>>> TradeGate Pre-Market Indications

DAX:
  • Siemens (SIE TH) +3.7%
    • Siemens 1Q Comparable Revenue Beats Estimates (1)
  • Siemens Energy (ENR TH) +1.7%
  • Deutsche Boerse (DB1 TH) +1.6%
    • Deutsche Börse Forms Strategic Partnership With Google Cloud
    • Deutsche Boerse Sees 2023 Ebitda EU2.6B to EU2.8B, Est. EU2.67B
  • Vonovia (VNA TH) +1.2%
  • Porsche SE (PAH3 TH) +1%
MDAX:
  • VERBIO Vereinigte (VBK TH) +2%
  • K+S (SDF TH) +1.6%
    • K+S Raised to Neutral at Citi; PT 22 euros
  • Software AG (SOW TH) +1.3%
  • Aixtron (AIXA TH) +0.8%
  • Talanx (TLX TH) +0.8%
    • Talanx Sees 2023 Net About EU1.4B, Proposes EU2 Dividend
  • Jungheinrich (JUN3 TH) -0.5%
  • Evonik (EVK TH) -1.4%
    • Evonik Cut to Reduce at Baader Helvea; PT 20 euros
  • Delivery Hero (DHER TH) -4.4%
    • Delivery Hero Misses Sales Estimates as Profitability Gains (1)
SDAX:
  • Hamborner REIT (HABA TH) +3.6%
    • Hamborner REIT FY FFO per Share EU0.63
  • flatexDEGIRO (FTK TH) +1.8%
  • Nordex (NDX1 TH) +1.7%
    • Nordex Group Gets 255 MW Order for Estonia Wind Farm
  • Synlab (SYAB TH) +1.3%
  • Fielmann (FIE TH) +1.3%
  • Hensoldt (HAG TH) -0.6%
  • DIC Asset (DIC TH) -1.1%
  • Shop Apotheke (SAE TH) -2.4%
    • Shop Apotheke Double-Cut at CS With Zur Rose Now Preferred

>>> What to look at today - 9th of February 2023

US and European stock futures edged higher while equity benchmarks across Asia fluctuated. Chinese shares climbed after opening lower, Japanese benchmarks traded in and out of positive territory and Australian stocks fell. The mixed sentiment followed a down day on Wall Street Wednesday when hawkish comments from Federal Reserve officials prompted investors to rethink expectations about US peak rates. The S&P 500 fell 1.1% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 dropped 1.8%. Treasury 10-year notes held the gains from a rally on Wednesday in the wake of a strong auction. The Australian and New Zealand dollars advanced.  The knock to risk sentiment hinged on comments from four Fed officials who spoke at separate events Wednesday and reinforced a shared message: the fight against inflation is not yet won. Fed-funds futures markets priced in higher rates, with some options traders betting the US policy benchmark will reach 6%. Fed Bank of New York President John Williams said prior Fed indications that would see rates rise to 5.1% remain accurate. An index of the dollar weakened. The yen strengthened following speculation that Japan’s ruling party members would face division if Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s choice for the new Bank of Japan chief is someone who is unlikely to follow the current path of monetary easing. A 7.7% drop for Alphabet Inc. shares amplified the hit to tech stocks as investors showed concern that its new artificial intelligence chatbot Bard may yield inaccurate responses. Walt Disney Co. shares surged in after-hours trading following fourth-quarter earnings that outpaced estimates. The company unveiled a dramatic restructuring that includes slashing 7,000 jobs as part of a $5.5 billion cost-cutting plan. Shares in Adani Enterprises fell as much as 10% to snap a two-day rally after MSCI Inc. said it was reviewing the amount of Adani Group-linked shares that were freely tradable in public markets. Meanwhile, Turkey’s stock exchange suspended trading for the first time in 24 years following a selloff that erased billions of dollars from the value of its main equities gauge in the wake of two devastating earthquakes. Trading in Turkish equities, futures and option contracts will resume on Feb. 15.  oil steadied during trading in Asia after rallying about 7% over the previous three sessions as investors assessed the latest commentary from Fed officials and mixed Energy Information Administration data. Gold was little changed. US After Hours DIS +5.5% jumps following earnings and cost cutting moves; APP +28.2%, SONO +15.4%, QNST +10.3% higher on earnings; AFRM -19.6% falls on earnings and job cuts; APPS -18.6%, MAT -12.2%, TTMI -8.9% lower on earnings

Nikkei -0.08% Hang Seng +1.43% CSI +1.32% Shanghai +1.17% Shenzen +1.51%

Eur$ 1.0730 CNH 6.7905 CNY 6.7846 JPY 131.32 GBP 1.2105 CHF 0.9189 RUB 72.9538 TRY 18.8336 WTI$ 78.48 +0.01% Gold 1,879.60 +0.22% BTC 22,657 -1.35% ETH 1,630.40 -1.37%

S&P +0.37% Nasdaq +0.48% EuroStoxx +0.62% FTSE +0.25% Dax +0.72% SMI +0.23%

Macro :
- ECB Rates Must Hit Significantly Restrictive Levels, Kazaks Says

Keep an eye on :
- AGN NA : Aegon 4Q Operating Profit Beats Estimates
- AMBEA SS : Ambea 4Q Net Sales Beats Estimates
- MT NA : ArcelorMittal Sees 2023 World Ex-China ASC +2% to +3%
- ATEA NO : Atea 4Q Revenue Beats Estimates
- BCVN SW : BC Vaudoise FY Operating Profit CHF447.7M Vs. CHF428.8M Y/y
- BAR BB : Barco FY Ebitda Beats Estimates
- BPE IM : BPER Banca FY Dividend per Share Beats Estimates
- BAYN GY : Bluebell Says Bayer CEO Hire Is ‘First Step in Right Direction’
- CTM SS : Catena Media CFO Messner to Step Down Within Six Months
- CAV1V FH : Caverion 4Q Operating Profit Misses Estimates
- CINE LN : Cineworld’s Assets Attract Potential Buyers in Bankruptcy
- COP GY : CompuGroup FY Revenue Beats Estimates
- COOR SS : Coor 4Q Net Sales Matches Estimates
- ACA FP : *CREDIT AGRICOLE 4Q NET INCOME EU1.56B, EST. EU1.07B
- CSGN SW : Credit Suisse to Buy The Klein Group for $175M: M&A Snapshot
- CSGN SW : Credit Suisse Clients Pull $120 Billion Amid Fifth Straight Loss
- DAE SW : Daetwyler FY Ebit Misses Estimates
- DB1 GY : Deutsche Boerse Beats With Strength Across Board: Street Wrap
- DFDS DC : DFDS 4Q Ebitda Before Significant Items Misses Estimates
- DKSH SW : DKSH FY Operating Profit Beats Estimates
- D§IS US : *DISNEY SHARES RISE 3% AFTER 1Q ADJUSTED EPS BEATS ESTIMATE
- DNO NO : DNO 4Q Ebitda $226.7M Vs. $208.8M Y/y
- DNB NO : DNB Bank 4Q Net Income Beats Estimates
- DHER GY : Delivery Hero 4Q Gross Merchandise Value Misses Estimates
- EQNR NO : Gas Trader Spurned by Goldman Made Over $1 Billion Last Year
- EQNR NO : Equinor Makes Oil, Gas Discovery Near Troll Field in North Sea
- FAGR BB : Fagron FY Adjusted Ebitda Beats Estimates
- FLOW NA : Flow Traders 4Q Normalized Net Trading Income EU115.6M
- GLPG NA : Galapagos Data Ends Plans for Crohn’s Disease Filing
- GET FP : Getlink Jan. Passenger Shuttle Traffic Y/y +88%
- GN DC : GN Store Nord Sees 2023 Hearing Organic Rev Growth +2% to +8%
- GVOLT PL : Greenvolt Completes Issuance of €200m of Convertible Bonds
- HABA GY : Hamborner REIT FY FFO per Share Beats Estimates
- HUH1V FH : Huhtamaki 4Q Adjusted Ebit Matches Estimates
- IPN FP : Ipsen Sees 2023 Sales at Constant Exchange Rates Above +4%
- KBC BB : KBC Group Sees 2023 Net Interest Income About EU5.7B
- KWS GY : KWS Saat Boosts FY Net Sales Forecast
- LR FP : Legrand FY Adjusted Operating Margin Beats Estimates
- LEON SW : Leonteq FY Operating Income Beats Estimates
- B4B GY : Metro 1Q Sales Meets Estimates
- MTGB SS : MTG 4Q Ebit Beats Estimates
- MTRS SS : Munters 4Q Ebit Misses Estimates
- OCI NA : Fertilizer Price Dynamics Now Reflected in Valuations, Citi Says
- PNDXB SS : Pandox 4Q Ebitda SEK829M Vs. SEK521M Y/y
- PCEL SS : PowerCell will establish a local US presence as a result of growing demand from customers
- ROG SW : Roche, Janssen Expand Collaboration in Precision Medicine
- ROCKB DC : Rockwool Plunges Most Since 2008 on Outlook for Sales Drop
- SCST SS ; Scandi Standard 4Q Operating Profit SEK99M Vs. SEK30M Y/y
- SIE GY : Siemens 1Q Comparable Revenue Beats Estimates
- SIKA SW : Sika’s Acquisition of MBCC Cleared by the EU With Conditions
- SIM DC : Simcorp Prelim FY Ebit EU125.9M
- SWECB SS : Sweco 4Q Operating Profit Beats Estimates
- SCMN SW : Swisscom 2023 Ebitda Forecast Beats Estimates
- SPSN SW : Swiss Prime FY Vacancy Rate Beats Estimates
- TLX GY : Talanx Sees 2023 Net About EU1.4B, Proposes EU2 Dividend
- TGS NO : TGS 4Q Ebitda Beats Estimates
- URW NA : Unibail FY Adjusted Recurring EPS Beats Estimates
- VACN SW : VAT Says Mike Allison to Step Down as CEO at Year-End
- VAR NO : Var Energi Makes New Oil Discovery in Barents Sea
- VERK FH : Verkkokauppa.com 4Q Net Income Misses Estimates
- DG FP : Vinci FY Ebit Meets Estimates
- VOLVB SS : Volvo Cars 4Q Operating Income Beats Estimates
- WBD IM : Webuild Consortium Wins €934M Rail Bypass Contract in Italy
- WHA NA : Wereldhave Sees 2023 EPS EU1.65 to EU1.75
- ZURN SW : Zurich Ins. FY Operating Profit Meets Estimates

>>> Europe : Brokers Upgrades & Downgrades - 9th of February 202

>>> Up
* H&M Raised to Add at AlphaValue/Baader
* K+S Raised to Neutral at Citi; PT 22 euros
* Publicis PT Raised to 65 euros from 53 euros at Morgan Stanley
* Swiss Re Raised to Buy at HSBC; PT 115 Swiss francs

>>> Down
* Barratt Cut to Add at Peel Hunt; PT 490 pence
* Bunge Cut to Neutral at Baird; PT $115
* Hannover Re Cut to Hold at HSBC; PT 193 euros
* Hiscox Cut to Hold at HSBC; PT 1,250 pence
* Shop Apotheke Cut to Underperform at Credit Suisse

>>> Initiation
* Ashtead Technology Rated New Buy at Berenberg
* Ithaca Energy Rated New Underweight at Barclays; PT 140 pence

>>> Call
* Kone Downgraded at Exane on Slowing Growth, Margin Profile

>>> US After Hours Summary: DIS +5.5% jumps following earnings and cost cutting

After Hours Summary: DIS +5.5% jumps following earnings and cost cutting moves; APP +28.2%, SONO +15.4%, QNST +10.3% higher on earnings; AFRM -19.6% falls on earnings and job cuts; APPS -18.6%, MAT -12.2%, TTMI -8.9% lower on earnings

After Hours Gainers:

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: APP +28.2%, SONO +15.4%, ME +11.5%, QNST +10.3%, FORM +7.5%, CDAY +5.7%, DIS +5.5% (also announces workforce reduction; to ask Board to reinstate dividend by end of calendar year), HOOD +5.2%, MGM +4.9% (also suspends dividend; announces new $2 bln share repurchase program), MPWR +3.7%, CXW +3.2%, PPC +3.1%, WYNN +3%, AZEK +2.4%, XPO +2.4%, PDM +2.1%, TWO +2.1%, ENS +2%, ORLY +2%, PI +2%, PYCR +2%, MMS +1.9%, DHT +1.3%, ULCC +1%, AEIS +0.1%, ASGN +0.1%, EQH +0.1%, FLT +0.1%, SLF +0.1%, WTS +0.1%

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to news: CARA +2% (results from the KOMFORT Phase 2 trial), POST +1.5% (POST to acquire select pet food brands from SJM for $1.2 bln in cash and stock), SUMO +1.1% (nearing a $1.7 bln deal to be sold to Francisco Partners, according to WSJ), SJM +0.7% (POST to acquire select pet food brands from SJM for $1.2 bln in cash and stock), CRM +0.7% (Dan Loeb's Third point has stake in CRM, according to WSJ), MMM +0.4% (files mixed securities shelf offering), SPGI +0.3% (SPGI announces new collaboration agreement with AMZN's AWS), CCJ +0.3% (agree on commercial terms to supply Ukraine's full natural UF6), APA +0.2% (successful drilling and flow testing of the Sapakara South-2 appraisal well), JPM +0.2% (eliminates hundreds more mortgage jobs, according to Bloomberg)

After Hours Losers:

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: AFRM -19.6% (also announces 19% workforce reduction), APPS -18.6%, MAT -12.2%, VWE -10.4% (issues downside Q2 rev guidance; CEO to transition to Exec Chairman; announces reorganization and simplification of ops), TTMI -8.9% (also to close three manufacturing facilities), STE -8.6%, FROG -5.7%, LNC -5.7%, EFX -5.1%, AZTA -5%, AVB -4.9% (also increases dividend), IFF -4.8%, RPD -2.9%, HI -2.8%, NVST -2.3%, VKTX -2.3%, ACLS -2.2%, STC -2.1%, FWRD -2%, SON -2%, NLY -1%, ESE -0.9%, PTEN -0.8%, PAA -0.2%, RE -0.2%, AB -0.1%, FR -0.1% (also increases dividend), GT -0.1%, RDN -0.1%

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to news: PRPL -13% ($50 mln stock offering), APPH -9.1% (commences $40 mln stock offering), LNC -5.7% (names new CFO), GLPG -5.6% (topline results from Phase 3 DIVERSITY trial of filgotinib), NSSC -5.2% (stock offering), RBT -2.8% (stock offering), CCS -1.4% (increases dividend), CURO -0.2% (names new chairman)

FT : European wind industry attacks ‘absurd’ Danish halt to approvals

European wind industry attacks ‘absurd’ Danish halt to approvals
Turbine makers caught out by suspension of scheme owing to EU state aid fears

The European wind industry has called a sudden Danish government decision to suspend approvals for all offshore wind farms “absurd” in light of the EU’s push for a rapid rollout of clean energy supplies.

Denmark has become a leader in wind energy relative to its size thanks to its so-called “open door” programme for approving renewables projects, but this was called to a halt on Monday after the government cited concerns that it violates the EU’s state aid rules.

The interruption comes at a crucial time for Europe as it tries to protect its clean technology industries in response to the billions of dollars of incentives available to clean energy projects through the US’s Inflation Reduction Act.

The European Commission is also trying to push member states to hit higher targets and speed up permitting procedures for new wind and solar power projects as the bloc tries to wean itself off Russian natural gas.

Giles Dickson, chief executive of WindEurope, said that “pausing the established Danish approach to offshore wind development now will seriously undermine all these targets”.

It would also create uncertainty about the substantial wind energy projects that were already under development in the North and Baltic seas.

“That’s completely absurd — especially at a time when the EU is easing its state aid rules to allow for more flexible investments in renewables,” he added.

Danish wind turbine industry leader Vestas was equally taken aback. Chief executive Henrik Andersen said he hoped that “sense returns” and the government would reverse its decision. 

“I’m surprised,” by the move, he said on Wednesday. “You have removed something that a large portion of the industry in Denmark relies on, and is actually built on.” The new policy raises a “question mark” about Denmark’s ambitions in green energy, he added.

Rasmus Errboe, chief executive of Orsted Europe, which operates five offshore wind farms in Denmark, also called the move “surprising and regrettable”.

“We apparently won’t be able to progress quickly with the largest buildout of offshore wind in Danish history, at a time where Denmark’s two largest offshore wind developers both are ready to invest heavily in the buildout.”

The European wind industry has been clamouring for policymakers to accelerate the slow pace of permissions for new projects. At the same time, it is struggling with rising materials costs and supply chain disruption that has cramped profitability and forced cuts to its workforce.

It can take up to 10 years for onshore wind schemes to receive permits, the think-tank Ember found in a study last year, even though EU legislation says the process should take no more than two years.

EU policymakers have pledged to tackle the issue that has led to delays and cancellations for turbine makers, but the industry has said it has yet to experience a change in the grinding bureaucratic process.

The cost inflation and government interventions in energy markets since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have also slowed development. Financing for new offshore projects in Europe fell from €27.7bn in 2020 to €16.6bn in 2022, according to WindEurope figures. No investment in offshore wind was made in 2021, it said.

Danish authorities contacted the commission about the future of its scheme last month, after which they were advised that it could be against state aid rules.

Denmark’s climate and energy minister Lars Aagaard said in a statement that the suspension of approvals was “a serious situation for the green transition and especially for the market players who are ready to invest in this form of offshore wind”.

The European Commission responded that it was “in contact with the Danish authorities on this matter” and that it was up to member states to “design measures in line with State aid rules and its policy objectives”.

Last year, commission president Ursula von der Leyen pledged alongside leaders from Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark to increase offshore wind capacity in the North Sea by 65GW by 2030 and to “at least” double that by 2050.

“The Danish approach to offshore wind is workable and delivers exactly what citizens and companies all over Europe urgently need: more renewable electricity at low cost,” Dickson said.

FT : Baupost chief Seth Klarman blames Federal Reserve for ‘financial fantasylan

Baupost chief Seth Klarman blames Federal Reserve for ‘financial fantasyland’
Easy money response to 2008 credit crisis contained ‘the seeds of its own destruction’

Seth Klarman has told investors in his hedge fund that the Federal Reserve’s response to the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing decade-plus of low interest rates had helped “erect a financial fantasyland”.

“A consequence-free era of virtually unlimited low-cost capital had come to an end,” Klarman, the head of Baupost Group and a prominent figure in investing, declared in a year-end letter to clients seen by the Financial Times. “A boom based on easy-money policies will inevitably contain the seeds of its own destruction.”

The downbeat outlook cuts against a rally that has sent major global stock benchmarks soaring this year, as sliding inflation figures give investors confidence that the Fed could soon stop lifting interest rates.

Klarman likened the sharp rise in interest rates last year to kryptonite, saying it had finally helped deflate the “everything bubble”, including the unravelling of investments in unprofitable so-called growth companies that had soared during the pandemic boom but had little inherent value.

“These included scores of profitless early-stage companies that could have come public only in a bubble, a staggering volume of bonds that sported cartoonishly low yields, most of the absurd ‘meme stocks’, and stocks such as Tesla — intensely hyped, egregiously overvalued, and priced only for the smoothest of rides — whose shares dropped by nearly two-thirds,” he wrote.

Shares of companies that had been bid to record highs in 2020 and 2021 deflated sharply last year, dealing a blow to investors across the venture capital, crypto and technology industries who had ploughed money into businesses with high revenue growth but little or no profits.

“Time spent on due diligence came to seem to them a hindrance to maximal capital deployment, and the usual warning signs of excess — financial profligacy, a proliferation of dubious business models, and obvious red flags — were mocked or ignored,” he wrote.

Despite the rebound in markets this year, Klarman warned that last year’s sell-off “probably has further to go” and that a sovereign debt crisis could lie ahead.

Klarman spent much of his letter critiquing the Fed’s response to the financial crisis, when the US central bank cut interest rates close to zero and began hoovering up Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities. The policy dramatically reduced the returns on safer investments, such as US sovereign debt, and prompted many investors to buy riskier and higher-yielding securities.

“Microscopic interest rates, like grains of sand at the beach, had gotten into everything,” he wrote. “The central bankers had fallen behind the curve, having failed to anticipate that the massive expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet would be difficult to reverse and that a decade-plus of low interest rate policies had finally run aground.”

He warned that “persistently low rates have a pernicious effect on investor behaviour”, with many asset managers moving into illiquid assets, including venture capital and private equity.

“An entire new generation of investors may well have come of age never having actually experienced an economic downturn, a protracted market downdraft, or interest rates above rock-bottom levels,” he wrote. “Like Halley’s comet, these are things many investors have heard about but may never have actually seen, or can’t quite imagine.”

Baupost benefited from the market volatility in 2022, netting $1.6bn from its hedging, which helped offset losses in its stock portfolio, including Just Eat Takeaway, Google-owner Alphabet and Instagram-parent Meta.

Klarman told clients the firm had added to positions in several of its public equity bets after prices declined, as well as investing in three Chinese companies that he said were “extremely undervalued”. It is the biggest exposure to China Baupost has had in many years and comes at a time when many other investors are pulling back from the region.

Baupost said it posted a mid-single digit decline last year, significantly outperforming the S&P 500.

WSJ : New Ring Discovered Around Small, Icy World in Our Solar System

New Ring Discovered Around Small, Icy World in Our Solar System
The ring—encircling a Pluto-like object named Quaoar—is unusually far from its parent body


Billions of miles away, in a distant part of our solar system, astronomers have found a new ring orbiting a small, icy world.

But this newly discovered ring is unlike the telltale halos of ice and dust that orbit planets such as Saturn and Jupiter in a key aspect—it is unusually far from its host body, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“It is a factor of two further out than what was previously recognized as the limit for how far a ring system can exist around a parent body,” said Vikram Dhillon, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. and co-author of the new study. He added that the finding seriously challenges existing theories about ring formation in our corner of the cosmos.

An international team of nearly 60 researchers from more than a dozen countries used telescopes on Earth and in space to help confirm the existence of the disk, orbiting roughly 2,500 miles away from its parent body’s center.

Finding a ring that is so far out “either implies that there is something really unusual about this system, or that rings can be found in a broader range of conditions than we previously thought,” said Dr. Matthew Hedman, a University of Idaho physicist who wasn’t involved in the research but wrote an editorial accompanying the study.

The new ring system encircles a small, celestial body named Quaoar, located in what astronomers call the Kuiper belt, a ring of icy objects—including dwarf planets such as Pluto—around the sun beyond Neptune’s orbit. This isn’t the first time a ring system has been found around a Kuiper belt object—scientists announced the existence of one around the dwarf planet Haumea in 2017.

“Quaoar is like a cousin of Pluto. It is a little bit further away from us and from our sun and is around half Pluto’s size,” said Bruno Morgado, an astronomer at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and lead author of the new research. It was discovered using a telescope at the Palomar Observatory in southern California in 2002.

Quaoar—pronounced “kwa-whar” and named after the creator god of the Tongva people indigenous to the area around Los Angeles—is on average 4 billion miles away from the sun. At such vast distances, any ring would be too small and faint to see directly. So the researchers instead studied the 680-mile-wide Quaoar at times when it passed in front of bright stars—observing how the object blocked that background star’s light.

“How long the light blinks out tells us how big Quaoar is,” Dr. Dhillon said. The study authors examined data from four different events like this involving Quaoar between 2018 and 2021, including observations from Namibia, Australia, the Canary Islands and from space using the European Space Agency’s CHEOPS telescope.

Dr. Dhillon led the project that built a sensitive high-speed camera mounted on the world’s largest optical telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands, which observed Quaoar in June 2019. This observation was key to resolving subtle and rapid changes in how much starlight the distant world blotted out, he said. The camera helped reveal small, symmetrical dips in light before and after Quaoar passed in front of a star.

“If you see that kind of symmetric signature, that indicates the presence of a ring,” said Matthew Tiscareno, an astrodynamicist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who wasn’t involved in the study. “This is a time-honored technique; the rings of Uranus and Neptune were discovered this way back in the 1970s.”

The researchers determined that Quaoar’s ring system—made of water ice and rock debris—orbits far enough from the icy world that Dr. Morgado said he knew the team was seeing “something very, very strange and unexpected.”

All previous observed ring systems—including those around the four outermost planets—fall within what astronomers call the Roche limit. If an orbiting object goes inside this limit, Dr. Morgado said, it will breakup due to a planet or host body’s gravitational forces and become a ring. Conversely, if a ring goes beyond this critical distance, debris in the ring isn’t disrupted by the host’s gravity and can combine to become an orbiting object, like a moonlet. Yet Quaoar’s rings exist far beyond this Roche limit, which had “previously been considered kind of sacrosanct,” Dr. Dhillon said.

“Many of the individual observations wouldn’t be convincing by themselves, but taken together, it is clear what is being seen: a complicated ring system,” said Henry Throop, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronomer in the planetary science division at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Dr. Throop, who wasn’t involved in the research, called the finding “a really exciting new result.”

After modeling Quaoar’s ring system and running simulations, the study authors offered several ideas to explain the unique ring. One suggestion is that Quaoar’s ring is debris from a moonlet that recently got broken up by a disruptive impact, and that debris hasn’t come back together yet. But Dr. Morgado said that the coalescing process would take 10 to 20 years at most.

“At the end of the day, it is very unlikely—if you consider the billions of yearslong history of the solar system—that we are in the right place at the right time to be observing this kind of thing,” he added.

Another scenario is that the icy particles in the ring have a hard, frosty coating—making the particles more likely to bounce off each other than stick together after colliding, Dr. Dhillon said. Gravitational interactions between Quaoar, its moon Weywot, and objects in the ring system could also be keeping the particles moving at very high speeds, which would prevent them from combining into larger objects. Gravitational forces from an undiscovered moon could be a factor as well, he added.

Dr. Tiscareno said more observations of Quaoar’s ring and more simulations of the system should help identify the mechanisms responsible for its existence.

The new finding ultimately suggests there are more ring systems awaiting discovery around similar-sized celestial bodies in our solar system, according to Dr. Morgado. He said he thinks new and better instruments, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, could help make that happen.

FT : Microsoft targets Google’s search dominance with AI-powered Bing

Microsoft targets Google’s search dominance with AI-powered Bing
Big Tech companies rush to gain ascendancy after launch of ChatGPT

Microsoft’s use of the artificial intelligence used in ChatGPT to disrupt the internet search market is set to demolish the high profit margins that have underpinned Google’s core business, chief executive Satya Nadella predicted on Tuesday.

“From now on, the [gross margin] of search is going to drop forever,” Nadella said in an interview with the Financial Times.

Nadella was speaking as the software giant unveiled an overhaul of its Bing search engine to incorporate AI advances that have been sweeping through the tech world since the launch of ChatGPT more than two months ago.

Google is scrambling to make up lost ground since the arrival of ChatGPT, which provides text answers to complex questions directly rather than requiring the use of a traditional search engine. Google has said it would launch its own chatbot and add AI features to its search engine.

The use of language AI to supplement or even replace internet searches has raised the prospect of sharply higher costs for search companies. Nadella said he was willing to accept any “demonetisation” of the search business, from which Microsoft last year earned $11bn of revenue, for the chance to eat into Google’s business.

“There is such margin in search, which for us is incremental. For Google it’s not, they have to defend it all,” he added, referring to the competition against Google as “asymmetric”.

Google’s delayed response to ChatGPT has left Microsoft with a rare chance to claim a technological edge as the search market faces its first big change for years. Microsoft said its search overhaul was based on a new version of the language AI system developed by OpenAI, the San Francisco AI research group in which it recently announced a “multibillion-dollar” investment.

Nadella acknowledged that Google would introduce its own AI-powered search products, calling it the “800-pound gorilla” and that users would have to decide which product they preferred.

Microsoft poured billions of dollars into challenging Google in the early days of search, but could not make a dent in its dominant position. According to Statcounter, Bing accounts for only 3 per cent of global searches, compared with 93 per cent for Google.

Microsoft on Tuesday showed off a new version of Bing that it said would be available immediately to anyone using a desktop computer, though only for “a limited number of queries”. The overhaul includes a box running down the right-hand side of search results pages that seeks to draw information out of web pages returned in a search.

It also includes a chatbot, similar to ChatGPT, that can create travel itineraries or compare products, and a creation tool to generate emails and shopping lists based on search queries.

Nadella claimed the changes marked the start of a new “race” in the internet search market that would disrupt “the largest software category on planet earth”.

“It’s a new day in search,” he said. “Rapid innovation is going to come, in fact a race starts today.”

Microsoft said that Bing users would, after their initial searches on the new system, have to join a waiting list to access “the full experience” of the service. It also said it planned to launch a mobile version and expand the service “to millions of people in the coming weeks”.

Google on Wednesday hosted an event in Paris where it announced several integrations of AI into search and mapping tools, including interactive 3D models of some cities including London and Los Angeles. “Although we are 25 years into search, I daresay that our story has just begun,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice-president at Google.