Baltic
Dry Index. 1458
+13
Brent Crude 63.80
Today,
onward and upward, well Bitcoin anyway. As for the bubbly hopium
global stock markets, buyer beware. If
Microsoft manage to get my Office 365 Suite up and running later
today, attempt number three since Thursday, normal service resumes
tomorrow. Until then, thank God for Libre Office free.
Asia Stocks Fall as Rally Curtailed; Dollar Gains: Markets Wrap
By Adam Haigh
November
26, 2017, 10:21 PM GMT Updated on November 27, 2017, 5:31 AM GMT
A
rally that carried Asian stocks to record highs petered out and the
dollar edged up as investors turned their attention to U.S. tax
reform ahead of a busy week with data on the health of the world’s
biggest economies. An OPEC meeting will discuss extending supply
cuts.
Stocks fell with the biggest declines
in Hong Kong, China and South Korea, while Japanese equities reversed
earlier gains. The Bloomberg dollar index inched higher for the first
time in five days as the greenback made gains against most G-10
peers. The South African rand halted its slide triggered by S&P
Global Ratings cutting the country’s local-currency debt to junk on
Friday, sending the currency 2 percent lower. Bitcoin was up 16
percent compared with trading late on Friday.
Economic
reports from the U.S., China, Japan and India this week will allow
investors to assess progress for global growth. While equities
markets trading at record levels show money managers’ enthusiasm
for an earnings expansion as economies grow, bond investors are
betting inflation concerns will limit the pace at which interest
rates will rise in the U.S. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries and Russia, a partner in the deal, have crafted the outline
of an agreement to extend curbs to the end of next year.
More
China Shares Resume Decline as Year's Top Performers Take a Hit
By Emma Dai
November
27, 2017, 2:49 AM GMT Updated on November 27, 2017, 4:15 AM GMT
After
taking a breather in the wake of a battering Thursday, Chinese shares
resumed their decline Monday, with some previously high-flying
consumer and technology companies among the hardest hit.
The
CSI 300 Index of large-cap stocks was down 1.3 percent as of the
mid-day trading break, with ZTE Corp. and BOE Technology Group Co.
both falling more than 6 percent. Liquor-makers like Luzhou Laojiao
Co. and Wuliangye Yibin Co. were also lower, but Shanghai-listed
Kweichow Moutai Co. rebounded to trade higher for the first
time in the seven sessions since state media warned it was
climbing
too fast.
“Institutional
investors are choosing to cash in toward year-end as valuations are
near historic highs and market sentiment deteriorated after official
media targeted Moutai,” said Shen Zhengyang, Shanghai-based analyst
at Northeast Securities Co. He said the market “lacks steam” for
further gains.
The CSI 300 consumer staples subgauge
fell 0.8 percent Monday, deepening a 6.8 percent decline posted in
the final three sessions of last week. Jiangsu Yanghe Brewery
Joint-Stock Co. was hardest hit Monday, with a loss of 3.1 percent.
H Shares Decline
Other indexes were also lower as some
of the year’s best performers declined. Ping An Insurance Group Co.
and BYD Co. were among the losers on the Hang Seng China Enterprises
Index in Hong Kong. Those two companies are still at the top of the
H-share index year-to-date, with Ping An up 111 percent and BYD up 78
percent.
The H-share gauge was down 0.8
percent as of midday in Hong Kong and the benchmark Hang Seng Index
fell 0.4 percent. The Shanghai Composite Index shed 0.8 percent and
the Shenzhen benchmark lost 0.5 percent.
“The slides continue as blue chips
have gained significantly this year,” said Shao Rui, analyst
at Shanghai Securities Co. “The tighter liquidity conditions prompt
institutional investors to lock in their profits.”
After injecting a net 150 billion
yuan last week, the central bank’s additions via open-market
operations matched maturities Monday, suggesting cash supply will
remain tight. China’s 12-month interest-rate swaps climbed for
the first time in three sessions.
Bitcoin Guns For $10,000 as Cryptocurrency Mania Intensifies
By Julie Verhage and Eric Lam
November
26, 2017, 8:08 PM GMT Updated on November 27, 2017, 2:59 AM GMT
Bitcoin
is showing no signs of slowing down, blowing past $9,000 less than a
week after topping $8,000 and now quickly closing in on five big
figures.
The price of the largest
cryptocurrency by market value is soaring as it gains greater
mainstream attention despite warnings of a bubble in what not
everyone agrees is an asset. From Wall Street executives to venture
capitalists, observers have been weighing
in, with some more skeptical than others. Bitcoin has climbed
more than 40 percent over the past two weeks.
“Bitcoin
has seen another frenzy of buying as the fear of missing out trade
bites even harder,” analysts at IG Group, a trading-platform
operator, wrote in a note Monday. “There are others who see
downside risks from the introduction of bitcoin futures," they
wrote.
The surge has swept along individual
investors. The number of accounts at Coinbase, one of the largest
platforms for trading bitcoin and rival ethereum, has almost tripled
to 13 million in the past year, according to Bespoke Investment Group
LLC.
Bitcoin
climbed as high as a record $9,720.95 Monday, and was recently up
about 16 percent compared with trading late on Friday.
The rapid appreciation has made it
difficult for bullish analysts and investors to keep their
predictions up to date. Hedge fund manager Mike Novogratz, who is
starting a $500 million fund to invest in cryptocurrencies, said last
week that bitcoin would end the year at $10,000. A day later,
Fundstrat head of research Thomas Lee doubled his price target to
$11,500 by the middle of 2018.
In a move toward mainstream
investing, CME Group Inc. has said it plans to start offering futures
contracts for bitcoin, which could begin trading in December.
JPMorgan Chase & Co., the largest U.S. bank, was weighing
last week whether to help clients bet on bitcoin via the proposed
futures contracts, according to a person with knowledge of the
situation.
More
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The
bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Presented
with the comment, so why would the London Fire Brigade recklessly
tell victims to remain in place in a blazing tower block? What
inspections, up to date database, at the LFB led to such fatally
flawed advice to so many victims? Will the LFB issue an apology and retraction?
Niall
Rowan from the Passive Fire Protection Association told us: "Due
to the green agenda we've had a push to insulate buildings and the
easiest and cheapest way to insulate was using these combustible
materials […] our eye was off the ball."
Grenfell: Plastic firms helped write safety rules
By Gerard Tubb, Sky News Correspondent and Nick Stylianou, Sky News Producer
The deaths of 71 people in Grenfell
Tower was a defining tragedy in 21st century Britain. That so many
people could lose their lives in one block of newly-renovated council
flats shocked the entire country, shock that turned to anger when it
became clear that the fire had spread up a thick layer of external
plastic foam insulation covered in plastic-filled panels.
The disaster was also a wake-up call;
a deadly warning that something has to be seriously wrong with fire
safety regulation and enforcement in Britain. If so many people could
die in Grenfell Tower, how can anyone be certain that their own home,
school, hospital or workplace is safe?
Our investigation, conducted over the
past four months, has attempted to answer that question, and it has
exposed some disturbing issues.
Even
before the first bodies had been removed from Grenfell Tower, senior
figures in the fire safety sector began revealing a number of
uncomfortable truths: they knew plastic insulation was storing up
problems; they had suspected a disaster would happen; and many of
them had been telling the Government for years that the building
regulation and control system was not fit for purpose.
And some went further; claiming that
elements of the plastics industry were not only helping to write the
rules that require more insulation to be fitted to buildings, but
were also trying to silence people who questioned whether plastic
insulation was safe.
Time after time we were told the
plastic insulation industry was highly litigious, that speaking out
about its fire safety was impossible, and that while the story should
be told, no-one would go on camera. Eventually we found a former
government scientist who agreed to talk, on condition of anonymity,
about the pressures he faced. He said threats to sue him had made him
unwell.
"If you've got no [legal]
insurance you lose your house," he said. "It was a worrying
time and they were quite famous for it - people knew this was the way
they reacted." He says he doesn't think the work he did was
influenced by the threats, but they had an effect: "I think
perhaps more than anything else other people were silenced - by
saying 'Oh, you'd better not say anything about that, look what
happened to him'," he told us.
We
have identified several other similar cases. Among them Rockwool, the
main producer of the non-combustible mineral-based alternative to
plastic insulation. Rockwool sent out videos in 2007 showing how
their product doesn't burn and how plastic insulation does. They were
sued for trademark violation and malicious falsehood. Despite the
falsehood claim being thrown out the legal action tied up Rockwool
for years and cost them millions of pounds.
In 2013 an insurance firm set fire to
plastic insulation panels to demonstrate that they burned more
fiercely in real life us than they did in official tests and posted
the video on YouTube. It might explain, they suggested, why hundreds
of millions of pounds of fire damage had been caused in a spate of
factory fires. They were immediately threatened with legal action and
had to remove all references that could have identified the
manufacturer.
And the week after the Grenfell Tower
fire, six European plastic industry lobby groups complained in a
letter to the respected publishers of a peer-reviewed paper on the
dangers of toxic smoke from burning plastic insulation written by
chemistry and fire safety expert Professor Anna Stec at the
University of Central Lancashire. "We request that the article
is withdrawn," it said. "The consequences […] are
enormous and could well lead to significant consequential losses."
It ended: "We feel you should consider this very seriously."
more
Technology Update.
With
events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene,
I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported. Is
converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC energy mankind’s
future from the 21st
century onwards? DC? A quantum computer next?
Tesla’s Newest Promises Break the Laws of Batteries
Elon Musk
touted ranges and charging times that don’t compute with the
current physics and economics of batteries.
By Tom Randall
and John Lippert
November
24, 2017, 10:00 AM GMT
Elon
Musk knows how to make promises. Even by his own standards, the
promises made last week while introducing two new Tesla
vehicles—the heavy-duty Semi Truck and the speedy Roadster—are
monuments of envelope pushing. To deliver, according to
close observers of battery technology, Tesla would have to far exceed
what is currently thought possible.
Take the Tesla Semi: Musk vowed it
would haul an unprecedented 80,000 pounds for 500 miles on a
single charge, then recharge 400 miles of range in 30 minutes.
That would require, based on Bloomberg estimates, a charging
system that's 10 times more powerful than one of the fastest
battery-charging networks on the road today—Tesla’s own
Superchargers.
The diminutive Tesla Roadster is
promised to be the quickest production car ever built. But that
achievement would mean squeezing into its tiny frame a battery
twice as powerful as the largest battery currently available in
an electric car.
These claims are so far beyond
current industry standards for electric vehicles that they
would require either advances in battery technology or a new
understanding of how batteries are put to use, said Sam Jaffe,
battery analyst for Cairn Energy Research in Boulder, Colorado. In
some cases, experts suspect Tesla might be banking on technological
improvements between now and the time when new vehicles are
actually ready for delivery.
“I don't think they're lying,”
Jaffe said. “I just think they left something out of the
public reveal that would have explained how these numbers work.”
Here are four of Tesla's most
provocative battery claims—and an attempt to puzzle out how
they might be achieved.
----Tesla
is making its trucks more efficient by reducing wind drag to levels
that are comparable to those of sports cars. But even if Tesla
achieves record-breaking efficiency for the truck, it would still
require a battery capacity somewhere from 600 kilowatt hours to
1,000 kilowatt hours to deliver on Musk’s claims, according to
estimates from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Split the
difference, at 800 kWh, and it would mean a battery that weighs more
than 10,000 pounds and costs more than $100,000—even before
you build the truck around it. Tesla has priced the truck with
500-mile range at $180,000, less than the estimated prices of
seven analysts surveyed by Bloomberg, and says fuel savings will
result in a two-year payback when compared to diesel.
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished October
DJIA:
23,277 +233 Up.
NASDAQ:
6,728 +284 Up.
SP500:
2,575 +183 Up.
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