*** PartyGaming cuts its price
*** Why Icelanders won't bid for M&S
*** The Fed's 'blatantly stupid' comments...Describing prisoners in a jail cell...make the most of uranium...and more
------------------- – Profit-taking utility investors chased the blue chip index lower yesterday. With Scottish & Southern Energy, United Utilites and Severn Trent down 3%, the sector as a whole tumbled 2.5%.
– And the fall halted the blue chip index's recent rise: the FTSE 100 has now gained some 5% in the last 2 months, but fell 27 points yesterday to close at 5,019. The FTSE 250 also closed 0.4% down at 7,258.
– Brokers discounted reports that Icelanders had started building a £170m stake in retailer Marks & Spencer yesterday, which could lead to a bid. According to the rumours, Icelandic group Baugur – which owns stakes in Oasis, Karen Millen and Whistles – now owns some 3% in the wobbing retailer. But while a bid by any Icelander seems rather unlikely, according to broker Seymour Pierce noted yesterday, shareholders enjoyed the reports: they pushed the share price up 1.5% to 351p.
– Opec agreed to hike oil output limits yesterday – raising the production quotas by 500,000 barrels of oil per day. The increase may have had an impact on the oil sector: the sector fell 0.5% on Wednesday, as BP and Shell closed nearly 1% down. But by London’s close, Dated Brent traded 2.5% in the black at $54.27 per barrel. Nymex crude traded over $56 a barrel.
– Online poker group PartyGaming – set to float on the London stock market at the end of June – has had to cut its price range out of fear the group was too expensive. The group, which is based in Gibraltar, now expects to be valued at some $10.5bn – substantially higher than the $5.5bn that most investors reckon it should be valued at. More notably, anything above $8bn will launch the stock straight into the FTSE 100.
– Yet just how keen will investors be to buy PartyGaming stock? Trading at a 20% discount to rival Sportingbet it looks pretty attractive. But does the group have any aces left up its sleeve?
– And on the upside, miners closed in the black following days of lagging the market. Barclays Stockbrokers added that a near-17% surge in China's industrial output for the year to May should also boost the sector as demand for commodities continued. Both BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto traded more than 1% up.
------------------- – There's been a whole stack of 'pearls of wisdom' coming from Fed officials in recent weeks, says Mike Shedlock in Whiskey & Gunpowder. Some comments have in fact been so 'blatantly stupid', so stunning, and so silly that they deserve an essay on their own. But here's a roundup of the bizarrest comments, thoughts on what 'inning' the US interest rate cycle is in, and more on why there's no need to worry about smoke until your house burns down.
– Calling fund managers who track the index 'active' is like 'describing a prisoner in a jail cell as 'active' on the grounds that he can track the bars', says MoneyWeek's Tim Price. And if 'absolute return investing is merely a 'fad' or a trendy idea, one wonders how to describe index-relative investment during those periods when markets are falling'. Yet language is only one problem associated with the investment consulting industry...the 'intellectual sloth' of the industry also doesn't help...
– There's a good reason to consider investing in uranium: as countries reduce their dependence on oil and gas, they're turning increasingly to nuclear energy, we note in the latest MoneyWeek. China for one intends to build some 30 reactors in the next 15 years, while Russia is contemplating adding a further 24 to their supply. In the meantime, uranium stockpiles are dwindling – which means that uranium's upswing has only just started…
– There's more on uranium in the latest MoneyWeek; as well as the top five Aim stocks available to investors; the showdown between Charlotte Church and Tony Blair; and much more. MoneyWeek should be on its way to subscribers first thing tomorrow
Published in Stock markets
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by
Heather D'Alton
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