THE ECONOMIST PICKS ALEX KARP AS CEO OF THE YEAR
“Among our finalists, however, it is Mr Karp of Palantir who stands out. Over the course of 2024 his company's market capitalisation has rocketed from $36bn to over $180bn. Its underlying financial performance has been impressive. Palantir is expanding rapidly, with analysts expecting it to notch up revenue growth of 26% in 2024, up ten percentage points from the year before. It has also become much more profitable, with operating margins doubling to 15% in the 12 months to September 2024. In a sign of its ascendancy, Palantir was added to the S&P 500 index of America's most valuable companies in September.”
Italy and France are exceeding the EU’s 3% of GDP deficit rule by nearly double!
Chart: @robin_j_brooks, Alex Joosten @joosteninvestor
The Ratio of Emerging Markets to US Equities is now at an all-time low, breaking below the prior low from March 1999.
Source: Charlie Bilello
Canadian investor and “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary said Thursday that he wants to help broker a deal with President-elect Donald Trump
that would create some sort of “economic union” between the US and Canada – declaring that at least half of his countrymen would support such a merger. "There's 41 million Canadians sitting on the world's largest amounts of all resources, including the most important, energy and water. Canadians over the holidays have been talking about this. They want to hear more. What this could be is the beginning of an economic union. Think about the power of combining the two economies and erasing the border between Canada and the United States. I like this idea and at least half of Canadians are interested. Nobody wants Trudeau to negotiate this deal. I don't want him doing it for me, so I'm going to go to Mar-a-Lago. I'll start the narrative".
THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST EXPENSIVE MARKETS IN HISTORY
Most valuation indicators are at or near the highest levels since the 2000 Dot-Com BUBBLE. Some of them exceeded these levels, such as the Buffett ratio. Some indicators imply negative returns over the next few years. Source: Global Markets Investor @GlobalMktObserv, Hubert Ratings
"Bad" newspaper headlines do not always translate into bad equity returns...
Believe it or not but both Israel and China outperformed all the major U.S. Indexes in 2024. Source: J-C Parets
In Germany, Gas storage levels have fallen to 83.3% due to colder weather, marking the lowest level for the end of December since Russia's war against Ukraine began.
By comparison, storage levels were 91% full in 2023 and 88% in 2022. Source: HolgerZ, Bloomberg
On-chain analytics reveal that retail investors (holding less than 1 BTC) own 9.5% of total bitcoin, while large investors control the remaining 90.5%.
Notably, retail ownership has grown significantly—from 6.8% in 2020 to a record high of 9.85% in December 2023. Quarterly reports from crypto exchange Coinbase provided data on transaction volume on its platform and broke down whether this volume came from institutions or consumers (retail). Although retail investor volume grew in 2024 compared with 2023, so did institutional volume — and at much higher levels. source : criptoquant
