Nvidia ($NVDA) was the big loser, down over 8% on the week (its biggest weekly loss since Sept 2022...)
Will the stock repeat a similar de-bubbling process than the one which took place after the crypto/mining boom? (at the time, Nvidia chips were seeing growing demand from the crypto miners but the buzz faded when crypto crashed) Let's keep in mind that Nvida is now a much BIGGER WEIGHT in the key US equity indices than it used to be at the time... Source: Bloomberg, www.zerohedge.com
Within US equities, Large-cap technology stocks have corrected the most since the start of August as shown by declines in the "Magnificent 7" and NASDAQ index.
Source: Edward Jones
Amazon is the largest corporate purchaser of clean energy in 2022 at 12,415MW
They are closely followed by other large tech companies such as Meta, Google, and Microsoft. Source: Genuine Impact
US money-market assets have reached a new record of $5.5 trillion
US Treasuries are on course for a record year of inflows as investors chasing some of the highest yields in months pile into #cash and #bonds, according to Bank of America Corp. strategists. Cash funds attracted $20.5 billion and investors poured $6.9 billion into bonds in the week through August 9, strategists led by Michael Hartnett wrote in a note, citing data from EPFR Global. Meanwhile, US #stocks had their first outflow in three weeks at $1.6 billion. Flows into Treasuries have reached $127 billion this year, set for an annualized record of $206 billion, BofA said. The buoyant demand shows how alluring fixed-income markets remain even as the bond rally and economic slowdown many were predicting last year has failed to materialize. The yield on 10-year US Treasuries was trading at around 4.09% on Friday, up from a low of around 3.25% in April, and near a 15-year high touched last year. Source: Bloomberg, Lisa Abramowicz
The US just published their budget numbers showing a $221 BILLION deficit in July ALONE
With $276 billion in receipts, the US spent a massive $497 billion last month. Total interest on US debt YTD is now at $726 BILLION. US spending problem is getting worse. Source: The Kobeissi Letter
Out of the 22 world leaders included in a release by Morning Consult, only six can currently claim positive net approval ratings
This means that more people in their country approve of them than disapprove. The exceptions are Prime Ministers Narendra Modi, Anthony Albanese and Giorgia Meloni of India, Australia and Italy, respectively, as well as the presidents of Mexico, Switzerland and Brazil, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Alain Berset and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. As the COVID-19 crisis dragged on in 2020 and 2021, world leaders' approval ratings mostly decreased or stagnated at low levels. As global crises deepened with Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they have not yet recovered for most countries. French President Emmanuel Macron's score was among the worst in the ranking as protest in France about the raising of the retirement age quelled even more discontent. Other politicians faring very poorly were Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and South Korean President Yoon Seok-youl. Source: Statista
"Companies with good ESG scores pollute as much as low-rated rivals". The finding holds true even when researchers looked only at the environmental part of the metric.
Companies rated highly on widely accepted environmental, social and governance metrics pollute just as much as lowly rated companies, research has found. This perverse lack of correlation holds even if companies’ carbon intensity — their carbon emissions per unit of revenue or market capitalisation — is compared purely to their environmental rating, according to Scientific Beta, an index provider and consultancy. “ESG ratings have little to no relation to carbon intensity, even when considering only the environmental pillar of these ratings,” said Felix Goltz, research director at Scientific Beta. “It doesn’t seem that people have actually looked at [the correlations]. They are surprisingly low.” “The carbon intensity reduction of green [ie low carbon intensity] portfolios can be effectively cancelled out by adding ESG objectives.” The findings come amid strong demand for ESG investment, with “sustainable” funds globally attracting net inflows of $49bn in the first half of this year, according to Morningstar, while the rest of the fund industry saw outflows of $9bn. Goltz and his colleagues looked at 25 different ESG scores from three major providers: Moody’s, MSCI and Refinitiv. They found that 92 per cent of the reduction in carbon intensity that investors gain by solely weighting stocks for their carbon intensity is lost when ESG scores are added as a partial weight determinant. Even just using environmental scores, rather than the whole panoply of ESG, “leads to a substantial deterioration in green performance”, they found. Worse still, mixing social or governance ratings with carbon intensity typically creates portfolios than are less green than the comparable market capitalisation-weighted index, the researchers noted. “On average, social and governance scores more than completely reversed the carbon reduction objective,” Goltz said. He offered a simple explanation for this, namely that “the correlation between ESG scores and carbon intensity is close to zero [at 4 per cent]. The two objectives are unrelated and are therefore hard for investors to simultaneously achieve.” “It can very well be that a high-emitting firm is very good at governance or employee satisfaction. There is no strong relationship between employee satisfaction or any of these things and carbon intensity,” Goltz argued. Source: FT
During stagflationary periods, the SP500 index tends to be inversely correlated with inflation
Tavi Costa: "From the late-1960s to the mid-1970s, equity markets declined whenever CPI rates re-accelerated to the upside. The primary driver behind this negative correlation stems from the market's growing concern about the potential for a tighter monetary policy to address the persistent increase in consumer prices". Source: Crescat Capital, Bloomberg
