The battle between small-time traders and hedge funds that has shaken U.S. and European stock markets moved into Asia on Thursday, with surges in several Australian companies joining a list of social-media hyped moves that have cost financial institutions billions of dollars.
Heavily shorted Australian shares, including Webjet and Tassal Group, climbed more than 5% even as Sydney’s benchmark ASX 200 index fell 2%.
In New York, GameStop, the video game chain at the heart of the slugfest between Wall Street and Main Street, added another 37% in early trading after a two-week, 1,700% surge that has hammered fund investors who were betting the stock would fall.
Driven by an army of individual traders who work through online brokerage apps like Robinhood.com and discuss stocks on anonymous social media messaging boards, the dramatic jump in the stock price of companies including GameStop, BlackBerry Ltd and AMC Corp drew more calls for regulatory scrutiny from commentators.
“The frenzy raises all sorts of questions with respect to possible market manipulation,” said Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at retail broker CMC Markets U.K.
“It is already illegal for institutions to coordinate in the manner currently being seen in moving prices on these stocks, raising questions about the legality of what is currently taking place right now on these forums.”
The short squeeze – where traders have to abandon loss-making “short” bets on a stock falling because it has instead risen – also fuelled a 2% slide in the benchmark S&P 500 on Wednesday as investors sold other assets to cover their losses.
Futures tracking the main New York index were down another 0.6% on Thursday.
Reddit discussion threads were again humming with chatter about the stocks on Thursday as membership of the trader-focused group WallStreetBets raced past 4 million.
In one discussion, thousands of participants responded “We love this stock” to a post that called for more buying of GameStop and cast retail traders as Iron Man against a hedge fund Thanos in a nod to the superhero movie “Avengers: Endgame.”
BlackBerry and Nokia, however, slipped more than 5% in premarket trading after recording hefty gains this week and derivatives positioning pointed to a greater rise in the number of orders betting GameStop would fall.
“The idea that this is about hedge fund short-sellers transferring funds to a mass of ordinary retail buyers is a compelling story,” said Paul Donovan, chief economist of UBS Global Wealth Management.
“But it is also a story that is unlikely to hold true beyond the brief period of the frenzy.”
GAME ON
The war began last week when famed short seller Andrew Left of Citron Capital bet against GameStop and was met with a barrage of retail traders betting the other way. He said on Wednesday he had abandoned the bet.
Regarded by market professionals as “dumb money,” the pack of traders, some of them former bankers working for themselves, have become an increasingly powerful force worth 20% of equity orders last year, data from Swiss bank UBS showed.
The only-way-is-up nature of stock markets over the past decade, fuelled by a constant flow of newly created money from major central banks, has also made it less risky to bet on shares rising.
The U.S. Federal Reserve kept those taps firmly open at its latest meeting on Wednesday.
This week’s turmoil caught the attention of the White House, with U.S. President Joe Biden’s economic team — including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on her first full day on the job on Wednesday — “monitoring the situation.”
Massachusetts state regulator William Galvin called on NYSE to suspend trading in GameStop for 30 days to allow a cooling-off period.
“The prospect of intervention here is clearly high, but this will just galvanize the (WallStreetBets) community as it just brings home the feeling of inequality in financial markets,” said Chris Weston, head of research at broker Pepperstone in Melbourne.
“It’s fine to prop up zombie companies through Fed actions but if retail follows a path that greatly distorts asset prices by targeting short sellers, then this gets shut down.”
Reddit said on Wednesday that it had not been contacted by authorities over the surges.
Reporting by Sagarika Jaisinghani, Nikhil Nainan and Sruthi Shankar in Bengaluru, Saqib Iqbal Ahmed and April Joyner in New York; and Thyagaraju Adinarayan in London Writing by Patrick Graham; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
