Tag Archives: Investing: Features

It’s not shaping up to be a banner year for mergers and acquisitions in Europe. Deal value totaled about $400 billion as of July 26 and is on track to reach $800 billion by year-end, which will put it some $200 billion short of last year. And parts of the horizon beyond that aren’t exactly compelling, either: A Credit Suisse survey of European executives shortly after the U.K.’s June vote to leave the European Union found that the Brexit shock had already made business leaders more...

It’s been a good year for gold. Gold spot prices hit $1,360 per ounce in early August, up 28% percent since the beginning of the year, buoyed by low interest rates and more recently, demand from investors seeking a safe haven from Brexit-related economic uncertainty. But for equities-minded investors, it’s worth considering the miners behind the metal. Gains by gold mining stocks have outpaced those of gold prices, with the NYSE Arca Gold Miners Index up more than 125% percent...

Interest rates in developed economies have been declining for the past 40 years. At this point, 60 percent of global GDP is generated in countries that have negative or near-zero interest rates. Germany and Switzerland have both issued bonds that yield negative returns to investors, and a handful of European corporations have done the same. The yield curve has also flattened significantly in recent years, making long-term debt relatively more affordable. In other words, it’s cheaper than ever...

Around the world, central banks continue to cut interest rates and buy bonds to stimulate their sluggish economies. China is no exception to the monetary policy trend, with the People’s Bank of China cutting rates seven times since late 2014. But here’s the twist: Whereas for most corporates, borrowing costs have been falling in lockstep with central bank moves, a recent spike in defaults has left investors in Chinese corporate bonds on edge. At a time when the cost of money has...

To say that the Brexit vote on June 23 took financial markets by surprise would be an understatement. The pound, British stocks, and Gilt yields had all risen sharply in the week leading up to the vote, only to crash once the results started coming in. Broadly speaking, strategists on Credit Suisse’s Global Markets and Investment Solutions and Products (IS&P) teams expect markets to remain volatile in the coming days and for investors to prefer safe assets to risky ones. Below, we...

Do you trust software to make decisions for you? Would you trust it if you’d written the software yourself? Consider the case of Cade Massey, a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Rufus Peabody, a former student and professional sports gambler. Together, the two men have built a well-known system for predicting the outcomes of college and professional football games known as the Massey-Peabody rankings. Their picks rely purely on statistics – except the one day they...

Investing in companies such as Facebook before they went public has proven very lucrative for many well-connected investors – and Facebook’s decision to stay private for eight years before going public certainly worked out well for the social media giant. Bill Gurley, a general partner at venture capital firm Benchmark Capital, believes that early success stories such as Facebook and many other high-flying technology companies have made it fashionable for CEOs to resist public offerings....

On June 8, the price of Brent crude ticked above $50 a barrel for the first time since August 2015. But the new $50-plus era came to an end two days later, amid a broader selloff that affected multiple asset classes. Energy analysts with Credit Suisse’s Global Markets team point out, however, that both supply (which is shrinking) and demand (which is growing steadily) point to firming oil prices ahead. Indeed, the bank’s analysts think that after two years of oversupply, the crude oil market...

The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Tech investors learned that the hard way after Alphabet, Apple, and Microsoft missed first-quarter earnings expectations. Share prices for all three companies dropped in late April and have yet to return to their pre-earnings highs. Are the results a harbinger of poor results for the rest of technology? Credit Suisse says no.   For starters, the average tech company already reporting has beaten earnings expectations by 4.3 percent on an...

Paper, gunpowder, the compass – China has a history of disruption that extends back thousands of years. In the digital age, however, the Middle Kingdom’s technology startups gained a reputation for quickly copying their Western peers, rather than coming up with their own world-changing ideas. All that is changing, though, and in 2016, innovation itself is increasingly being “Made in China”. China’s Internet giants are coming up with ingenious homegrown products, services, and business models,...