News & Insight • Weekly Newsletters

04 February 2022 | William Buckhurst

That Was The week That Was

MACRO

• In the US, following a poor ADP jobs report at the start of the week, non-farm payrolls on Friday massively surprised on the upside with 467,000 new jobs in January
• The Bank of England, as expected, raised rates to 0.5%, five members voted for a 0.25% hike and the remaining four for 0.5%

COMPANY NEWS

• Alphabet enjoyed very good quarterly results, beating on the top and bottom lines and Google Cloud showed 45% revenue growth
• Paypal reported weaker than expected results and provided a 2022 outlook below consensus estimates, reflecting pressures on low-income consumers. The shares fell sharply as a result
• Novo Nordisk shares rose on upbeat guidance and 16% operating profit growth
• Sony raised profit forecasts but lowered its forecast of PlayStation 5 sales
• Compass beat consensus forecasts for organic sales in the first quarter and showed a very impressive level of new contract wins
• Shell delivered a major profit increase on the back of higher energy prices and ramped up its share buyback programme
• Amazon earnings beat, flattered by the Q4 rise in their stake in Rivian. But the market was buoyed by their announcement of a 17% rise in Prime subscription rates

BROKER NEWS

Three years ago this week, perhaps the most notorious research note of all time? Commerzbank publishes a Buy recommendation on Wirecard: “we see the allegations as having no substance...and the obvious short attack as a buying opportunity”. Just over a year later the company was insolvent after revelations that €1.9bn was missing

STATISTIC OF THE WEEK

A number of good stats this week: Meta, saw the largest ever one day fall in market cap, while Amazon a day later saw the largest daily rise ever. Closer to home, the Bank of England enacted the first back-to-back rate rises since 2004 and - although we haven’t substantiated this one - Boris Johnson suffers the most ever staff resignations in a week?

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY

1929: In order to try and cool soaring stock markets, the Federal Reserve announces a new policy to try and prevent the re-loaning of reserve funds to brokers

1996: Open Text, one of the early search engine companies, goes public. The success of Open Text’s IPO persuaded others to go public, leading to search engines becoming one of the major fascinations with the tech bubble. Within the next 4 months Lycos, Excite and Yahoo would all IPO

RE-OPENING TIMES

Marks & Spencer’s Colin the Caterpillar patched things up with his doppelganger Cuthbert from Aldi. Details of the deal, which was finalised in the high court last week, have not been revealed, but it is understood that Cuthbert will not appear again in quite the same form.  In even better news for Colin this week, M&S announced they will pair him with his girlfriend, Connie, as two cakes to be sold together for Valentines Day

MARKET DATA

 As at 3^rd February 2022. Source: Financial Express

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