>>> Coty misses by $0.01, beats on revs; provides Q1 (Mar) and FY27 guidance (3.

Coty misses by $0.01, beats on revs; provides Q1 (Mar) and FY27 guidance (3.03 +0.29)
  • Reports Q4 loss of $0.02 per share, $0.01 below the FactSet Consensus of -$0.01, and revenues rose 1.3% yr/yr to $1.27 bln vs. $1.19 bln FactSet Consensus.
GUIDANCE
  • 1Q27 LFL revenue: expected to decline by a low- to mid-single-digit percentage (negative trend)
  • 1Q27 FX impact on reported revenue: expected to be neutral
  • 1Q27 adjusted gross margin: expected to decline by approximately 50 to 100 basis points year-over-year
  • 1Q27 adjusted EBITDA: expected to decline by a low-teens percentage
  • 1Q27 adjusted EPS (excluding equity swap): guidance range $0.11 to $0.13 per share
FUTURE CONSENSUS ESTIMATES
  • Q1 2027: EPS est. $0.14; Rev est. $1.54 bln
  • FY27: EPS est. $0.35; Rev est. $5.73 bln
Consensus Source: FactSet
SURPRISE HISTORY (Last 4 Quarters)
  • Avg Rev surprise: +1.5%

FT : Mike Ashley’s luxury retail empire is going cheap The sharp-elbowed billion

Mike Ashley’s luxury retail empire is going cheap
The sharp-elbowed billionaire is remaking Frasers with acquisitions including Harvey Nichols, but the stock market remains wary

When Sir Dickson Poon, the Hong Kong billionaire, paid £130mn at today’s prices for Harvey Nichols 35 years ago, he declared the Knightsbridge shop “one of the greatest stores in the world”. He turned the department store frequented by Diana, Princess of Wales, into a luxury group with six UK outlets and several international franchises.

Harvey Nichols was acquired again last week, this time for about £40mn in a pre-packaged administration. The new owner is Frasers Group, the UK company controlled by Mike Ashley, who became a billionaire by building his Sports Direct discount chain from one store into a multi-brand international retail group with a market value of £3.6bn.

It is typical of Ashley to strike a bargain for “Harvey Nicks”. It still feels incongruous that a former squash coach known for cut-price retailing, a sharp eye for trading corporate assets and aggressive tactics towards rivals should own the genteel department store. As he told the FT recently, “I’m not Mary Poppins — when you get in a fight with me, I’ll come back at you.”

His reputation for being a discount retailer is outdated. Frasers has been moving steadily upmarket under its “elevation” strategy, led since 2022 by Michael Murray, chief executive and Ashley’s son-in-law. It controls about 100 luxury stores, led by the Flannels department store chain, and has partnerships with brands such as Moncler, Gucci and Burberry.

But Ashley, who is no longer a director of Frasers but holds a majority stake in the business, is as sharp as ever. Some of the luxury suppliers to Harvey Nichols are still smarting from Frasers’ tactics after it acquired the Matches Fashion chain in 2023 and shut it down within months. It emerged with a profit, while they got pennies on the pound as trade creditors.

The road to Harvey Nichols stretches back a decade, to when Sports Direct was overtaken by its smarter rival JD Sports. Ashley had fallen out with suppliers such as Nike and Adidas over his ruthless discounting and messy stores. He saw that shoppers were no longer purely seeking bargains but were increasingly being drawn by brands.

His second insight was that of a value investor. High street retailing was shrinking and valuations were falling as ecommerce rose, giving him the chance to recycle Sports Direct’s surplus cash into brands and physical stores. “It’s going to be a lot smaller pond but [some] fish are going to be enormous,” he remarked in 2019.

This led to today’s Frasers, which owns a range of brands and stores, including the House of Fraser chain. Sports Direct bought the latter out of administration in 2018, found it was in even more trouble than Ashley realised and scythed through it, closing stores and cutting jobs. Its deals have had mixed results but it usually finds a way to extract some return.

The strangest aspect of Frasers is that it also behaves like a corporate hedge fund, buying stakes in public companies including Mulberry, Boohoo (also known as Debenhams) and Hugo Boss, the German brand. It launched a €2.7bn takeover offer for Boss in June and this week announced that it had built its stake to 48 per cent, despite getting a chilly response.

The investments can turn out to be the prelude to a bid, as with Boss; an attempt to secure leverage over brands in Frasers stores; or simply Ashley’s instinct for an undervalued asset (“I just think it’s very cheap,” he said of his Boss stake-building). But they puzzle even his fans. “We see the individual pieces of the jigsaw, but only he knows the picture,” says one investor.

Ashley has a fearsome mystique. Clive Black, head of consumer research at Shore Capital, describes him as “a terrible beauty”. But his tactics do not do much for Frasers’ rating as a public company. Many investors find it too opaque and unpredictable to touch, although its stock market valuation has risen by 20 per cent in a year amid its burst of dealmaking.

The salutary comparison is Next, another multi-brand retailer with a strong supply chain and logistics platform. Next has ascended steadily to a market capitalisation this week of £18bn — five times that of Frasers — thanks to consistent growth under Simon Wolfson, chief executive. Their operations have a lot in common, but there is a gulf between their styles.

One answer would be for Ashley to take Frasers private again, although he denies even considering it. While Murray insists he is in charge, the hand of the founder is not well hidden. Frasers’ purchase of Harvey Nichols may elevate its reputation but do not expect Ashley to change his nature

WSJ : Hong Kong’s Exchange Operator Posts Record Quarter on Surging IPOs, Tradin

Hong Kong’s Exchange Operator Posts Record Quarter on Surging IPOs, Trading Activity
The exchange has been rolling out measures to boost the attractiveness of the market for listings

  • Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing said its second-quarter net profit rose 21% from a year earlier to 5.38 billion Hong Kong dollars.
  • The exchange operator’s revenue and other income climbed 18% to HK$8.50 billion as trading and clearing fees rose on higher volumes.
  • HKEX has rolled out measures to boost market attractiveness, including cutting the minimum market capitalization requirement for certain companies.

Booming trading and listing activity in Hong Kong propelled the city’s exchange operator to another record quarter, putting the Asian financial hub in a strong position to continue reform efforts to attract more capital.

Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing 388 2.37%increase; up pointing triangle said Wednesday that net profit rose 21% from a year earlier to 5.38 billion Hong Kong dollars, equivalent to US$685.8 million. That topped the HK$4.77 billion consensus estimate of analysts in a Visible Alpha poll.

Revenue and other income reached HK$8.50 billion, climbing by a stronger-than-expected 18% as trading and clearing fees rose on higher volumes across the cash, derivatives and commodities markets. The headline average daily turnover jumped 22% to HK$289.5 billion, HKEX said, a new quarterly high.

Strong market sentiment helped drive trading activity, HKEX Chief Executive Bonnie Y Chan said. Fundraising demand from technology and AI-related companies, as well as active participation from Chinese mainland and international investors alike also contributed to the robust performance, said Chan, whose contract was recently renewed for a further three years, through February 2030.

The funds raised from 87 new listings in the city in the first half of the year rose 94% to HK$212.4 billion compared with a year earlier. Chan said the IPO pipeline remains strong, without specifying a number.

The record results come as the exchange has been rolling out measures to boost the attractiveness of the market for listings. They also coincide with a surge of high-tech companies looking to tap the Hong Kong market, including Chinese firms that are already listed in mainland China.

Key changes to the listing framework include allowing confidential filings for all companies, and cutting the minimum market capitalization requirement for companies with a weighted voting-rights structure to HK$20 billion from HK$40 billion.

“Through market reforms, enhanced connectivity and the expansion of our multiasset ecosystem, we are strengthening the competitiveness, resilience and attractiveness of our markets,” Chan said.

Although macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties persist, opportunities for HKEX and Hong Kong remain compelling, Chan said, “as global capital increasingly seeks access to China’s innovation economy and Asia’s growth prospects.”

John C. Lee, co-head of Asia country coverage at UBS, expects the reforms to broaden Hong Kong’s appeal to high-quality international issuers

“Combined with deep capital pools, improving market liquidity and strong investor participation, the enhanced listing framework should support a healthy pipeline of listings and reinforce Hong Kong’s position as one of the world’s premier fundraising centers,” Lee wrote in a recent note.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Indexes also plans to revamp its main technology stock benchmark to capture more high-growth technology companies amid a banner year for new listings, fueled by the artificial-intelligence and robotics sectors in China.

Under the proposed changes, the index would have 50 constituents, up from the current 30 largest Hong Kong-listed tech companies.

Still, AI-related stocks globally have been volatile recently, as investors who piled into companies tied to the infrastructure build-out reassess the large capital spending required to support it.

The Hang Seng Tech Index has fallen 15% this year, underperforming markets with heavy chip exposure. Taiwan’s Taiex and South Korea’s Kospi have advanced more than 50% each, while the Nasdaq composite has climbed 13% year to date.

WSJ : Novel Cancer Vaccine Prevents Melanoma From Returning in First for mRNA Re

Novel Cancer Vaccine Prevents Melanoma From Returning in First for mRNA
Result in high-risk patients validates decades of research into mRNA-based therapeutic cancer vaccines

  • An experimental mRNA-based vaccine from Moderna and Merck succeeded in preventing cancer from returning or spreading in high-risk melanoma patients.
  • The late-stage study tested the personalized vaccine, intismeran, in combination with Merck’s cancer immunotherapy Keytruda.
  • Moderna hopes to have the personalized therapeutic cancer vaccine on the market in 2027.

An experimental mRNA-based vaccine succeeded in preventing cancer from coming back or spreading in a study of high-risk melanoma patients, Moderna and its partner Merck said Wednesday, paving the way for a potentially new life-extending treatment for the thousands of people diagnosed with the deadly skin cancer each year.

The study looked at people who had surgery to remove a melanoma—the point of the treatment was to reduce the risk of it coming back.

The companies said the late-stage study, which tested the personalized cancer vaccine intismeran in combination with Merck’s blockbuster cancer immunotherapy Keytruda, met its main goal of extending the time before cancer returns in high-risk patients. The study also met a secondary goal of preventing the disease from spreading to different organs.

“I have a feeling that this is just the beginning of a new field,” said Jane Healy, a vice president of oncology at Merck, adding the goal for patients is “to give them longer without having to worry about treatments for cancer.”

Moderna shares surged more than 90% in early trading Wednesday, while Merck’s stock rose 8%.

The companies didn’t provide specific details about how long patients taking the Moderna-Merck combination lived without their cancer progressing or how long they lived on average. The companies will present more details at a medical conference later this year.

Investors and researchers will be watching closely to see how effective and tolerable the vaccine proves to be, as that has the potential to dictate its chances for approval and how widely it is used.

The results mark the first successful late-stage trial for a personalized mRNA cancer therapy, validating decades of research into custom treatments engineered specifically for an individual’s tumor mutations.

For Moderna, these results could pave the way for its entry into the $240-plus-billion cancer-drug market, a boon for a company that has been dependent Covid-19 vaccine sales, which have been falling. For Merck, this could bring a new drug into its arsenal to help offset the impending patent loss for Keytruda, one of the top-selling drugs in the world.

Moderna has been trying to regain financial ground after years of consecutive losses since the Covid-19 pandemic started to wane.

“We are now an oncology company,” said Moderna Chief Executive Stéphane Bancel. “By Christmas, you could have a company that’s going back into sales growth for the first time in four years.”

The melanoma study followed more than 1,000 patients who were randomized to either receive a combination of intismeran and Keytruda or Keytruda alone for about a year.

Unlike traditional vaccines designed to prevent infections, intismeran is a personalized therapeutic vaccine built for a single person. The process begins after a patient undergoes surgery to remove a high-risk melanoma tumor. Doctors send a blood sample and biopsy of the tumor, where the cancer’s genetic profile is analyzed.

Scientists home in on unique mutations on the cancer cells that are likely to alert the immune system. Those mutation targets are encoded into mRNA and manufactured into a vaccine—a process that takes about six weeks from the date of the biopsy.

Meanwhile, patients recover from their surgery and start a regimen of Keytruda to keep the disease in check while their personalized shot is prepared.

Moderna and Merck teamed up in 2016 to jointly develop personalized mRNA cancer vaccines and expanded that partnership over time. The researchers began by studying the vaccine in melanoma because those tumors are typically highly mutated. There are other studies under way in different types of cancer, including bladder cancer, a common form of lung cancer and kidney cancer.

Ahead of the news, Citi analyst Geoff Meacham said the study could be a “defining catalyst” for Moderna’s cancer drug business and that strong results could speed FDA review. Bancel said the company hopes to have the drug on the market in 2027.

Earlier trial readouts showed that the vaccine in combination with Keytruda reduced the risk of melanoma recurrence or death by 49% compared with Keytruda alone.

Moderna recently won approval for its mRNA-based flu vaccine, though analysts said this was more likely to be a long-term growth driver than an immediate financial windfall.

Personalized cancer vaccines are complicated and expensive to produce. Questions remain as to how accessible the vaccines will be if they are approved. The only FDA-approved therapeutic cancer vaccine to date is Provenge, a personalized immunotherapy for prostate cancer.

WSJ : Cantor Lets Hedge Funds Place Big Bets on Kalshi’s Prediction Markets The

Cantor Lets Hedge Funds Place Big Bets on Kalshi’s Prediction Markets
The investment bank will serve as a broker, arranging block trades on everything from weather forecasts to iPhone sales

  • Cantor Fitzgerald plans to give its institutional clients access to Kalshi’s prediction markets.
  • Cantor Fitzgerald will act as a broker, buying or selling blocks of event contracts and helping to distribute them through private negotiations.
  • Susquehanna International Group will provide pricing and liquidity for trades based on the event contracts.

Cantor Fitzgerald plans to give investment funds access to Kalshi’s prediction markets.

Cantor’s some 3,000 institutional clients, which range from family offices to hedge funds, will have full access to Kalshi’s suite of events-based, yes-or-no contracts such as those tied to weather, commodities and corporate results.

“The investor base that we’ve met—we’ve met dozens—has been really keen on entering and participating in the prediction markets,” said Pascal Bandelier, co-chief executive and global head of equities at Cantor.

Susquehanna International Group, Kalshi’s flagship market maker, will provide pricing and liquidity for trades based on the event contracts.

The details
Cantor plans to serve as a broker to those clients, buying or selling blocks of event contracts and often helping to distribute those holdings to other investors through private negotiations.

Bandelier said that hedge funds have expressed interest in trading event contracts tied to iPhone sales rather than trying to anticipate how Apple shares will react to sales numbers. Family offices have interest in hedging risks related to weather or commodities such as crop outputs and oil prices, he added.

Other use cases include risks to artificial-intelligence supply chains and betting on the price of computing power, said Joe Grubb, head of business development at Susquehanna Predictions.

Institutions will also be able to propose markets for their specific needs. The companies have already been in discussions with institutional investors about what markets they would like to see.

“I think prediction markets allow us to be much more creative with the types of hedging,” said Grubb. “And we’re seeing a lot of interesting ideas from counterparties.”

The context
Proponents say that prediction markets harness the wisdom of crowds to accurately forecast the outcome of future events and that they offer a more specialized way to hedge risk or make wagers that aren’t possible in traditional financial markets and insurance policies.

Kalshi has turned its attention to wooing institutional investors in recent months, completing its first block trade earlier this year for a contract tied to carbon allowances in California that was created specifically for the trade. The company partnered with Interactive Brokers earlier this year, another leg in the race to draw institutions to their markets.


“We get a lot of questions of, I do want to hedge specific event risk, but I don’t know how to do it,” said Max Crowley, vice president of business development at Kalshi. “The demand is there.”

WSJ : Novo Nordisk Starts Testing Lower-Doses of Its Wegovy Weight-Loss Pills Dr

Novo Nordisk Starts Testing Lower-Doses of Its Wegovy Weight-Loss Pills
Drugmaker working to find the lowest dose patients can take to lose weight

  • Novo Nordisk is studying smaller doses of its Wegovy weight-loss pill to find the lowest dose that still allows patients to lose weight.
  • The study began last week, has enrolled 450 overweight people and will test two low doses of the pill compared to a placebo.
  • Novo Nordisk recently disclosed that uptake of the pill has been particularly strong for its lowest doses across self-paying patients.

Novo Nordisk NOVO.B -0.93%decrease; red down pointing triangle is studying smaller doses of its Wegovy weight-loss pill to find the lowest dose that patients can take and still lose weight, according to a U.S. clinical trials database.

The study, which began last week and will run into 2028, has enrolled 450 overweight people and will test two low doses of the pill compared to a placebo. The actual doses being used in the trial weren’t disclosed.

Novo Nordisk didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Currently the lowest dose Wegovy pill available is 1.5 milligrams for the starter dose, with patients able to work their way up to the highest 25-milligram dose over time.

Novo Nordisk recently disclosed that uptake of the pill has been particularly strong for its lowest doses across self-paying patients, which are also around half the price of the higher doses in the U.S.

The Wegovy pill, which launched earlier this year in the U.S., logged sales of around $500 million in the second quarter, up from around $350 million in the first quarter. It has since become available in the U.K. and the United Arab Emirates, with executives hoping the pill can help it regain lost ground in the surging obesity market.

TechCrunch : Etched’s valuation doubles to $21B in a month Julie Bort 10:21 AM P

Etched’s valuation doubles to $21B in a month

Etched on Tuesday announced that it has raised another $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, led by Jane Street after the famed quant fund tested and bought the startup’s AI hardware.

Even by AI standards, this valuation step-up is jaw-droppingly fast. Etched was valued at $5 billion in December. It raised a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation in July. Now investors have doubled its valuation to $21 billion, up nearly $11 billion, in a month.

Etched delivers its AI tech as full systems that it calls “frontier inference clusters.” (Etched competitor Nvidia calls its full systems AI factories.)

Co-founder and COO Robert Wachen told TechCrunch that investors are so enthusiastic because Etched has designed two new components from scratch to speed up inference — the computing process that happens after a user submits a prompt.

“Inference is built in two stages,” Wachen said, “prefill and decode.” In the mathematically and compute-intensive “prefill phase,” the system must understand the prompt, including context. In the memory-intensive “decode” phase, the system generates output tokens, meaning the actual answer the user sees.

Etched created a prefill chip that operates at low voltage, allowing it to pack in more transistors without the typical heat problems of other high-end AI chips. It can therefore process more tokens faster. Etched created a new type of memory and an interconnect for the decode process that the company calls cluster-scale memory.

“It allows many chips to connect together and use a shared memory pool at a very, very fast, low latency,” Wachen said. The result, Etched promises, is higher speeds and lower costs.

Etched is still battling the perception from its early days that it etches a particular model into its chips, meaning that each chip is somehow custom-designed to run one frontier model. That was its original intention but is no longer the case. Etched’s systems can run any frontier model.

In the blog post announcing the new round, investment firm Jane Street said, “We tested the chip and are pleased with the early results. Etched’s unique approach to inference delivers the precision we will need to support our most demanding workloads. We’re excited to now have our own rack running in our datacenter.”

Other investors in Etched include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Stripes, Primary, Positive Sum, Diffusion, Argo, and Blackstone.

TechCrunch : Cursor capitalizes on GitHub frustration, launches rival hosting pl

Cursor capitalizes on GitHub frustration, launches rival hosting platform

For as long as anyone can remember, GitHub has been the de facto code host preferred by a majority of developers. However, in recent times, the platform has struggled with widely reported outages and performance degradation and, as it drops the ball, Cursor is waiting to pick it up.

The AI startup, which is now officially a part of SpaceX, launched Origin this week — a new code-hosting platform designed to do all of the things that developers typically use GitHub for: collaboratively work on codebases, browse and edit them, handle pull-requests (edits made by others asking to be added to the main codebase), and store them in repositories.

This seems like a natural next step for Cursor, whose primary focus until this point has been selling automated web development services through its AI Code Editor. Cursor has also said that “agent native” features will soon be available for Origin, although hasn’t shared many details yet. The company also says it is building a wider “app ecosystem” to support broader coding efforts within Origin.

Interestingly enough, using Origin doesn’t require a user to stop using GitHub. Indeed, Origin is designed to allow developers to work alongside GitHub and pass code back and forth between the two in an interoperable manner.

“Your GitHub repos can sit alongside the ones Cursor hosts,” Cursor says in its blog. “Connect GitHub to Cursor, pick your org, and you’ll see the repos you can sync. Select one and Cursor pulls it in.”

The launch of Origin coincides with ongoing frustration over a perceived dip in GitHub’s services. Indeed, on the same day that Cursor launched its new platform, GitHub suffered a quite lengthy worldwide outage. For over six hours, the site’s functions were reportedly degraded, with a nearly 20% error rate worldwide.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. either. Earlier this year, after a rash of outages, GitHub announced new actions to sate unhappy coders as its availability problems seemed to escalate. More broadly, the platform has suffered 257 outages over the past year, a recent analysis by LeadDev states. Such persistent issues have led to “a visible exodus of high-profile users,” writes LeadDev’s reporter Charles Humble.

Still, if Cursor wants to compete with GitHub, it will have its work cut out for it. According to GitHub’s own metrics, some 180 million developers use its platform as of last October. The platform, which was founded in 2007 and acquired by Microsoft in 2012, continues to be the largest source-code host in the world.

>>> US Gapping down

Gapping down
In reaction to earnings/guidance:
  • LZB -16.3%, TOYO -10.8%, AUNA -10.5%, MRCY -8.1%, OPRA -5.5%, ZIM -3.5%, ZTO -3.2%, LOW -3.1%, LU -2%, TGT -1.4%
Other news:
  • WYFI -22.6% ($250 mln convertible notes private placement)
  • EPM -11% (priced previously announced offering of 3,700,000 shares of common stock at $3.25 per share)
  • BLZE -4.6% (launches $150 mln convertible notes offering)
  • SNN -4% (CFO John Rogers to resign effective Sept. 30; Pierre Palassian named interim CFO)
  • FRNM -2.9% (stock offering by selling shareholders)