Stock Code: 600230Stock abbreviation: Cangzhou DahuaNo. 2016-30Cangzhou Dahua Co., LtdClarification of media reportsThe Board of Directors of the Company and all the Directors hereby confirm that there are no false representations or misleading statements in this AnnouncementOr material omissions, and the contents of the authenticity, accuracy and completeness of individual and joint and several liability.First, the reported situationOctober 14, 2016 Some media reports said the country plans to Sinochem Corporation and the ChineseGroup merged into a group company. The Company is very concerned about the content of the rumors, and this was carried outVerification.Second, to clarify the noteThe Company verified and asked the Company's largest shareholder Cangzhou Dahua Group Co., Ltd. and the actual controlChina Chemical Industry Group Corporation, as of now, China National Chemical Corporation, Cangzhou Dahua Group Co., Ltd.Neither the Company nor the Company has received any written or oral information from any government department in relation to such rumors;Such intention was expressed to any department and enterprise.The Company currently has no information that should be disclosed without disclosure.Third, the risk warningThe Company reminded the investors that "China Securities Journal", "Shanghai Securities News" and Shanghai Stock ExchangeWebsite (http://www.sse.com.cn) is the designated information disclosure media, the company all informationThe company in the media announcement of the official announcement of the information shall prevail, please note that the majority of investors in investment risk.Special announcement.Cangzhou Dahua Co., LtdBoard of DirectorsOctober 17, 2016
Banco Popolare and Banca Popolare di Milano shareholders approve merger
Shareholders of listed Italian lenders Banco Popolare and Banca Popolare di Milano (BPM) have agreed to a merger of the two institutions, according to joint press releases by the two banks.
The merger will create a new entity called Banco BPM, which will have its registered offices in Milan and its corporate headquarters in Verona.
As already communicated to the market, the merger will have the following share ratios:
- One newly issued Banco BPM share for each Banco Popolare share
- One newly issued Banco BPM share for 6.386 BPM shares
Sturgeon threatens second referendum vote if UK goes for hard Brexit
Scotland to appoint its own trade and investment officials across Europe
Nicola Sturgeon has closed her Scottish National party's conference with a speech balancing pressure for another independence push with pledges to act on more down-to-earth issues such as health and childcare.
The three-day conference in Glasgow has laid bare differences within the SNP on whether to seek an early second referendum that could allow Scotland to become independent before the UK leaves the EU.
In her closing speech, Ms Sturgeon won cheers by suggesting that another plebiscite could come soon if the UK government continues to push for a hard Brexit that would take Scotland out of the EU single market.
"The time is coming to put Scotland’s future in Scotland’s hands," the first minister said.
Ms Sturgeon also drew applause by unveiling a de facto diplomatic push that would see Edinburgh appoint new trade and investment officials across Europe. Scotland could not trust UK ministers to tell EU partners that it was open for business, she said.
But aides said the tough language did not mean Ms Sturgeon was committed to a second referendum, which more cautious members fear would lead to a defeat that would be disastrous for the independence cause.
The SNP leader herself sought to shift some of the political spotlight away from constitutional issues, telling members the key word of her address was "inclusion" rather than “independence”.
She announced a shift of funding in Scotland's National Health Service toward primary care provided by general practitioners that would leave them with 11 per cent of the frontline NHS budget from under 10 per cent now.
In a move intended to improve access to childcare for pre-school children, Ms Sturgeon said the Scottish government would adopt a new approach of allowing parents to choose a qualified nursery or childminder and then ask the local authority to fund it.
She also announced a "root and branch review" of policy on children in state care, saying that only 6 per cent of those who came out of the care system went to university, nearly half would suffer mental health issues.
"Worst of all, and this breaks my heart, young person who has been in care is twenty times — twenty times — more likely to be dead by the time they are 25 than a young person who hasn't," she said.
Such pledges alongside Ms Sturgeon's promise of a major rethink of primary and secondary education mark an implicit recognition of shortcomings in the SNP's near decade in power.
The first minister said her "defining mission" was to improve attainment in primary and secondary education and to close the gap between richer and poorer pupils. In pursuit of that goal, her government has announced plans to reintroduce standardised testing, give headteachers more control over their schools and direct funding toward pupils from deprived backgrounds.
The CBI big employers' lobby hailed Ms Sturgeon's focus on educational attainment and childcare as "vital ingredients" for the economy’s long-term health.
"Placing inclusive growth at the centre of the Scottish government’s domestic agenda will be welcomed by businesses," said Hugh Aitken, CBI Scotland director.
Fed's Dudley (dove, FOMC voter): expects Fed's next rate rise this year; expects rate rise relatively soon - press interview
- Fed has not faced urgency to raise rates
- a rate rise is not aimed at slowing the economy
- there's big uncertainty over outlook limits guidance the Fed can give
- US likely to grow 2-2.5%; inflation to 2% within 2 years
- the job market still has slack; remains unsure how far jobless rate will drop
- the 10-year Treasury yield seems a little low given the economy
PBoC held a Oct 12th meeting with senior officials at SOEs and commercial banks to discuss rising risks of mortgage loan growth deemed to be too fast - Chinese press
- PBoC officials have warned that the overheated property market could affect economic stability.
- Report notes mortgage loan growth in certain areas has doubled since the end of last year.
- In some areas, mortgages account for 90% of new lending.
Natural Gas: The Casino Is Open
With winter approaching, now is the time to bet on gas prices.
Sometimes, purchasing a lottery ticket isn’t such a bad idea.
If you have some spare cash, and betting on a moonshot doesn’t make you nervous, buy natural gas before the winter. This could produce a big jackpot, if nature cooperates. Prices are still not far above historic lows, and winter is the time of year when demand can surge.
Nearly half of all U.S. households use natural gas for heating, which has sent gas futures soaring during many winters. The highest price of nearly the past eight years—$6.149 per million British thermal units—came during the polar-vortex winter of 2014, which brought record-low temperatures across much of North America. That winter, prices climbed nearly 80% from early November to the mid-February peak.
Natural gas spent two years after that on a killer ride lower, but the market has changed tremendously in that time. Low prices are already starting to cure low prices. Natural-gas producers have fewer active drilling rigs heading into this winter than in any other in the 29-year history of the Baker Hughes (ticker: BHI) rig count. Producers have been cutting back for years, but the oil boom had helped them keep output high during those cutbacks by producing natural gas as a byproduct. Now, lower oil prices have reduced oil drilling, too. This has cut the supply of so-called associated gas by 2.5 billion cubic feet a day—about 3% of total U.S. supply—according to Platts Analytics, the forecasting and analytics unit of S&P Global Platts.
MAYBE MORE IMPORTANTLY, the demand trends that helped cause the polar-vortex highs have only gotten stronger. A generation of coal-fired power plants is closing, and electricity companies are replacing them with successors that use cleaner-burning gas, now that it comes at a lower price. They are consuming a record amount. In fact, 2016 is likely to be the first year in which the U.S. uses more gas than coal to produce electricity, the federal Energy Information Administration predicts.
In extreme cold, both gas utilities and power plants will need a wave of supply at once, and power plants can’t store as much gas as coal, which they can pile up outside their generators. Even though gas producers can ramp up quickly, it isn’t clear that they can do so as rapidly as cold weather can boost demand. One reason: a shortage of pipelines.
Exports are rising, too, and with all that demand, there just isn’t enough drilling to keep supplies as high as they are now, Bernstein Research said in a recent note to investors. As storage levels diminish by mid-2017, prices could spike, possibly above $4 per million BTU, the investment firm adds. Buying shares of producers is one way to play the possibility. Bernstein rates Range Resources (RRC), Southwestern Energy (SWN), andCabot Oil & Gas (COG) Outperform.
Just be careful, and don’t be afraid to rip up that ticket if the winter turns warm and against the trade. Both gas futures—which settled down 1.7% at $3.285 per million BTU on Friday—and producers’ shares have rallied sharply this year, making further gains tricky to come by. If the weather forecasts coming in early to mid-November show a lot of mild weather ahead, gas futures may not even be able to hold above $3.25 per million BTU, warns Gene McGillian, research manager at Tradition Energy. But if the winter looks cold, gas could get hot.
The next time the stock market crashes, we will all step forward and buy stocks boldly — at least in our imaginations.
But buying stocks when the market collapses is far harder to do than to imagine. New research looks at how the great economist — and equally great investor — John Maynard Keynes waded into the wake of the Great Crash of 1929, when U.S. stocks fell by more than 80% from peak to trough. His experience should teach all investors the importance of preparation, courage and patience.
Between the early 1920s and his death in 1946, Keynes wrote several books, revolutionized economic policy and helped devise the modern global monetary system. In his spare time, he managed the endowment of King’s College at the University of Cambridge. From 1922 through 1946, Keynes’ stock portfolio outperformed the U.K. stock market by an average of nearly six percentage points annually — over a period covering the worst market crash, the worst economic depression and the worst war in modern history.
Keynes didn’t look like a great investor all the time. As what we today call a value investor, focused on buying stocks at bargain prices, he got left behind in the torrid bull market of the 1920s. Keynes didn’t see the Great Depression coming; he went into the Crash of 1929 with roughly 90% of the college’s funds in stocks even though, at the time, most other endowments overwhelmingly preferred bonds.
By late 1929 Keynes had cumulatively underperformed the British stock market by 40 percentage points over the preceding five years.
But he was already turning his performance around.
In a new research paper in Business History Review, an academic journal, finance professor David Chambers of Cambridge’s Judge Business School and economist Ali Kabiri of the University of Buckingham analyze how Keynes mustered the courage to invest heavily in U.S. stocks devastated by the crash and the ensuing depression.
Keynes had almost entirely ignored U.S. stocks in the college’s endowment until September 1930. What a time to get interested! The U.S. stock market had fallen 38.4% over the preceding 12 months. But Keynes was so excited by the bargains he saw opening up in the U.S. that he worked with a small New York brokerage, Case Pomeroy & Co., to research the market and his own stock ideas. In 1931, when U.S. stocks fell a bloodcurdling 47.1%, and again in 1934, when they dropped another 5.9%, Keynes traveled to the U.S., spending much of his time meeting people on Wall Street, in government and in business who could help him research his investment ideas.
He bought U.S. stocks throughout the depression. When they fell another 38.6% in 1937, Keynes, undaunted, bought still more. By 1939, he had put half his main portfolio for the college in U.S. companies, favoring high-dividend-paying preferred stocks, investment trusts (diversified stock portfolios similar to today’s mutual funds) and, later on, public utilities. He focused on a small number of stocks trading at low multiples of their value as businesses, often hanging on for eight years or more until their stock prices finally rose to reflect those asset values.
Chapter 12 of Keynes’ book “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” which he wrote 80 years ago, remains one of the most concentrated bursts of brilliance anyone has ever brought to bear on investing. His words still ring with the resolve it must have taken to buy when blood was running in the streets:
“The spectacle of modern investment markets has sometimes moved me towards the conclusion that to make the purchase of an investment permanent and indissoluble, like marriage, except by reason of death or other grave cause, might be a useful remedy for our contemporary evils. For this would force the investor to direct his mind to the long-term prospects and to those only.”
Keynes understood, as did his contemporary, the American value investor Benjamin Graham, that bear markets are so unpredictable that reliably sidestepping them is nearly impossible — and that the pain of losing money is nearly unbearable.
Still, Keynes knew, barging into bear markets to buy, rather than trying to sidestep them, is the way to prevail. Since, over the long run, stocks tend to go up more than they go down, one of the greatest advantages an investor can have is the gumption to buy stocks aggressively in falling markets.
That requires both cash and courage.
With stocks still not far from their record highs today, sitting on some cash is a better idea than ever.
And — unless you’re in or near retirement, in which case you should probably be scaling back on stocks already — steel your courage. Write a binding contract with yourself, witnessed by a friend or family member, committing you to buy more stocks when they fall 25%, 50% or more. Years from now, you’ll be glad you did.