|
Monday 18th of January 2016 |
Morning Africa |
Register and its all Free.
If you are tracking the NSE Do it via RICHLIVE and use Mozilla Firefox as your Browser. 0930-1500 KENYA TIME Normal Board - The Whole shebang Prompt Board Next day settlement Expert Board All you need re an Individual stock.
The Latest Daily PodCast can be found here on the Front Page of the site http://www.rich.co.ke
“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” ― |
read more |
|
18-JAN-2016 A Start To The Year That Goes Back Decades, @TheStarKenya Africa |
ONE of the finest books on the markets I have ever read is called ‘’Reminiscences of a Stock Operator’’ by Edwin Lefèvre. It was written in 1923 and is an account of the life of the securities trader Jesse Livermore. Lefèvre says many things in this wonderful book. He, for example, says:
“Another lesson I learned early is that there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again. I’ve never forgotten that. I suppose I really manage to remember when and how it happened. The fact that I remember that way is my way of capitalising experience.”
“But a busy market did not keep me from thinking about the work. Those quotations did not represent prices of stocks to me, so many dollars per share. They were numbers. Of course, they meant some- thing. They were always changing. It was all I had to be interested in the changes. Why did they change? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I didn’t think about that. I simply saw that they changed. That was all I had to think about five hours every day and two on Saturdays: that they were always changing.
That is how I first came to be interested in the behaviour of prices. I had a very good memory for figures. I could remember in detail how the prices had acted on the previous day, just before they went up or down. My fondness for mental arithmetic came in very handy.
“I noticed that in advances as well as declines, stock prices were apt to show certain habits, so to speak. There was no end of parallel cases and these made precedents to guide me. I was only 14, but after I had taken hundreds of observations in my mind I found myself testing their accuracy, comparing the behaviour of stocks today with other days. It was not long before I was anticipating movements in prices. My only guide, as I say, was their past performances. I carried the ‘dope sheets’ in my mind.”
“You can spot, for instance, where the buying is only a trifle better than the selling. A battle goes on in the stock market and the tape is your telescope. You can depend upon it seven out of ten cases.’’
There are so many deep truths in this extraordinary book but the key phrase is “the tape is your telescope”.
The tape since the start of 2016 has been unprecedented. The venerable English Times said last week that the “markets suffer[ed] their worst start to the year since [the] Great Depression”. An economist at RBS advised clients to “sell everything except high-quality bonds”.
Krishna Memani, chief investment officer at Oppenheimer Funds Inc in New York told Bloomberg:“Markets have to go through several stages and right now they’re just holding their head and crying.”
The Shanghai market is down a whopping 18% since the start of the year. In fact Nigeria’s All Share is the second worst performer in 2016 having slumped 17.91% over the same period. European stocks fell into a bear market. “The Tape” is narrating a story of “financial carnage”. The Bloomberg Commodity Index fell to the lowest level in data going back to 1991. Currency markets have seen a massive flight to quality. The South African rand collapsed 10% in the early hours of Monday morning last week before recovering a little. The Nigerian Naira whose official rate is just under 200.00 would now be closer to 350.00 if it were a freely convertible currency. Investors are buying the yen, the euro and the dollar and dumping everything else as fast as they can. Interestingly, the Kenya shilling has been a big outperformer. In part jest, I tweeted last week that the shilling is the new yen. I, like Lefevre, have watched the markets for eternity and I have never seen anything like this and thats saying something because I can remember 1994, 1998 and those were big and seismic events.
|
read more |
|
Dow Sinks 390 Points in Global Selloff, Crude Falls Nears $29 Africa |
The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 391 points, European stocks fell into a bear market and the Shanghai Composite Index wiped out gains from an unprecedented state-rescue campaign as global equities added to the worst start to a year on record. Oil touched $29.28 a barrel before closing at a 12-year low. A measure of default risk for junk-rated U.S. companies surged to the highest in three years. Yields on 10-year Treasury notes dipped under 2 percent as doubts grow that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates. Gold surged the most in six weeks.
The Bloomberg Commodity Index, which measures returns on 22 raw materials, dropped 1.4 percent to the lowest level in data going back to 1991.
The Canadian dollar fell for an 11th straight day in its longest run of losses on record. New Zealand’s kiwi slumped 1.4 percent.
Treasury 10-year note yields slipped below 2 percent to the lowest since October, casting doubt on the Fed’s ability to raise interest rates.
|
read more |
|
Giving @BarackObama His Due New York Times Law & Politics |
Barack Obama’s election in 2008 swept “away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease,” The New York Times reported. The New Yorker, with its cover of a glowing Lincoln Memorial, heralded “the resurgence of America’s ability to astonish and inspire.” They sensed “the beginning of a new era.”
You couldn’t help thinking of these trumpets of hope while watching the graying head of the president on Tuesday night. As he walked to the exit, he turned to soak in the scene of his final State of the Union address. “Let me take one more look at this thing,” he said.
By any objective measurement, his presidency has been perhaps the most consequential since Franklin Roosevelt’s time. Ronald Reagan certainly competes with Obama for that claim. But on the night of Reagan’s final State of the Union speech in 1988, when he boasted that “one of the best recoveries in decades” should “send away the hand-wringers and doubting Thomases,” the economic numbers were not as good as those on Obama’s watch.
At no time in Reagan’s eight years was the unemployment rate lower than it is today, at 5 percent — and this after Obama was handed the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. Reagan lauded a federal deficit at 3.4 percent of gross national product. By last fall, Obama had done better than that, posting a deficit of 2.5 percent of G.D.P.
On policy, then, Obama has been a remarkable doer, though you wouldn’t know it from the curiously inept self-promotional apparatus of his White House. The swagger we saw from this president on Tuesday — saying, “anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction,” and “if anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change have at it, you’ll be pretty lonely” — was absent most of the last seven years.
But on the mastery of changing hearts and minds, the “ability to astonish and inspire,” he falls short. His presidency, as of now, has not been transformational. He has 370 more days, or thereabouts, to make a dent in a hard history.
|
read more |
|
28-OCT-2013 @BarackObama and @HassanRouhani The Two Husseins Law & Politics |
THE recent rapprochement between President Barack Obama and Iran’s Hassan Rouhani has certainly snapped a losing sequence in US-Iran relations that goes all the way back to the Iranian revolution in 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. The Shah was the second and last monarch of the House of Pahlavi and otherwise known as the peacock throne. Hussein [Barack Hussein Obama] and Hassan [Rouhani] share the same name as did Prophet Muhammed’s revered grandsons. Those who pursue the study of anthro- ponymy [personal names] especially in the Islamic World probably view this as very fortuitous.
I was wandering around the Hirshhorn Gallery in Washington last year and I came across this from the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei:
What’s in a name?
A name is the first and final marker of individual rights, one fixed part of the ever-changing human world. A name is the most basic characteristic of our human rights: No matter how poor or how rich, all living people have a name, and it is endowed with good wishes, the expectant blessings of kindness and virtue.
Hussein and Hassan are going to cut through a great deal of interference. In this situation, there are powerful vested interests fully invested in the status quo. If the pax Americana in the Middle East were a three legged stool with the US the most important leg, then Israel and Saudi Arabia are the other two legs of that stool. Neither Riyadh nor Tel Aviv are aligned with President Obama’s Iranian rapprochement and Saudi Arabia in particular has become increasingly forthright and is even threatening its own pivot and away from the US.
|
read more |
|
Tsai Wins Taiwan’s Presidency, Captures Legislature in Landslide Law & Politics |
Taiwan opposition leader Tsai Ing-wen rode a tide of discontent over everything from China ties to economic growth to become the island’s first female president and secure a historic legislative majority for her Democratic Progressive Party.
Tsai, 59, a former law professor, won 56 percent of the vote to 31 percent for the ruling Kuomintang’s Eric Chu. Her victory margin was the biggest since Taiwan’s first democratic presidential election two decades ago. The DPP won 68 seats in the 113-seat legislature, gaining its first ever majority and locking the KMT out of power for the first time since since Chiang Kai-shek fled with his government across the Taiwan Strait in 1949.
|
read more |
|
Currency Markets at a Glance WSJ World Currencies |
Euro 1.0891 Dollar Index 98.94 Japan Yen 117.25 The dollar slid to 116.56 yen JPY=, from 117.10 late in New York. A break below 116.15 - its August trough - will take the greenback back to one-year lows. Swiss Franc 1.0051 Pound 1.4279 sterling languished at a 5-1/2 year low below $1.4300 Aussie 0.6916 India Rupee 67.525 South Korea Won 1210.73 Brazil Real 4.0479 Egypt Pound 7.8418 South Africa Rand 16.6730
|
read more |
|
Gold 1 month INO 1091.40 Commodities |
Brent LCOc1 settled down $1.94, or 6.3 percent, at $28.94 a barrel, sticking below the pivotal $30 a barrel mark after briefly dipping below that level in the previous two days. It fell as far as $28.82, the lowest since February 2004.
U.S. crude CLc1 ended $1.78, or 5.7 percent, lower at $29.42, after hitting a contract low of $29.13, its lowest since November 2003, earlier in the session.
|
read more |
|
Iran sanctions: Middle East stock markets crash as Tehran enters oil war Emerging Markets |
Saudi Arabia’s stock market crashed yesterday as nuclear sanctions on Iran were lifted, clearing the path for an all-out oil war between the Middle Eastern rivals.
The lifting of sanctions means Iran can start exporting oil worldwide, having been restricted to selling to a handful of countries, including China and India.
Tehran’s plan to ramp up daily exports from one million barrels currently to 3.4 million barrels in seven months’ time will unleash a new wave of oil on to a flooded market and threatens to drive the price to its lowest level in decades.
Fears of a new price war between the world’s biggest crude-oil producer and Iran caused Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul All Share Index, the largest Arab market, to drop by 5.4 per cent. It has now shed 20 per cent of its value since the start of the year.
Meanwhile, shares in Qatar and Dubai, two more oil-dependent Gulf states, fell 7.2 per cent and 4.6 per cent respectively. Abu Dhabi’s main share index dropped 4.2 per cent.
|
read more |
|
Nigerian banks allow foreign currency transfers as FX restrictions ease Africa |
The naira NGN=D1 is pegged at around 198 to the dollar on the official interbank market but slid to a record low of 305 on the parallel market last week amid low FX reserves.
Central bank governor Godwin Emefiele said foreign reserves in January stood at around $28 billion compared with $37 billion in June 2014, making clear the impact of reduced oil revenues.
|
read more |
|
Somalia received Saudi aid the day it cut ties with Iran: document Africa |
A document from the Saudi embassy in Nairobi to the Somali embassy in the Kenyan capital showed the kingdom pledging $20 million in budget support and another $30 million for investment in Somalia, a nation trying to rebuild after two decades of war.
The two grants would come from the Saudi Development Fund, according to the document that was dated Jan. 7, the same day Somalia cut ties with Tehran.
|
read more |
|
Kenya Jets Target Militants After Group Says 100 Soldiers Killed Kenyan Economy |
Kenya’s military carried out air raids on al-Qaeda-linked militants in southwestern Somalia after an attack on an African Union military base Jan. 15 in which the Islamists said at least 100 Kenyan soldiers died.
The Kenya Defence Forces used both land and air forces in response to the attack on the El Adde base in Somalia’s Gedo region near the Kenyan border, Samson Mwathathe, the head of Kenya’s military, said in a statement published Sunday on the Ministry of Interior’s website. The operation is “delicate” because some Kenyan soldiers have been captured and are being used as human shields, he said.
“As we speak right now our troops are engaging the terrorists,” Mwathathe said. “We have information to the effect that some soldiers are being used as human shield and we will not allow any further casualties.”
|
read more |
|
Treasury plans Eurobond type loan Nation Kenyan Economy |
National Treasury Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich told the Sunday Nation the Treasury will hold an international road show with global investors to explore the possibility of new debt instruments for Kenya with a view to plugging deficits for the country’s fiscal programme.
“Whatever deficit we have we will use to finance it by borrowing. Such borrowing will be a mix of local and external borrowing ranging from direct bilateral loans, export credit agencies, new products like Sukuks and Samurai bonds, and all other products in the international market including also going back to the Eurobond. We are not ruling out that,” he said.
Mr Rotich said the appetite for Kenyan bonds was currently high in the global market offering Kenya cheaper financing options away from the local market.
He would be acting unperturbed by political noise surrounding management of the proceeds of the 2014 Eurobond, which Opposition leaders and critics say have been misappropriated.
The government has denied it and said all monies were properly applied and investigation agencies have not found evidence of broken law at this stage.
But Mr Rotich disputed the assertion that the country’s debt was unsustainable noting that Kenya’s debt sustainability analysis shows Kenya can shoulder additional debt without straining.
Nairobi-based analyst Aly Khan Satchu said the fact that Kenya has access to international debt markets showed the confidence the world has on Kenya’s debt repayment capability.
He, however, added that any new such debt should be channelled to productive sectors particularly roads.
|
read more |
|
|
|
|