A Little Sunshine At The End Of A Dark Week
Global markets are looking a bit like the weather in Australia lately: bits of sunshine amidst downpours of rain. Major Wall Street indexes officially wiped out all gains for the year on Wednesday EST as corporate-earnings season failed to calm nerves about rising rates and the prospect of slowing economic growth worldwide. This meant that the Australian share market tumbled to its lowest level in 12 months on Thursday, with the indices suffering significant losses across the board. However, last night (Thursday in the United States) marked a bit of a comeback. Gains were led by the tech-heavy Nasdaq, climbing +3.5% higher after sliding into a correction Wednesday when it fell more than 10% below its recent peak. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (+2%) and the S&P 500 (+2.5%) also posted gains.
Amazon’s Q3 Profit: 10x Larger Than Prior Year
Amazon’s overall Q3 profits just blew through Wall Street’s forecast. Analysts had predicted that on a per-share basis, Amazon’s profit would be six times larger in Q3 of 2018 than they were in Q3 of 2017. However, in actuality, the company’s earnings per share in the third quarter were more than 10 times larger than the prior-year quarter. The boost came from Amazon’s cloud services, Amazon Prime, and advertising. Though Amazon is obviously doing quite well globally, it still has a long way to go in Australia.
The Aussie Dollar Gets A Bit Stronger
The Australian dollar is gaining across the board, despite the recent turbulence of global markets. The Aussie dollars recent resilience is most likely due to firmer bulk commodity prices and a reluctance to test technical support. At 8 am AEDT today, the Aussie was up 0.28% to 0.7078.
Tesla’s 3rd Profit in Its Eight Years As a Public Company
Always a whirlwind, the electric car-maker just managed to blow past expectations for revenue and earnings, reporting adjusted EPS of $2.90 per share on revenue of $6.82 billion. This exceeded average analyst expectations of losses of 15 cents per share on revenue of $6.32 billion. After adjustments, the company’s total revenue was $516 million USD for the quarter. According to a statement released by Tesla, all credit goes to the Model 3. “Model 3 was the best-selling car in the US in terms of revenue and the 5th best-selling car in terms of volume.” The turbulence continues at Tesla.
Brexit: No Deal or No Deal
According to the Scottish government, no deal is now the most realistic outcome on Brexit proceedings. Scotland’s Brexit minister Michael Russell MSP says that the UK appears likely to either leave the EU without working out a deal or push some sort of deal through parliament, the likes of which will most likely split the Conservative party in two. He said: “That’s the choice [May] has. She either doesn’t get a deal because she won’t move, or she cuts her party in half – or cuts a substantial part of her party off from her – and she tries to get a deal through with the support of the opposition parties”. Either way, this will most likely mean disrupted trading and a definite adjustment in the overall economic and business climate following Brexit in about 5 months time.
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