Markets
News
Analysis
User
24/7
Economic Calendar
Education
Data
- Names
- Latest
- Prev
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
A:--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
--
F: --
P: --
No matching data
Latest Views
Latest Views
Trending Topics
To quickly learn market dynamics and follow market focuses in 15 min.
In the world of mankind, there will not be a statement without any position, nor a remark without any purpose.
Inflation, exchange rates, and the economy shape the policy decisions of central banks; the attitudes and words of central bank officials also influence the actions of market traders.
Money makes the world go round and currency is a permanent commodity. The forex market is full of surprises and expectations.
Top Columnists
Enjoy exciting activities, right here at FastBull.
The latest breaking news and the global financial events.
I have 5 years of experience in financial analysis, especially in aspects of macro developments and medium and long-term trend judgment. My focus is maily on the developments of the Middle East, emerging markets, coal, wheat and other agricultural products.
BeingTrader chief Trading Coach & Speaker, 8+ years of experience in the forex market trading mainly XAUUSD, EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY, and Crude Oil. A confident trader and analyst who aims to explore various opportunities and guide investors in the market. As an analyst I am looking to enhance the trader’s experience by supporting them with sufficient data and signals.
Latest Update
Risk Warning on Trading HK Stocks
Despite Hong Kong's robust legal and regulatory framework, its stock market still faces unique risks and challenges, such as currency fluctuations due to the Hong Kong dollar's peg to the US dollar and the impact of mainland China's policy changes and economic conditions on Hong Kong stocks.
HK Stock Trading Fees and Taxation
Trading costs in the Hong Kong stock market include transaction fees, stamp duty, settlement charges, and currency conversion fees for foreign investors. Additionally, taxes may apply based on local regulations.
HK Non-Essential Consumer Goods Industry
The Hong Kong stock market encompasses non-essential consumption sectors like automotive, education, tourism, catering, and apparel. Of the 643 listed companies, 35% are mainland Chinese, making up 65% of the total market capitalization. Thus, it's heavily influenced by the Chinese economy.
HK Real Estate Industry
In recent years, the real estate and construction sector's share in the Hong Kong stock index has notably decreased. Nevertheless, as of 2022, it retains around 10% market share, covering real estate development, construction engineering, investment, and property management.
Hongkong, China
Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
Dubai, UAE
Lagos, Nigeria
Cairo, Egypt
White Label
Data API
Web Plug-ins
Affiliate Program
View All
No data
Not Logged In
Log in to access more features
FastBull Membership
Not yet
Purchase
Log In
Sign Up
Hongkong, China
Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
Dubai, UAE
Lagos, Nigeria
Cairo, Egypt
White Label
Data API
Web Plug-ins
Affiliate Program
US home prices are expected to climb as the Federal Reserve begins cutting interest rates while the underlying economy is still firm, according to Goldman Sachs Research.
The broader market isn’t reflecting Ethereum’s true value, which could be fixed with refined messaging to entice Wall Street investors to snap up spot Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs), say executives from institutional staking firm Attestant.
Attestant’s chief business officer Steve Berryman and strategic adviser Tim Lowe told Cointelegraph they remain bullish on Ether (ETH) despite the low appetite for the United States ETFs and complaints of “underperformance” in the price action of ETH itself.
But, they’ve set their sights on several crucial developments, including better marketing, diversification, and tokenomics, that could spark renewed appetite for the asset on a longer time horizon.
Bitcoin (BTC) currently dominates the mindshare of digital assets for institutional investors. With a simple value proposition of being “digital gold” — it hasn’t been hard to sell it to the suits on Wall Street, said Lowe.
However, Lowe believes Ethereum can easily nab some of this mindshare through a mix of refined marketing and a more unified value proposition which will see it naturally accrue value from institutional investors that choose to diversify into the asset over time.
“I think the number one, simple catalyst for Ethereum is diversification. In traditional finance, almost everyone wants to have a more diversified portfolio,” Lowe said. “We know digital assets are becoming an investable asset class for traditional investors, so it’s an easy step to say, okay, we should diversify.”
“How do you diversify? The next step is into ETH.”
But diversification can only come about if Ethereum is made more simple for non-crypto natives to wrap their heads around.
“Is it an app store? Is it a blockchain-based internet, or is it ‘digital oil’?” asked Lowe.
“At the moment Ethereum is only really going to be interesting to people that are interested — a lot of people buying Bitcoin ETFs are just looking at a digital asset that performs very well,” Lowe added.
“But eventually, we’ll see more refined messaging where ETH will permeate its way into the wider consciousness,” he said.
US Ether ETFs have continued to fall short of market expectations after launching in July, with ETF analyst Eric Balchunas correctly predicting a “small potatoes” debut for the funds relative to Bitcoin ETFs.
The nine Ether ETFs have together seen a net outflow of $564 million since launch and on Sept. 10, they broke an eight-trading day streak where the funds saw no net positive inflows.
Staking is another major selling point for Ethereum on a longer-term horizon says Berryman, which would allow Ether ETF investors to earn about 4% a year by owning ETH through a fund.
Several fund managers, including BlackRock, Fidelity, and Franklin Templeton, tried to get regulatory approval to include staking in their ETFs but were rejected by the SEC.
Berryman said the exclusion of staking was a necessary sacrifice for funds to make at the time but added it would be an ideal scenario for Ethereum to see it introduced in the future.
“It makes a lot of sense to introduce staking at some point. If you’re going to hold Ethereum, then why wouldn’t you also stake it?”
Aside from concerns that staking may regulated under US securities laws, Berryman said one of the biggest challenges for ETF issuers looking to offer staking was issues with liquidity, particularly in the short term. “With these ETFs, you need to be able to get in and out quickly and there’s not a finite staking period. If there’s a long queue, then it can take a long time,” he said.
Staked ETH can take days to be withdrawn — a problem for issuers who are required to quickly redeem shares for the underlying asset on request.
Even if staking is never an option, the issuance schedule of Ethereum itself is reason enough to gain exposure to ETH, added Lowe.
While many view Bitcoin as a “harder” asset than Ethereum, due to the capped supply of 21 million BTC, Lowe said Ethereum actually boasts a superior economic model for investors who are attracted to scarcity.
“When you pay ETH for gas, you’re actually taking it out of circulation, which Bitcoin doesn’t have,” he said.
“It’s not going to miners to be sold. It’s being destroyed and reducing the circulating supply.”
The continued halving of Bitcoin’s block reward every four years introduces significant sustainability issues in the long term, Lowe said, something that Ethereum’s development model allows it to avoid.
“In terms of pure numbers, there’s less Ethereum issued each year than Bitcoin,” said Lowe, which he said is a far more attractive prospect for value-driven investors in the long haul.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has seemingly “dug in” on its stance on a rule that would curtail crypto custody services for regulated financial firms.
In a Sept. 9 address to a banking conference, SEC chief accountant Paul Munter discussed the agency’s regulatory stance on accounting for crypto assets, focusing on SEC Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 121 (SAB 121) and its applications.
“The [SEC] staff’s views in SAB 121 remain unchanged,” he said.
“Absent particular mitigating facts and circumstances, the staff believes an entity should record a liability on its balance sheet to reflect its obligation to safeguard crypto-assets held for others,” Munter added.
ETF Store President Nate Geraci said in a Sept. 10 X post that the SEC “appears dug in” on SAB 121.
“They simply don’t want to provide regulated financial institutions with the ability to custody crypto,” he added.
The SEC introduced SAB 121 in March 2022, outlining its accounting guidelines for institutions looking to custody crypto assets.
The rule was divisive in political circles as it virtually prevented banks and regulated financial institutions from custodying crypto assets on behalf of clients.
The SEC believes that entities with such safeguarding arrangements should record a liability on their balance sheets for digital assets.
Munter said the SEC had reviewed various accounting scenarios involving blockchain and crypto assets and acknowledged that not all arrangements fit the proposed guidelines set out in SAB 121.
Bank holding companies that safeguard crypto with bankruptcy protection may not need to record a liability on their balance sheets, he said.
Additionally, “broker-dealers” that facilitate crypto transactions but do control the cryptographic keys may also not be required to record liabilities.
Meanwhile, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who has been vocally against the rule, said on X she continued “to be concerned about the SAB 121 substance and process.”
The US House of Representatives voted to overturn controversial SEC guidance in May. However, President Biden vetoed the repeal the following month.
Intel is one of the most famous semiconductor chip producers. Founded in 1968, it was the legendary chip foundry that had its “Intel Inside” almost every personal computer and server in the 1980s and 1990s. But its success in that sector missed the rise of DRAM (dynamic random access memory) and NAND (NOT-AND logic circuit) flash memory chips, today dominated by South Korean chipmakers; GPU (graphics processing unit) chips led by Nvidia; and ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) reduced instruction set computer architecture chips used widely in mobile phones.
In other words, while Intel reaped the benefits of dominating general purpose chips, it missed the rise of specialised chips used in gaming machines, mobile phones (such as the M1 chip used by Apple) and crypto-asset mining computing equipment, as well as the artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in big data processing centres. Its asset-heavy vertically integrated foundry fab model has been challenged by asset-light but design-intensive (fabless) chip companies such as Qualcomm, AMD and Nvidia, which rely on specialist makers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) to do high-quality fabrication.
Intel’s legendary co-founder Gordon Moore coined Moore’s Law, which predicted that the number of transistors in integrated circuits (ICs) would double every two years, generating speed, scale and scope in computer processing capacity. Meanwhile, co-founder Andy Grove was the ruthlessly focused engineer and corporate captain who drove research and development (R&D), production efficiency and product branding, particularly the famous 86-series chip.
Intel was the darling of the tech market in the run-up to the Nasdaq boom of 2000. Thereafter, the company was led by marketing and financial engineers who slowly lost focus on how to evolve chip design and production in a situation where the design and manufacturing of smaller, faster and energy-efficient chips were costing more and more. Consulting firm McKinsey estimated that the design cost of bringing a 65nm (nanometer) chip to production in 2006 was US$28 million, whereas this rose to US$540 million for a 3nm chip by 2020. The cost of each advanced ASML lithography machine essential to producing such advanced chips is now more than US$378 million (RM1.6 billion) each. The financial cost of capital and capacity expansion rise with each new generation of chips, making it tough not to keep investing for the long term, but companies must do so at the right cycle.
Intel became the top chipmaker because for half a century, US companies like Intel, Motorola and Texas Instruments (TI) were vertically integrated as they designed, manufactured and marketed their own chips. In the 1980s, Motorola and TI were much bigger than Intel, but they were more conservative in R&D.
As the cost of R&D rose, from 2019 to 2023, Intel spent US$101 billion on increasing plant and equipment (P&E) capacity and US$75 billion on R&D. But it also lavished shareholders with US$30 billion in stock buybacks and US$25 billion in cash dividends, which together absorbed 79% of its net income. Intel’s distribution to shareholders has been far greater than that of TSMC and Samsung, which distributed 67% and 38% respectively over the same period.
Despite the vast sums that Intel had aggressively indulged on its shareholders, it consistently allocated 30% of its revenue to P&E and 22% to R&D. The other major global integrated device manufacturer (IDM), Samsung, had a big gap of 13% between P&E and R&D compared to Intel. In contrast, TSMC, which is a pure foundry that manufactures to client needs (such as Apple), has allocated a significant 45% of its revenue to capital expenditure while its spending on R&D remains low at 8%. In other words, TSMC lets its clients focus on R&D while it focuses on production excellence. But being involved in different chip sectors, the broad skills and knowledge intensity of its engineers are impressive.
During the pandemic, even though Intel made huge allocations to catch up with its competitors, its financial performance began to weaken when its net income declined more than 50% after 2021. To maintain its share price, the company generously provided a dividend payout to shareholders averaging 129% of net income between 2022 and 2023. At the same time, Intel increased borrowing, bringing its total debt to around US$45 billion. For a financial analyst, this looked more like financial engineering to produce profits through leverage, rather than paying attention to real excellence and cutting edge engineering.
Despite getting more than US$8 billion from the US government under the CHIPS Act to help onshore chip manufacturing return to the US, Intel is beginning to experience both financial and operational headwinds.
On Aug 1, the company announced 15,000 job cuts and suspended dividends. The market reacted harshly after it released its 2Q2024 earnings report, resulting in around US$30 billion being wiped off its market cap. Market rumours swirled after Lip Bu Tan — a former CEO of Cadence Design Systems, which produces cutting-edge software tools to design advanced chips — resigned from Intel’s board, with unconfirmed disagreements on the company’s strategic direction.
Intel’s 2Q2024 earnings report showed that operating losses had increased by US$948 million compared to last year. Key factors contributing to the huge losses included the higher cost of producing smaller processors such as Meteor Lake, and increased construction charges on new AI fabs in the US and supporting facilities around the world. Our calculations of economic-value-added based on Intel’s financial accounts suggest that value-added declined to negative-value-added of US$11.5 billion from the previous year.
Intel has shown the classic strategic choice for market leaders, which is to keep milking profits from legacy winners but lose focus on keeping the R&D edge over strong competitors like AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm, which offer comparable AI chips with better performance or price. If you do not cut out the fat earlier with short-term impact on quarterly profits, the market will punish you when you take belated action. TSMC today has eight times the market cap of Intel.
Beleaguered CEO Pat Gelsinger has called in Wall Street advisers like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to advise Intel on how to move forward. Can financial engineers fix real engineering strategic issues, other than to temporarily calm impatient investors? There are options such as spinning off subsidiaries like Altera or splitting the company into different listed companies. The risk is that Intel, which has a total market cap of less than one-tenth of that of any of the Magnificent Seven tech giants, will be bought up as their manufacturing arm.
As Grove used to say, only the paranoid survive. The question is whether the present Intel leadership is paranoid enough to survive that cruellest of market tests.
Apple Inc lost its court fight over a €13 billion (RM62.44 billion) Irish tax bill, in a boost to the European Union’s crackdown on special deals doled out by nations to big companies.
The EU’s Court of Justice in Luxembourg backed a landmark 2016 decision that Ireland broke state aid law by giving the iPhone maker an unfair advantage.
The European Court of Justice ruled on last Tuesday that a lower court win for Apple should be overturned because judges incorrectly decided that the commission’s regulators had made mistakes in their assessment.
The ruling is a boost for EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager, whose mandate in Brussels is about to end after two terms.
In 2016, Vestager sparked outrage across the Atlantic when she homed in on Apple’s tax arrangements. She claimed that Ireland granted illegal benefits to the Cupertino, California-based company enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses in the country over many years.
She ordered Ireland to claw back the €13 billion sum, which amounts to about two quarters of Mac sales globally. The money has been sitting in an escrow account pending a final ruling.
CEO Tim Cook blasted the EU move as “total political crap”. The US Treasury weighed in too, saying the EU was making itself a “supra-national tax authority” that could threaten global tax reform efforts. Then-president Donald Trump said Vestager “hates the United States” because “she’s suing all our companies”.
“We are disappointed with decision as previously the general court reviewed the facts and categorically annulled this case,” an Apple spokesperson said.
White Label
Data API
Web Plug-ins
Poster Maker
Affiliate Program
The risk of loss in trading financial instruments such as stocks, FX, commodities, futures, bonds, ETFs and crypto can be substantial. You may sustain a total loss of the funds that you deposit with your broker. Therefore, you should carefully consider whether such trading is suitable for you in light of your circumstances and financial resources.
No decision to invest should be made without thoroughly conducting due diligence by yourself or consulting with your financial advisors. Our web content might not suit you since we don't know your financial conditions and investment needs. Our financial information might have latency or contain inaccuracy, so you should be fully responsible for any of your trading and investment decisions. The company will not be responsible for your capital loss.
Without getting permission from the website, you are not allowed to copy the website's graphics, texts, or trademarks. Intellectual property rights in the content or data incorporated into this website belong to its providers and exchange merchants.