Gapping up
In reaction to disappointing earnings/guidance:
- STNE +22%, SYNH +10.9%, AMRS +5.5% (also signed agreement for cannabinoid development, licensing and commercialization containing $300 million of R&D and milestone payments plus long-term royalties), MIK +4.7%, TLRY +3.2%, HDS +1%
Other news:
- FOE +7% (to join S&P SmallCap 600)
- PAGS +5.8% (attributed to STNE results)
- AMRS +5.5% (Amyris signed final definitive agreement for cannabinoid development, licensing and commercialization containing $300 million of R&D and milestone payments plus long-term royalties)
- BIOS +4.3% (modestly rebounding from 16% decline)
- DERM +2.7% (proposed public offering of $110.0 mln of its common stock)
- CTRE +1.8% (increases quarterly dividend to $0.225/share from $0.205/share)
- WMB +1.3% (Williams Cos and Canada Pension Plan form $3.8 bln strategic joint venture partnership in the Marcellus/Utica basins )
- F +0.5% (increasing production of Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator this summer by 20% to meet surging customer demand, adding 550 jobs at Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville)
Analyst comments:
- ZUO +3.6% (upgraded to Buy from Hold at Canaccord Genuity)
- AAXN +2.7% (upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Northcoast)
- DPZ +2% (upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at JP Morgan)
- SCCO +1.9% (upgraded to Hold from Reduce at HSBC Securities)
- FLWS +1.6% (upgraded to Buy from Neutral at DA Davidson)
- FIVE +1.4% (upgraded to Buy from Hold at Loop Capital)
- NBL +1.3% (upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Mizuho)
Early premarket gappersGapping up:
- STNE +20.4%, SYNH +9.7%, FOE +7%, BIOS +4.3%, PAGS +4%, TLRY +3.8%, AMRS +2.4%, AMRS +2.4%, HDS +2.1%, CTRE +1.7%, MIK +1.4%, WMB +1.3%, AMRN +1%
Gapping down:
- REV -9%, TORC -8.8%, WAGE -7.8%, YEXT -6.2%, TACO -6%, EMES -5.2%, NOMD -4.9%, HQY -4.7%, NSTG -3.7%, ECPG -3.4%, DERM -3.2%, TWO -2.9%, BITA -2.7%, AGS -1.9%, WHD -1.9%, UNIT -1.5%
Bundesbank unconcerned with creating ‘national banking champion’
German central bank pushes back against finance minister’s ambitions
Deutsche Bundesbank, one of Germany’s key financial watchdogs, has made clear that it would ignore political goals when deciding to approve a potential merger between Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank.
Joachim Wuermeling, a board member of Germany’s central bank, on Tuesday told bankers at a conference in Frankfurt that “[the desire to create] champions is not a relevant category for supervisors.”
His remark was a reference to German finance minister Olaf Scholz’s political ambition to create a “national champion” in banking by merging Germany’s two listed lenders.
Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank on Sunday announced that they have started formal talks over a tie-up that would create the eurozone’s second largest bank with €1.9tn in assets.
Mr Wuermeling pointed out that such a deal needed regulators’s aproval and stressed that the authorities have a neutral stance with regard to a potential merger. “We monitor them, we do not initiate them,” he said.
The central banker stressed that a merged lender needed a viable and sustainable business model to win the regulator’s approval. “The assumptions and forecasts will be closely scrutinised.”
A “halo drive” could accelerate interstellar spacecraft to close to the speed of light
Borrowing energy from black holes would offer a highly efficient way to navigate our galaxy, an astronomer says.
Back in 2016, the physicist Stephen Hawking and the billionaire Yuri Milner unveiled a plan to travel to the stars. The so-called Breakthrough Starshot project is a $100 million program to develop and demonstrate the technologies necessary to visit a nearby star system. Potential targets include Proxima Centauri, a system some four light-years away with several exoplanets, including one Earth-like body orbiting in the habitable zone.
Hawking and Milner’s plan was to build thousands of tiny spacecraft the size of microchips and use light to accelerate them to a relativistic speed—one this close to the speed of light. The large number increases the chances that at least one would arrive safely. Each “starchip” would be attached to a light sail the size of a badminton court and then zapped with hugely powerful ground-based lasers.
Laser propulsion has various advantages. The most significant is that the spacecraft need not carry any fuel, vastly reducing their mass. It should also be capable of accelerating the light sails to a velocity of up to 20% the speed of light. At that rate, a starchip would arrive at Proxima Centauri in less than 30 years.
The fantastically powerful lasers required for such a mission will be particularly difficult and expensive to develop. And that raises an obvious question: is there any other way to reach relativistic speeds?
Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of the David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University in New York. Kipping has come up with a novel form of gravitational slingshot, the same technique that NASA has used, for example, to send the Galileo spacecraft to Jupiter. The idea is to accelerate a spacecraft by sending it skimming past a massive object such as a planet. In this way, the spacecraft steals some velocity from the movement of the planet, propelling it on its journey.
Gravitational slingshots work best around hugely massive bodies. In the 1960s, the physicist Freeman Dyson calculated that a black hole could accelerate a spacecraft to relativistic speeds. But the forces on the spacecraft as it approached such an object would be likely to destroy it.
So Kipping has come up with a clever alternative. His idea is to send photons around a black hole and then use the extra energy they gain to accelerate a light sail. “Kinetic energy from the black hole is transferred to the beam of light as a blueshift and upon return the recycled photons not only accelerate, but also add energy to, the spacecraft,” says Kipping.
The process depends on the hugely powerful gravitational field around a black hole. Because photons have a small but measurable rest mass, this field can trap light in a circular orbit.
Kipping’s work is based on a slightly different orbit that steers a photon emitted from a spacecraft around the black hole and back to the spacecraft—a kind of boomerang orbit. During this journey, the boomerang photons gain kinetic energy from the motion of the black hole.
It is this energy that can accelerate a spacecraft fitted with an appropriate light sail. Kipping calls this a “halo drive.” “The halo drive transfers kinetic energy from the moving black hole to the spacecraft by way of a gravitational assist,” says Kipping, pointing out that the spacecraft does not use up any fuel of its own in the process.
Since the halo drive exploits the movement of a black hole, it is best applied to binary systems in which a black hole is orbiting another object. The photons then gain energy from the movement of the black hole at appropriate points in its orbit.
And the drive should work for any mass that is significantly smaller than the black hole. Kipping says this could allow planet-size vehicles. So a sufficiently advanced civilization could travel at relativistic speeds from one part of the galaxy to another by hopping from one black-hole binary system to another. “An advanced civilization might utilize the light sailing concept to conduct relativistic and extremely efficient propulsion,” he says.
The same mechanism can also decelerate spacecraft. So this advanced civilization would probably look for pairs of binary black-hole systems to act as accelerators and decelerators.
The Milky Way contains around 10 billion binary black-hole systems. But Kipping points out that there are likely to be just a limited number of trajectories that link them together, so these interstellar highways are likely to be valuable regions.
Of course, the technology to exploit this concept is well beyond humanity’s capability at the moment. But astronomers ought to be able to work out where the best interstellar highways lie and then look for the techno-signatures of civilizations that might be exploiting them.
All that sounds like good fun, and critics might argue that it is little more than fodder for science fiction fans. Perhaps.
But the starchip concept has been discussed for decades, usually on the fringes of science. In the wake of Hawking and Milner’s announcement, the project has suddenly gained legs. Indeed, the first starchip technologies have already been tested in low Earth orbit and the first mission penciled in for around 2036, at a cost of $5 to $10 billion.
That’s an ambitious goal, but even allowing for various delays, interstellar travel is likely to be possible within a hundred years of humanity’s first forays into space. That’s rapid progress. And it suggests that any civilization with even a small head start on us could have made significantly larger strides.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1903.03423 : The Halo Drive: Fuel-Free Relativistic Propulsion of Large Masses Via Recycled Boomerang Photons
A meteor exploded over Earth with 10 times the energy of Hiroshima’s atomic bomb
Nobody saw or was even aware of the fireball that exploded above the Bering Sea on December 18, 2018—until now.
The scale: It’s the biggest blast since the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk in Russia in 2015—and the second-biggest in 30 years, says the BBC. It was 10 meters across, and the energy released as it exploded in Earth's atmosphere was equivalent to 173 kilotons of TNT. That’s about 10 times bigger than the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima in 1945.
Discovery: NASA eventually found out about the blast from military satellites that spotted light it emitted when it exploded. The fireball was also spotted by Peter Brown at Canada’s University of Western Ontario, who announced his finding on Twitter. He looked at data taken from around 16 different infrared stations that were originally set up to listen for covert nuclear tests.
Rare: Lindley Johnson, planetary defence officer at NASA, told the BBC an explosion of this size takes place about two or three times every 100 years.
Back in 2016, the physicist Stephen Hawking and the billionaire Yuri Milner unveiled a plan to travel to the stars. The so-called Breakthrough Starshot project is a $100 million program to develop and demonstrate the technologies necessary to visit a nearby star system. Potential targets include Proxima Centauri, a system some four light-years away with several exoplanets, including one Earth-like body orbiting in the habitable zone.
Laser propulsion has various advantages. The most significant is that the spacecraft need not carry any fuel, vastly reducing their mass. It should also be capable of accelerating the light sails to a velocity of up to 20% the speed of light. At that rate, a starchip would arrive at Proxima Centauri in less than 30 years.
The fantastically powerful lasers required for such a mission will be particularly difficult and expensive to develop. And that raises an obvious question: is there any other way to reach relativistic speeds?
Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of the David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University in New York. Kipping has come up with a novel form of gravitational slingshot, the same technique that NASA has used, for example, to send the Galileo spacecraft to Jupiter. The idea is to accelerate a spacecraft by sending it skimming past a massive object such as a planet. In this way, the spacecraft steals some velocity from the movement of the planet, propelling it on its journey.
Gravitational slingshots work best around hugely massive bodies. In the 1960s, the physicist Freeman Dyson calculated that a black hole could accelerate a spacecraft to relativistic speeds. But the forces on the spacecraft as it approached such an object would be likely to destroy it.
So Kipping has come up with a clever alternative. His idea is to send photons around a black hole and then use the extra energy they gain to accelerate a light sail. “Kinetic energy from the black hole is transferred to the beam of light as a blueshift and upon return the recycled photons not only accelerate, but also add energy to, the spacecraft,” says Kipping.
The process depends on the hugely powerful gravitational field around a black hole. Because photons have a small but measurable rest mass, this field can trap light in a circular orbit.
Kipping’s work is based on a slightly different orbit that steers a photon emitted from a spacecraft around the black hole and back to the spacecraft—a kind of boomerang orbit. During this journey, the boomerang photons gain kinetic energy from the motion of the black hole.
It is this energy that can accelerate a spacecraft fitted with an appropriate light sail. Kipping calls this a “halo drive.” “The halo drive transfers kinetic energy from the moving black hole to the spacecraft by way of a gravitational assist,” says Kipping, pointing out that the spacecraft does not use up any fuel of its own in the process.
Since the halo drive exploits the movement of a black hole, it is best applied to binary systems in which a black hole is orbiting another object. The photons then gain energy from the movement of the black hole at appropriate points in its orbit.
And the drive should work for any mass that is significantly smaller than the black hole. Kipping says this could allow planet-size vehicles. So a sufficiently advanced civilization could travel at relativistic speeds from one part of the galaxy to another by hopping from one black-hole binary system to another. “An advanced civilization might utilize the light sailing concept to conduct relativistic and extremely efficient propulsion,” he says.
The same mechanism can also decelerate spacecraft. So this advanced civilization would probably look for pairs of binary black-hole systems to act as accelerators and decelerators.
The Milky Way contains around 10 billion binary black-hole systems. But Kipping points out that there are likely to be just a limited number of trajectories that link them together, so these interstellar highways are likely to be valuable regions.
Of course, the technology to exploit this concept is well beyond humanity’s capability at the moment. But astronomers ought to be able to work out where the best interstellar highways lie and then look for the techno-signatures of civilizations that might be exploiting them.
All that sounds like good fun, and critics might argue that it is little more than fodder for science fiction fans. Perhaps.
But the starchip concept has been discussed for decades, usually on the fringes of science. In the wake of Hawking and Milner’s announcement, the project has suddenly gained legs. Indeed, the first starchip technologies have already been tested in low Earth orbit and the first mission penciled in for around 2036, at a cost of $5 to $10 billion.
That’s an ambitious goal, but even allowing for various delays, interstellar travel is likely to be possible within a hundred years of humanity’s first forays into space. That’s rapid progress. And it suggests that any civilization with even a small head start on us could have made significantly larger strides.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1903.03423 : The Halo Drive: Fuel-Free Relativistic Propulsion of Large Masses Via Recycled Boomerang Photons
Vitol warns oil demand to peak within 15 years
Forecast comes after tripling of second-half profit at world’s biggest independent energy trader
Vitol, the world’s biggest independent energy trader, said it expected oil demand to peak within 15 years, joining a chorus of warnings that the industry needed to prepare for a shift towards cleaner fuels.
Russell Hardy, chief executive of the privately held company since last year, said on Tuesday that, while the world was not ready to move to renewable energy without denting economic growth, there was a clear inflection point ahead.
“We anticipate that oil demand will continue to grow for the next 15 years, even with a marked increase in the sales of electric vehicles,” Mr Hardy said. “But that demand growth will begin to be impacted thereafter.”
The admission is among the first from a big trading house that has built its multibillion-dollar valuation on the rapid pace of oil demand growth over the past two decades. The comments are the most detailed yet from a trading company whose views are closely tracked in the industry.
The projection, made as the company announced its trading volumes for 2018, comes at a time when oil companies are split over whether environmental policies and attempts to limit climate change will cap more than 150 years of almost untrammelled growth in oil consumption.
Vitol said on Tuesday that it traded 7.4m barrels a day of crude and refined products last year, up slightly from levels just above 7m in 2017.
That activity gives the company huge sway in the 100m b/d global oil market. Its daily global trading volumes are the equivalent of enough to supply all of France, Germany and Spain’s oil consumption combined.
Mr Hardy said Vitol was increasing its focus on cleaner fuels and looking at new technologies, highlighting a joint-venture that has constructed the UK’s largest battery park portfolio and plans to invest in large-scale wind power generation across Europe.
“We are cognisant of the increasing move to alternative sources of energy and are considering how our skillsets can best be deployed in these new areas,” he said, adding that the company was “investing in new and established technologies which may form an important part of the energy transition”.
Still, Vitol has not lost its knack for oil trading. Though the privately held company does not publish its full results, people who have seen its 2018 earnings told the Financial Times the company was one of the big winners from the volatility that roiled oil markets in the second half of 2018, posting a threefold increase in underlying profit compared with the first six months of the year.
Net income excluding one-off gains was around $750m in the second half of the year to December, compared with $250m in the first six months when the industry was buffeted by unfavourable market conditions.
For the full year, Vitol recorded net income of $1.7bn, excluding a $200m hit for currency and depreciation, according to the people familiar with the earnings. The result was boosted by $700m of one-off gains mainly from the stock market flotation of two retail businesses.
In June the company and its partners raised almost $2bn from the listing of its Australian refining and fuels business, marking one of the most successful investments in the company’s 50-plus-year history.
Vitol’s underlying net income for the full year dropped to $1bn from $1.2bn a year earlier, weighed down by a weak first half and margin pressure across the commodity trading industry in the face of fierce competition.
The results suggest the oil trading giant was well positioned for the sell-off and volatility that wrongfooted many hedge funds and rival traders at the end of last year.
Ian Taylor, the company’s chairman and former chief executive, said in October that the market was well supplied and that he expected prices to fall, despite crude having just hit a four-year high above $86 a barrel.
Oil went on to have one of its biggest quarterly drops on record, bottoming out below $50 a barrel at the end of December and leaving many traders nursing heavy losses.