Gapping up
In reaction to strong earnings/guidance:
- ERIC +10.6%, WAL +7.8%, CFG +6.1%, ALLY +5.3%, FNB +4.9%, TREE +4.5% (raises Q2 rev guidance above consensus), PPG +3.8%, FHN +3.5%, JBHT +3.3%, MRTN +2.2%, BLK +1.2%, RYAM +0.7%, ASH +0.7%, SXT +0.7%
Select biotech/vaccine co's showing strength following reports EU speaking with several biotech companies to secure vaccines for COVID-19:
- NVAX +8%, BNTX +2.1%, MRNA +1.8%
Other news:
- VRNA +103.3% (~$200 mln in an oversubscribed private placement and subscription with new and existing institutional and accredited investors)
- HMHC +26.4% (rumors on Twitter after hours that co signed new sales contracts; co denies)
- MGTX +22.7% (announces "positive" clinical data demonstrating treatment with AAV-RPGR Investigational gene therapy improves vision in X-linked retinitis pigmentosa patients)
- RADA +11.4% (received $8 mln in accumulated new orders since June 1, 2020 (received new orders of $49 mln since start of 2020); reaffirms 2020 revs guidance)
- PHAS +9.6% (doses first patient in Phase 2 trial in hospitalized COVID-19 patients)
- PBYI +3.9% (licensing partner receives marketing approval for NERLYNX in Malaysia)
- KPTI +3.3% (entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program)
- FOLD +1.9% (executed a definitive agreement for a $400 million credit facility with Hayfin Capital Management)
- SVM +1.5% (reports Q1 production results)
- TSLA +0.8% (New York State to invest $750 mln in infrastructure for electric cars)
Analyst comments:
- HL +3.5% (upgraded to Sector Perform from Underperform at RBC Capital Mkts
- NSIT +3.3% (upgraded to Buy from Hold at Stifel)
Early premarket gappers
- Gapping up:
- HMHC +26.4%, FHN +15.1%, PHAS +9.6%, ERIC +9.6%, FNB +7.8%, WAL +5.9%, PBYI +4.9%, JBHT +4.7%, TREE +4.5%, MRTN +2.9%, PPG +1.6%, BLK +1.4%, SVM +0.7%, RYAM +0.7%, ASH +0.7%, RIO +0.5%
- Gapping down:
- SPXC -8.2%, NFLX -7.1%, PSTI -6%, CYTK -2.9%, ALV -1.8%, ROKU -1.4%, TTWO -0.9%
The next German tech sensation struggles in a post-Wirecard world
After Northern Data shares plunged on an anonymous attack, investors need time to decide on the truth
The latest tech sensation out of Germany reached an important milestone this month. Northern Data, which operates racks of high-powered servers, surpassed $1bn in market value for the first time.
A few days later an article on Medium accused the Frankfurt-based company of overstating its prowess in “high performance computing” and understating its reliance on bitcoin miners. Moreover, its hosting services seemed so strangely profitable that either Northern Data was “cooking the books” or it had “found the dumbest customers in the crypto industry”. Either way, the situation was unsustainable, the company was “grossly overvalued” and did “not warrant its current unicorn level valuation”.
The critique contained no inside information or smoking gun. It lacked the imprimatur of an established short seller such as Muddy Waters. But it still packed a punch: Northern Data shares plunged by a third, toppling it from the “unicorn level”.
That is the Wirecard effect. Having sat by with their fingers in their ears as questions were raised during Wirecard’s rise, fund managers in Germany are much more skittish after the fintech company’s fall. In a market where it has been notoriously difficult to be a short seller, it is suddenly a lot easier — and a lot more difficult if you are the target.
“It’s a very unpleasant point in time,” says Maximilian Martin, head of finance at Northern Data. “It gives the anonymous trolls a power of influence.” He adds, however: “I’m not concerned because I know we’re no criminals — that’s the biggest point of differentiation. We’re as transparent as it gets.”
Certainly, the company — which published a thorough rebuttal — has offered an unusual level of access: look at our records, talk to our auditors, visit the headquarters in Frankfurt and the new data centre in Texas.
“We never hid that we were working in the blockchain sector and actually we are proud of it,” says chief executive Aroosh Thillainathan, who used to run a bitcoin mining company. Northern Data’s annual reports bear this out. If it has exaggerated its artificial intelligence prowess, that is also true of Tesla and plenty of other megacap tech companies.
None of this needs to be a fraud for the anonymous writer to be correct in his “grossly overvalued” assessment, however. Northern Data reported sales last year of about €10m. Its peak valuation of almost 100 times that is more than a little aggressive. It relies on the company making good on its forecasts — reaffirmed this week after the attack — of a stratospheric surge in sales to about €130m this year and earnings of about €50m before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation — and maintaining that pace for years.
This is where the pricing allegations are important. Customers mining bitcoin pay hosting services for the electricity consumed by their power-hungry machines, which carry out calculations 24 hours a day to earn the cryptocurrency. The Medium author estimates Northern Data offers a rate of 6 cents per kWh, which he says is uncompetitively high. This is, incidentally, the same estimate made by analysts at Baader Bank, which is positive on the company. Northern Data, though, says it is not correct and a happy customer, blockchain company Block.one, says it pays a different and competitive price.
This is a rabbit hole. To add to the complexity of the bitcoin burrow, some customers, including Block.one and SBI Holdings, a Japanese financial services group with a crypto mining arm, are also shareholders.
For investors, unravelling all this will take time. There are parallels with bitcoin itself: in a trustless world, there is a way to make money, but you have to do the work.
BlackRock assets jump in second quarter, driven by ebullient markets
Profits exceed estimates as world’s biggest fund manager generates higher fee income
BlackRock surpassed profit estimates in the second quarter after the bumper stock market rally boosted its assets under management, increasing the group’s fee revenue.
The group delivered $7.85 in diluted earnings per share on an adjusted basis for the quarter, 13 per cent above analyst estimates. Assets under management for the world’s largest fund manager rose 13 per cent from the first quarter to $7.3tn, undoing the big drop early in 2020. The figure was just $100m short of the record reached at the end of last year.
Net income of $1.2bn was a fifth higher than the same period last year, while revenue rose 3 per cent to $3.6bn from the second quarter in 2019. Fee revenue rose 2 per cent from the prior year.
BlackRock has taken a prominent role during the pandemic, managing the Federal Reserve’s bond-buying programme that attracted criticism given the central bank’s scheme includes purchasing exchange traded funds, even the asset manager’s own funds. The company has not taken revenue from the ETFs the Fed buys.
The group’s financial markets advisory unit, which manages the Fed programme and works with central banks around the world, generated $39m in revenue, down on the same quarter a year ago. Technology revenue hit a record $278m, nearly a fifth above the same period last year, driven by the group’s Aladdin tech platform.
BlackRock’s ETF business, iShares, brought in $51bn of the group’s $100bn in net inflows for the quarter. The company trailed Vanguard, the world’s second-largest fund manager, in ETF inflows in the first half of the year, according to data from ETFGI.
BlackRock stock is a shade off the year’s high point reached in February and just 5 per cent from the record reached two years ago. The shares are up 13 per cent this year compared with an 8 per cent decline for fund managers in the S&P 500 index of US blue-chips.
French High-Jewelry Houses Offer Digital and Real-World Shine
Chaumet drew on architecture, Boucheron sought to capture the lightness of air and Cartier borrowed patterns in the natural world.
PARIS — The historic jewelry houses of Place Vendôme are famous for weathering crises over the decades, and they weren’t about to allow the coronavirus pandemic to keep them from introducing fresh, high-end finery to the world during the traditional July presentations in Paris.
Emerging from a lockdown slumber, the Place Vendôme drew editors back to the gilded salons of Chaumet and Boucheron, while Cartier went virtual, hosting Zoom calls and a video from the Grand Palais.
The trio of French luxury houses had distinct propositions as they sought to push the realm of high jewelry into fresh directions as the industry grapples with steep declines in business and a cloudy outlook. Bain has projected a 25 to 30 percent decline in the global personal luxury goods industry this year. Cartier-owner Compagnie Financière Richemont reported this week that sales nearly halved in the first three months of the year, despite double-digit growth in China.
Chaumet drew on architectural design while Boucheron sought to capture the lightness of air and Cartier borrowed from patterns in the natural world for its stylized collection.
Other labels were also active, including Messika, Qeelin and Dinh Van, showing new collections in-person or through Zoom.
A number of high jewelers opted out of the July presentations, which normally coincide with the haute couture fashion calendar, including Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Dior and Gucci.
Boucheron invited a small group of journalists to an upper-floor salon of its Place Vendôme boutique, seating them on a sprawling sofa to view a meditative film — featuring clouds, stunning natural reflections, water droplets, birds in flight — before seating participants around a table to view the pieces of its new collection, titled “Contemplation.” While the house’s creative director Claire Choisne thought up the theme a few years ago, it carried particular resonance in these times. Choisne was on hand to introduce the jewelry, accompanied by chief executive officer Hélène Poulit-Duquesne. Refreshments were offered and trays of white, sugared macarons decorated the table, along with vases holding bouquets of raw cotton tufts.
The pair kicked off the presentation with the Goutte de Ciel necklace, passing it around on a tray before putting it on a model to show it worn — the first of a stream of a diverse and varied collection, which counted 67 pieces.
“The idea was to capture a piece of the sky to be able to offer it to the woman wearing the necklace,” said Choisne.
“We did a lot of research,” she noted, before they found the suitable material: aerogel. The ultralight silicon matter, mostly air and silica, is used by NASA to capture star dust in outer space. Bite-sized chunks were passed around for handling, to feel the weightlessness of the futuristic, pale, milky blue substance. For the necklace, it was encapsulated in a drop shaped case of rock crystal, the size of a hand. Adding volume and texture to the piece, and in contrast with the large, smooth droplet, the rest of the necklace was made of stacked discs, pavéd in diamonds or made of rock crystal, of varying sizes.
The pair recalled an important piece for the collection had languished in the mail during the lockdown period, adding drama during a tumultuous time.
“In a pile of packages at the Roissy airport!” laughed Poulit-Duquesne.
Seeking to capture lightness through another method, the house’s Nuage en Apesanteur necklace was designed with the help of algorithms, which mapped out clusters of droplets — made by hand — to resemble the shape of a cloud. The necklace sits around the neck like a nest of titanium threads, with thousands of diamonds and glass beads attached to the ends.
The Fenetre sur Ciel necklace took an altogether different approach to replicating the sky. The fabric-like mesh, worn like a flat scarf, was made of small hexagons in mother-of-pearl and blue lacquer, and punctuated with a hearty, 35-carat cabochon tanzanite. An homage to James Turrell’s “Open Sky” artwork on Naoshima Island in Japan, the set is completed with a prominent ring with an 8.52 carat emerald-cut tanzanite.
Keeping with the light and airy theme, the house showed feathered pieces carved out of mother-of-pearl, brooches and necklaces of swallows in flight, diamond-pavéd wing earrings and a delicate trembler dandelion necklace.
Across the Place Vendôme, Chaumet invited editors to view jewelry in an upper salon of its refurbished mansion that sits on the square. As was the case for most houses, more pieces are in the works — high-jewelry workshops were shut across France during the lockdown period — and Chaumet expects to have additional jewelry to show at the end of August.
But the jewelry pieces on display resolutely held their own, offering a broad range that started with lightweight pieces made from ultrathin titanium — a tiara, necklace and voluminous bracelet — resembling lattice work, and, in stark contrast, more assertive pieces with fuller volumes that paid homage to architectural design.
“We knew we would be reopening the Hôtel Particulier, which is a work of architecture situated on a place of architecture,” said Chaumet ceo Jean-Marc Mansvelt, referring to the refurbished store on the Place Vendôme.
“It’s a theme, like all high-jewelry themes for us, that allows us to revisit the history of the house, that we have reworked through time,” he continued.
“It shows that a construction of a jewel is similar to constructing a building — there are many points in common,” he said.
“You start with a drawing, you then go to 3-D, when you talk about architecture, as with jewelry, you talk about volume, balance, managing empty or filled spaces, light, movement,” he said, evoking the CCTV Tower by Rem Koolhaas in Beijing.
“You wonder, ‘how is it held up?’” he said, noting that this was the effect the house was after.
Organized by chapters, the jewelry revisited past and more contemporary architecture. The Skyline sets drew inspiration from Chaumet pieces harking back to the Seventies, and involved reworking yellow gold in myriad ways, contrasting hammered with polished surfaces, recalling works by Pierre Sterlé. The Skyline ring featured a ray-like construction around a flawless, 7.34-carat diamond, while the necklace had a 16.06-carat pear-shaped emerald and rows of baguette-cut diamonds and emeralds.
The Labyrinthe pieces played on empty and filled spaces, using onyx as a filler, and included a necklace featuring a 19.36-carat pear-shaped rubellite, jade and baguette-cut diamonds.
Cartier invited editors to view its colorful, new high-jewelry sets through Zoom, showing the “Sur-Naturel” collection with models on hand to display the pieces in movement. The Gharial necklace mixes octagonal-shaped emeralds with diamonds in a unique pattern that resembles the skin of a crocodile. A client had famously visited a Cartier store with a pet alligator, the story went.
The Sinopé necklace re-created the movement of water, with 39.22 carats of sapphires from Madagascar. The Panthère Tropicale watch was one of the bolder pieces, with a coral-lined bracelet and large octagonal-shaped aquamarines and tourmalines that contrasted with diamond pavéd panels. The Tillandsia necklace offered a blast of color, and was built around two oval-shaped green beryls totaling 163.97 carats, surrounded by brown, yellow and orange diamonds.
The recent lockdown period drove home the importance of digital means, and Cartier moved quickly to set up a studio in Paris to show high jewelry through other means than in person.
The studio was built by a transversal team of people from the label’s events teams and high-jewelry manufacturing staff, with the help of external agencies, explained Arnaud Carrez, marketing and communications director of Cartier International.
“A lot of stakeholders were involved in the development of this studio and a lot of briefing — a lot of preparation with the sales staff,” he explained.
“It was a challenging exercise,” he continued, noting that they sought to ensure that the digital version would carry the same level of experience as a physical event.
“Everything has to be done with excellence, the environment, the setting, the display of the pieces, the fact that you can have technical experts giving some explanation of these pieces, everything has been built for VIP clients to feel as though it was a physical experience,” he added.
“Everything is live, so there’s a lot of technology involved,“ he said, noting that confidentiality was also key, when it comes to VIP clients especially.
Valerie Messika took to Zoom to show her Voltige collection that was put together in a very short time frame — plans to show a more spectacular range of pieces had been postponed due to the COVID-19 crisis.
Focusing on the essentials — diamonds — she started with the stones, calling on her father, a well-known stone dealer, for supplies.
Alongside Messika, French journalist Peggy Frey took part in the video presentation, and remarked that the designer seemed to have a playful approach to her designs.
“I played with diamonds when I was a kid,” said Messika, prompting Frey to note that, for her, it was Lego.
The journalist modeled double rings and diamond ear clips, lifting the hooped earrings to the camera, while the two continued lighthearted conversation, making for a lively presentation. Seeking to free the stones, Messika suspended diamonds above their settings, or gave them movement, with large, pavéd hoops carrying a heart-shaped diamond and a 3.07-carat heart-shaped diamond solitaire ring.
Qeelin, which also belongs to Kering, presented its new Wulu rings, offering the signature house form in a variety of precious materials and colors, with red agate, jade and mother-of-pearl set with pavéd diamonds and rose gold, or, strikingly, in white gold and onyx, also pavéd with diamonds.
Dinh Van presented new jewelry in Paris, gathering the press for lunch in an airy restaurant to show a collection that had been scheduled for release in April. The house stopped all advertising activity during the recent lockdown period in France, but plans to kick off the fall with traditional advertising, with a television spot in France as well as posters. New pieces included a Menottes necklace in a fat serpent chain and large creole hoops.
Fashion vs. the Economy: Retail Faces Double Dip
Bolstered for now by government aid, the outlook on the economy is only growing shakier as coronavirus cases surge.
The economic roller coaster isn’t over — and fashion can just hold on as tight as possible.
As horrible as the first phase of the coronavirus crisis was, it was relatively straightforward (and straight down). Almost everybody was forced to shut down and go home, leading a projected contraction of more than 30 percent in second-quarter gross domestic product and an unemployment rate of more than 11 percent.
Even though the initial shock passed, that sinking feeling hasn’t gone away. No one knows what’s coming next. For retailers and brands, that means adjusting their business models and conserving cash, fingers-crossed they make it to the other side of the open-ended economic crisis.
The coronavirus is the driving force behind the chaos, but it’s not the only variable. The reactions to the pandemic on the part of federal policy makers, consumers and brands will also factor into just how rough of a ride it is for the rest of the year and into 2021 — with most companies of almost every strip pretty much ignoring the rest of 2020 (if they can) and plotting their strategies for next year, when the hope is there will be at least some recovery.
Beyond the case count, which is spiking in the key markets of Texas, Florida and California, the most important factor to watch could be the stimulus package that’s still forming in Washington.
So far the federal government has carried the economy with loans to businesses, the Paycheck Protection Program that helped keep workers on the job, expanded unemployment benefits and more. The trillions of dollars have helped prop up the stock market, businesses and spending.
“Consumers right now, if anything, are awash in cash because they got the stimulus checks and anyone who’s unemployed has gotten extra benefits, so there’s a lot of money kicking around right now,” said Scott Hoyt, senior director of consumer economics at Moody’s Analytics.
But many of the key support programs from Washington are set to expire soon, so lawmakers are expected to pump more money into the system, with the projected size of the next aid package varying widely from $1 trillion to $5 trillion.
“If we’re not too far from the worst of it, then you can probably get by on $1.5 trillion or $2 trillion,” Hoyt said. “If we were to get [hit by the virus] so badly that we had to significantly shut down again, then, who knows? You might well need more than that.
“It’s hard to see things improving more than very gradually until the virus is materially less of an issue, which means herd immunity, which no one seems to think we’re very close to, or an effective treatment or a vaccine,” Hoyt said. “Almost any economic outlook has to be contingent on a very heroic assumption about when you achieve one of those three things.”
In the meantime, economists are watching case counts as closely as they watch consumers and factory orders, while Wall Street investors are keyed into Washington in case the lawmakers turn off the spigot.
“The economy is going to move with the virus, the stock market is going to move with the government,” said Paul Nolte, partner and wealth manager at Kingsview Partners, which has $1.5 billion under management.
“This is a health-care issue and no amount of money is going to fix that until we get the virus under control and no one knows when that’s going to be,” Nolte said.
The reaction to the virus is evolving, with cities and states testing how much they can loosen social distancing restrictions and still keep COVID-19 in check.
“I don’t think we’re going back to all the way off to where we where we were in March, where it was a complete shutdown,” Nolte said. “So from that perspective we’ve learned something.”
Stores that have opened back up might have to close again, but perhaps can continue with curbside pickup, which has become a sudden growth avenue for retail. That trickle of business, along with the booming trade in e-commerce, could help many stores muddle through.
“We may be in a very slow, recessionary environment for a while,” Nolte said. “Depression — we probably avoided that, but I think we’ll have, depending on the state and area, a ‘rolling recession’ where you have these shutdowns for a month, where you back off of different things.”
“Rolling recession” sounds better than depression, but it’s still not good and could be accompanied by a new and much more bearish outlook from shoppers if the pandemic starts to feel less like a short-term disruption and more like a long haul.
Consumer confidence tanked with the shutdown this spring, but Erik Lundh, senior economist at The Conference Board, noted that while people were feeling “really pessimistic” about their immediate circumstances, they were “optimistic about the future.”
The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index stood at 98.1 in June, down from 130.7 in February. But it’s the light at the end of the tunnel that’s maintaining the measure of shopping sentiment, made up of The Present Situation Index, which is down to 86.2 from 165.1 in February, while the Expectations Index is off just mildly, to 106 from 107.8 in February.
But as the virus continues to spread and case numbers go up, consumers who managed to push on thinking things were going to get better soon could buckle.
“It’s like getting hit once in the face — you’re sort of on your feet, and then you get hit again and you go down,” said Lundh, noting that resurgence and additional lockdowns could be more damaging to consumer confidence than the initial shutdown.
“That supply shock that was initially felt at the beginning of the crisis is going to migrate over to the demand side,” he said. “You’re going to see a situation where consumption doesn’t recover and there’s going to be a lack of income, a lack of consumer confidence that’s really going to manifest itself in the economy later in the year.”
The Conference Board is predicting a “double dip” in the economy this year that will work out to a 7 percent drop in GDP overall.
That means retailers pinning their hopes on the holiday season could face even a tougher way forward, with consumers becoming more cautious just when they might have splurged.
Already there has been a wave of bankruptcies, including Neiman Marcus Group, J.C. Penney Co. Inc., J. Crew Inc., Brooks Brothers, Lucky Brand and RTW Retailwinds. Any companies holding on hoping for the holidays to save them might just be out of luck if the virus worsens with cooler weather in the fall.
Stronger companies are doing what they can now to stock up on cash and reorient to the new reality while looking for ways to take market share even as the market itself shrinks.
Levi Strauss & Co. said it was cutting 15 percent of its corporate workforce, or 700 positions, creating $100 million in annual savings and helping it to continue to fund the parts of the business that are performing best, such as e-commerce. PVH Corp. is streamlining North American operations, exiting 162 outlet stores in its Heritage Brands Retail business and reducing its office workforce by about 450 positions, or 12 percent.
Both moves acknowledged that times have changed and showed a willingness to keep up with that change, however painful.
Consultant Michael Brown, a partner in Kearney’s consumer practice, said companies are going to have to make hard decisions to build a “fit for the future organizational structure.”
Brown said companies have to learn the lessons of COVID-19, examine how it’s impacting their businesses and start to eliminate assets that are no longer needed and be ready for the future.
“We’ve got to figure out, how do we get through the potential implications [the virus] is going to have on the Christmas holiday?” he said. “In the current situation, executing a holiday in physical stores at the scale and volume that we have in past years is going to be virtually impossible.”
That has retailers trying to do it all — navigate an uncertain economy, hold on to cash, appeal to a new consumer mind-set and really become much more digital while nearly every aspect of the industry is dramatically shifting.
“This was never going to be a one-size-fits-all across-the-country recovery,” said consultant Matthew Katz, managing partner in SSA & Co.’s retail and consumer practice. “This was always going to be and will continue to be a recovery of stops and starts. You’re dealing not only with employee safety/municipal regulation. You’re also realigning with consumer psyche about, ‘Is it safe to engage?’ And you’re fighting against the new-found e-commerce freedom that many consumers had not yet enjoyed. Instead of four months of store closures, we’ve experienced seven-years’ [worth] of digital acceleration.”
>>> Up
* Alstom PT Raised to 55 euros from 46 euros at Oddo BHF (+)
* Duerr Raised to Buy at LBBW; PT 27 euros
* Gerresheimer PT Raised to 105 euros at Deutsche Bank
* National Grid Raised to Buy at Deutsche Bank; PT 940 pence
* Orlen Raised to Buy at HSBC; PT 72 zloty
* SGS Raised to Buy at Berenberg; PT 2,700 Swiss francs
>>> Down
* Boiron Cut to Sell at SocGen; PT 37 euros
* Bonheur Cut to Neutral at Clarksons Platou; PT 230 kroner
* Erste Cut to Hold at Deutsche Bank; PT 21 euros
* Jungheinrich Cut to Hold at HSBC; PT 24 euros
* Ringkjobing Landbobank Cut to Sell at ABG; PT 400 kroner
* Ubisoft Cut to Neutral at Oddo BHF; PT 78 euros
* XXL Cut to Sell at SpareBank; PT 18 kroner
>>> Initiation
* Mercialys Reinstated Buy at ABN Amro Bank; PT 13 euros
* Simec Atlantis Rated New Buy at Arden Partners; PT 77 pence (+)
>>> Call
* ASML Gains After Recommendation by Motley Fool Website
* Rio’s Solid Production Update Has Capex Rising, Citi Says (+)
* SGS Raised at Berenberg on ‘Unparalleled’ Capacity to Adapt
>>> Up
* Duerr Raised to Buy at LBBW; PT 27 euros
* Gerresheimer PT Raised to 105 euros at Deutsche Bank
* National Grid Raised to Buy at Deutsche Bank; PT 940 pence
* Orlen Raised to Buy at HSBC; PT 72 zloty
* SGS Raised to Buy at Berenberg; PT 2,700 Swiss francs
>>> Down
* Boiron Cut to Sell at SocGen; PT 37 euros
* Bonheur Cut to Neutral at Clarksons Platou; PT 230 kroner
* Erste Cut to Hold at Deutsche Bank; PT 21 euros
* Jungheinrich Cut to Hold at HSBC; PT 24 euros
* Ringkjobing Landbobank Cut to Sell at ABG; PT 400 kroner
* Ubisoft Cut to Neutral at Oddo BHF; PT 78 euros
* XXL Cut to Sell at SpareBank; PT 18 kroner
>>> Initiation
* Mercialys Reinstated Buy at ABN Amro Bank; PT 13 euros
>>> CallASML Gains After Recommendation by Motley Fool Website
*
* SGS Raised at Berenberg on ‘Unparalleled’ Capacity to Adapt
DAX
- Daimler +1.7%
- Daimler’s Late-Quarter Recovery Limits Loss to $1.9 Billion
- Merck +0.6%
- Bayerische Motoren Werke +0.6%
MDAX
- Duerr +2.0%
- Duerr Raised to Buy at LBBW; PT 27 euros
- Deutsche Lufthansa +1.1%
- Aroundtown +1.1%
SDAX
- ADVA Optical +9.9%
- Reported preliminary 2Q revenue up 8.9% y/y, profitability up
- Kloeckner +2.6%
- LPKF Laser & Electronics +2.3%
- Leoni +1.6%
- Jungheinrich -4.8%
- Jungheinrich Cut to Hold at HSBC; PT 24 euros
- CECONOMY -2.5%
- Nordex -1.5%
- Traton -1.1%