AirAsia Stock tumbles Most Since 2011 After Flight disappears

After the Malaysian budget carrier’s flight QZ8501 vanished en route from Indonesia to Singapore, AirAsia Bhd. (AIRA) shares slided the most in three years. The stock tumbled about 13% to 2.56 ringgit prior to the closing of 8.5 percent lower in Kuala Lumpur. The trading volume of it's shares are amounting to about 14 times the three-month daily average. While shares were cut to a trading sell from buy at Hong Leong Investment Bank Bhd., it lowered its price target to 2.64 ringgit from 3.15 ringgit. AirAsia X Bhd. (AAX), the long-haul arm of AirAsia then fell 8 percent.

Indonesia and three other nations are searching for the Airbus Group NV (AIR) A320 single-aisle plane that disappeared yesterday off the coast of Borneo. There were 155 passengers and seven crew on board. In March there was unresolved disappearance of Malaysian Airline System Bhd. (MAS)’s Flight 370 and now AirAsia Bhd is facing the same fate.

The flight was out of reach from airport controllers at 7:24a.m. (Singapore time) on Sunday.

An investment manager,Samsung Asset Management Co. in Hong Kong, Alan Richardson said, “The AirAsia incident is worrying. Investor sentiment toward Malaysian aviation has been hurt by the unfortunate incidents.”


On March 8, Malaysian Airline’s Flight 370 disappeared from radar screens en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.  Authorities called it a deliberate act. There were no leftovers of the missing passenger jet.The stock tumbled down by 18 percent to a record low in its first day of trading after the flight went missing.

AirAsia shares had raised 34 percent in the 12 months through Dec. 26. The relative strength index of the stock rose to 74. The relative strength index above the 70 level signals that declines may be imminent to some investors.

There was a decline in company's net income. It was 5.4 million ringgit ($1.5 million) in the third quarter, lowered down by foreign-exchange losses. There was increase in annual earnings by 38 percent for 2014.

According to  AviationSafetyNetwork, AirAsia is the region’s biggest budget airline. It had no fatal crashes in its history of more than a decade of operations.

Xiaomi just raised $1.1 billion in funding from some of the tech industry's most powerful players.

Xiaomi is a Chinese company that sells smartphones, add-ons and apps. Never heard of it? Well, Samsung is the biggest and Apple comes second in the world of smartphones maker. With this which is the third? Any guesss? Xiaomi is the third largest smartphone maker in the world.

The company collected $1.1 billion in funding from some of the industry's most reputed investors. That gives the company's value of $45 billion. It's bigger than LG, Motorola and Sony (SNE) combined together. Currently it's the world's most valuable startup. It's worth more than than Pinterest, Airbnb or Uber.

Xiaomi's sales raised 211% making it the fastest-growing smartphone maker. Its sold more than 17 million smartphones in the third quarter, it's just less than half the number of iPhones that Apple (AAPL, Tech30) sold, according to IDC.
Xiaomi's market share raised more than doubled to 5% while it was 2% of the market, a year ago.

BlackBerry Revenue Miss,shares plunged 5.6 percent to $9.51 at 9:54 a.m. New York time

BlackBerry Ltd. published fiscal third-quarter revenue that seems to slide well short of analysts’ estimates, fading the company’s praiseworthy achievement of generating cash earlier than promised. It's revenue dropped 34 percent to $793 million in the three months ended Nov. 29, that's a miss in analysts’ estimates for $931 million. BlackBerry shares plunged 5.6 percent to $9.51 at 9:54 a.m. New York time. Before this there was a drop of  9.6 percent for the biggest intraday drop since July.

Chief Executive Officer John Chen said that company's revenue in the quarter was “not satisfying” and that he needs another couple of quarters before sales will rise. “Now we’ll turn our attention to revenue,” he said.

As Chen's command and working style got it's way in the company, BlackBerry generated positive cash flow of $43 million, a quarter earlier than promised. It even posted an adjusted profit of 1 cent a share. Now. Chen's goals were to reach break-even cash flow by the end of this fiscal year and then return to sustainable profit and revenue growth next year.

An analyst with BGC partners in NY,Colin Gillis said while the stock is down today because of the revenue miss, it not necessary that company won't reach positive cash-flow.

Chen has focused on making software and providing security for governments and corporations and along with that the company is also introducing new phones that focus business users, like the Passport and the Classic, which was introduced on Wednesday. Chen said today that orders for the Classic are higher than orders were for the Passport at the start.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based company recognized revenue on about 2 million smartphones, down from 2.1 million in the second quarter. It was the first quarter that customers could buy the square-screened Passport, which debuted in September. The week the phone was introduced, Chen said the company had pre-sold 200,000 Passports.Chen said today that orders for the Classic are higher than orders were for the Passport at the start.

The company has a net loss of $148 million, or 28 cents a share. A year earlier it had a loss of $4.4 billion, or $8.37 a share. At the end of the quarter it has $3.1 billion in cash and equivalents.  Even thought analyst were expecting 5 cent a share loss, the company has earnings of 1 cent a share, excluding some items, the first adjusted profit in seven quarters.

Jack Ma is ruling Alibaba with $18.5 billion this year, Buffett, Gates and other are also making billions

Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba (BABA, Tech30), made more that anyone this year, increasing his wealth by 173%. There was a gain of $18.5 billion from the research firm Wealth-X.

Ma opened the Chinese online marketplace with $60,000. Now the total worth of Ma is$29.2 billion. He got his treasure pot in September. That month was connected to the biggest IPO ever, Alibaba's IPO.

Warren Buffett is second on the list, whose investing netted $13.5 billion up to now in 2014. It's 23% of gain. He now has a net worth of $72.6 billion.

Bill Gates is third on the list. With $83.1 billion, the world's richest man has made $10.5 billion this year. Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) has even got investment of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA) and other investors.

Facebook (FB, Tech30) founder Mark Zuckerberg made $8.4 billion.

Swiss telecom magnate Patrick Drahi with a $5.1 billion gain.

With oil, Dow, Nasdaq and S&P are down.

Crude prices are lowest in more than five years. Now it's below $58 a barrel.

The Dow had a toughest weekly performance in more than three years. It faced a 3.8% loss with 3000 points this week.The S&P 500 also faced a tough week. It was down more than 3.5% for the week, biggest drop since May 2012.  The Nasdaq got a 2.7% drop.


All analysts  and investors are searching answer of:

is this a pullback of 10% from recent highs?

Even though market volatility has returned in the second half of the year, investors seem to be scared again. The market started to slide down from mid-September through mid-October before staging a sharp rebound. It fostered the Dow to hit a new all-time high just a week ago due to strong U.S. jobs report.

Still, many investors were predicting that the Dow would soon top 18,000 for the first time. And with the course of events, there was a sharp sell-off in oil and it changed everything. Crude prices are lowest in more than five years. Now it's below $58 a barrel. This initiated slide in energy stocks.
Not only oil other stocks also went down. Verizon (VZ, Tech30) fell 1% Friday and is now down 6% this week. Smaller telcos Windstream (WIN) and Frontier (FTR) were laggards in the S&P 500.

In a greater perspective, phenomenon of depletion on the oil price is spreading in other sector too. Yet, investors are still searching for silver lining in the market. 

HSBC does not have head of European forex trading

HSBC does not have head of foreign exchange trading for Europe, Middle East and Africa.
The bank was fined $618m (£393.8m) by regulators in connection with traders' attempted manipulation of foreign exchange rates a month ago.

HSBC told that "does not tolerate improper conduct and will take whatever action is appropriate"  at that time..

Almost 40% of the world's dealing is estimated to go through London.
Among six banks collectively fined by UK and US regulators following a 13-month investigation by regulators into claims that the foreign exchange market - in which banks and other financial firms buy and sell currencies between one another - was being rigged, HSBC was one of them.


There were even clear evidence that certain foreign exchange traders at the banks had co-ordinated their trading with one another to attempt to manipulate benchmark foreign exchange rates. Forex has huge market with $5.3 trillion worth of currencies.

Instagram with the potential to change the world.

Intagram has become more powerful now with more than 300 million users. CEO Kevin Systromm, CEO of the company said that it is exciting and also claimed that the compnay would not stop to grow. Twitter has 284 million users using it's network each month. Instagram was bought by Facebook in 2012 and Facebook has 1.35 billion monthly active users.
 Newsbeat ahead of the announcement, Kevin Systrom said: "Instagram is about seeing a live pulse of the world right now, it's not just about taking a photo of a cute baby or a cute dog."
"We want to be all about authentic users and you making sure that you know you're following real people not bots, not spam accounts, not fake accounts." Mr Systrom added.

Instagram will also introduce verified accounts that has blue tick symbols used by Facebook and Twitter. Instagram is also deleting fake accounts that does not follow the rules. This may cause decrease in the number of followers of some users.Co-founder of the company provided some clues that the company would soon be adding new event based features too.

The company announced it had reached 100million active monthly users in February 2013. It even introduced advertising.  Sponsored posts allowed brands to reach the app's growing number of users.

"Early on I would review and approve every single ad before it went on," Kevin Systrom said.
"The reason why we're doing this is as a growth engine for Instagram.
"When you get to 300m users it's not cheap to run that service and you need to make sure to be able to hire more people."

It introduced direct messaging to compete with rivals WhatsApp and Snapchat.

"We're absolutely paying attention to the pitfalls companies have faced before and trying our best to avoid them."

AT&T's expansion, future seems promising.

AT&T acquired Iusacell SA and Direct TV this year in order to expand itself into mexico. AT&T has settled for more than $50 billion to buying Mexican wireless carrier Grupo Iusacell SA and DirecTV.
AT&T  is providing it's services in bundle wireless, TV and broadband services south of the U.S. border. The best part is that the Iusacell business AT&T is getting benefits as long as America Movil faces penalties.

Gregorio Tomassi, an analyst at Banco Itau BBA said,“AT&T is in no rush to buy America Movil’s assets in the short term.” He added, “America Movil is seeing the situation is becoming more difficult than they had initially thought.”

AT&T, SoftbankCorp and China Mobile Ltd were originally contacted by American Movil. It was trying yoi sell more than $17.5 billion.AT&T spokes person is not trying to say anything about Korean visit.

AT&T agreed to pay $48.5 billion for DirecTV, including its Latin American business, expanding outside the U.S. for the first time in a decade. It then agreed to buy Iusacell, Mexico’s third-largest wireless carrier, for an equity value of $1.8 billion.

There was AT&T's announcement on Nov 7 to extend their presence in Mexico to improve AT&T.

AT&T was searching for new area to operate and new business. The $176 billion U.S. phone giant has been seeking further expansion to meet increased competition and slowing wireless growth at home. Randall Stephenson, Chief Executive Officer, initially targetted Europe but shifted back to the Americas after Comcast Corp. announced plans to buy Time Warner Cable Inc.

When Mexico signed a telecommunications over haul into law, competion on telecommunication was emphasized. It forces America Movil to cut its fees and share infrastructure with its competitors because it controls seven out of 10 mobile-phone users in the country. Even without legislation, AT&T mus expand to cope with the changes in the environment.

For Stephenson, the timing and structure of America Movil’s breakup isn’t clear yet and that his phone company would be just fine without Slim’s assets.

America Movil is raised by 4.9 percent this year as of yesterday.

Ryanair expects profits to be between €810 million and €830 million

Ryanair has upgraded it's full-year traffic and profit forecast following a 22% jump in November passenger numbers to over 6.35 million.

Now, the airline expects profits to be between €810 million and €830 million,

 with expected passenger numbers from 89 million to more than 90 million.

Even though there is increase in November seat capacity by 13%, load factors were 88% for the month. That's 7% more than previous month.


In the mean time, rolling annual traffic to November is 85.4 million customers. It's an increase of 5%.


Kenny Jacobs,Chief marketing officer said the increase in profits is credited to 'lower fares, our stronger forward booking strategy and the continuing success of our 'Always Getting Better' customer programme'.

On the other hand, EasyJet reported 4.39 million passengers which is up by 3.1%. It's load factors were up by 0.5 percentage points to 89.5% and annual traffic grew to 65.2 million.

Japan's Nikkei hits seven-year high

NKY:IND Open 15036.87 High 15089.9 Low 14919.71 Close 14936.51

Japan's Nikkei got a seven-year high Tuesday when market was filled with the rumors that Bank o f Japan buying stocks. It closed at 17663.22 which was up by 0.4%.

After Moody's investment service rated Japan's credit rating from A1 to Aa3, the index had fallen. After the national sales tax was delayed, Moody's move high lighted Japan's economy after an increase in the national sales tax was delayed.

Analysts are still positive about the investment. They are still affected by the activities of BoJ.

The Topix gained 0.9 percent to 1,422.82, and the JPX-Nikkei Index 400 advanced 0.9 percent to 12,946.63.

High:17,687.70
Low:17,476.42
Day Range:17,476.42 - 17,687.70
52-Week Range:13,885.11 - 17,687.70
Year To Date:+10.13%1-Year:+14.73%