail investors.”Boockvar added the activity has been encouraged by a “zero rate” and “unlimited QE” environment, referring to the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing measures. Ahead of the central bank’s decision Wednesday, he’s not the only one laying blame.“In this tape, bankruptcies have become the flavor of the day,” said Michael O’Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading. “At what point will Jay Powell and his colleagues at the Federal Reserve realize they have broken the market’s pricing mechanism? The bankruptcies are only a small part of the story.”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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  • Hertz tumbles after recent rally following Chapter 11 filing

     Hertz tumbles after recent rally following Chapter 11 filingYahoo Finance’s Emily McCormick joins Heidi Chung to break down why Hertz’s stock declined Tuesday after its three-day rally.

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  • Vroom soars in public trading debut

    Vroom soars in public trading debutInvestors saw Vroom shares soar in its public trading debut. Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre joins Heidi Chung to discuss.

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  • Apple’s Mac Chip Switch Is Double Trouble for Intel

    Apple’s Mac Chip Switch Is Double Trouble for Intel(Bloomberg Opinion) — It’s finally going to happen. Apple Inc. is on the verge of using its own chips over Intel Corp.’s for its Mac computers.Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that Apple is preparing to announce as soon as this month that it will use its own processors in Macs starting next year. The new Macs will incorporate the same internally-developed semiconductors, based on Arm Ltd. chip-architecture technology, that powers the iPhone. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple plans to move its entire Mac product lineup to its own chips because of their higher performance and improved power efficiency.The move will have multiple negative ramifications for Intel’s chip business. The most obvious is the direct impact of losing revenue as the sole processor supplier for Apple’s PC line. The Mac currently represents 12% of the U.S. PC market based on units sold, according to the latest Gartner data. And Bernstein estimates Apple’s laptop line accounts for 2% to 4% of Intel’s sales and mid- to high-single digit percentage of its earnings. Apple also will be able to leverage Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd.’s better chip-making technology going forward. Apple uses the Taiwan-based foundry to manufacture its chip designs. In recent years, TSMC has moved ahead of Intel in its ability to fabricate chips at smaller, more advanced chip nodes.  At first blush, the financial losses for Intel seem manageable. However, there are second-order effects that may prove more worrisome. First, if Apple is able to make better-performing and more power-efficient chips — an ability it has proven capable of in the smartphone market — then Arm-based Macs may be able to gain a larger share of the PC market on the back of its differentiated features. Further out, Apple’s move may pose a serious threat to Intel’s crown jewel server chip business. Here’s how.Currently, Intel dominates the high-profit-margin data-center business, where it sells server chips to cloud-computing providers and corporations. The segment generated sales of $23.5 billion for Intel in 2019, with operating profit of $10.2 billion. And according to IDC, the chip maker held 93% of the worldwide server processor market based on sales last year, versus Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s 5% share.While Intel has long been able to maintain its strong market position in the server space, the arrival of Arm-based Macs may change the game. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has long said the main reason Arm chips have struggled to gain traction in servers was because there weren’t any Arm-based PC platforms at critical mass. He cited the importance of developers being able to iterate and test their server code on local machines. There have been Arm-based Windows laptops on the market, but they generally have not sold well. Now, though, with Mac shifting to Arm-based chips, developers will have tens of millions of Arm-based machines at their finger tips, offering a thriving ecosystem for the up-and-coming chip architecture. Yes, it will take some time for Apple’s move to impact the market. Intel is currently enjoying strong demand as employees are forced to buy more computer hardware to outfit their remote-working home offices, on top of surging cloud-computing demand for its chips as internet services usage rises in the Covid-19 world. And applications must be ported to work well on Apple’s Arm-based chip architecture.But in coming years, Intel’s key businesses will be threatened by Apple’s move. The step is an important one and will likely prove to be a turning point for the chip industry.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Tae Kim is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. He previously covered technology for Barron's, following an earlier career as an equity analyst.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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