JPM - JPMorgan Chase & Co.
| Previous close | 129.92 |
| Open | 129.63 |
| Bid | 130.04 x 1000 |
| Ask | 130.07 x 1000 |
| Day's range | 129.52 - 130.62 |
| 52-week range | 91.11 - 131.29 |
| Volume | 3,501,333 |
| Avg. volume | 11,186,221 |
| Market cap | 407.46B |
| Beta (3Y monthly) | 1.20 |
| PE ratio (TTM) | 12.83 |
| EPS (TTM) | 10.13 |
| Earnings date | 14 Jan 2020 |
| Forward dividend & yield | 3.60 (2.77%) |
| Ex-dividend date | 2019-10-03 |
| 1y target est | 123.58 |
- Yahoo Finance
Jamie Dimon says income inequality is a 'huge problem' but don't 'vilify people'
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told "60 Minutes" on Sunday that income inequality is a “huge problem” but evaded a question about his $31 million salary and warned that his high-profile critics “shouldn’t vilify people who worked hard.”
- Investing.com
Gold Prices Fall Briefly Below $1,450 Despite Risk-Off Move
Investing.com -- Gold prices fell to a fresh three-month low on Monday, failing to get meaningful support from a general risk-off move in other markets on a day when hopes of a trade truce between the U.S. and China faded.
- Business Wire
JPMorgan Chase Commits $2.3 Million to NPower to Prepare More than 700 Veterans for High-Quality Technology Jobs
JPMorgan Chase today announced a $2.3 million, two-year commitment to NPower to provide technology-focused job training to more than 700 veterans in San Jose, CA, Jersey City, NJ and Dallas, TX. With JPMorgan Chase’s support, NPower will provide in-demand digital skills training and job placement services to support veterans in successfully transitioning into the civilian technology job market in growing areas such as cybersecurity and coding.
- Bloomberg
Homework Time, Singapore Banks. You’re Grounded
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- If their latest earnings are any guide, Singapore banks will be lucky to muddle through 2020 and use the lull in traditional business to extend their tentacles into fast-growing digital commerce. Worryingly for them, British, American and Japanese lenders — as well as Chinese fintech — have similar plans for the Singaporeans’ backyard in Southeast Asia. DBS Group Holdings Ltd., the largest of the three homegrown lenders, reported Monday a better-than-expected 15% jump in net income to S$1.63 billion ($1.2 billion) in the September quarter. However, its net interest margin eased by one basis point to 1.9% from the previous three months. CEO Piyush Gupta expects the margin to shrink by about 7 basis points next year.That squeeze is expected. DBS’s smaller rivals, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. and United Overseas Bank Ltd., have also reported declining interest margins. Singaporean banks did handsomely after the Federal Reserve resumed monetary tightening at the end of 2016. That cycle has now abruptly reversed, eroding the banks’ pricing power on loans. It’s a double whammy. Singapore’s economy, slowing sharply because of the U.S.-China trade war and attendant supply-chain dislocations in Asia, is threatening to push up bad loans. While DBS kept its nonperforming loan ratio stable at 1.5%, it did so by aggressively writing off soured assets. New bad loans rose almost 58% from a year earlier. There will be more credit-risk-related costs, just as interest-rate risks become unfavorable, a situation no bank likes.All this will bolster their resolve to go digital. On offer is Southeast Asia’s $100 billion-a-year internet economy, which is expected to triple by 2025. DBS has worked the hardest on third-party application interfaces. But Citigroup Inc. has built $500-million-plus annual revenue streams in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia. The U.S. bank is using its balance sheet and expertise in transactions banking to push into regional digital deals. British lender Standard Chartered Plc, looking better than at any time in the past five years, has earned digital chops in Africa and is seeking to flex its virtual banking muscles in Hong Kong soon. HSBC Group Plc is late to the party, but it, too, will eventually try to mitigate the risk from overexposure to the restive Hong Kong economy by pivoting to Singapore and Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, the Japanese will want to deploy their ultra-low-cost funding at home to profitable lending overseas. The likes of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. are in the game in Indonesia, the region’s largest economy and the biggest digital-consumption opportunity.Then there’s JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest tech investor on Wall Street, earmarking part of its outsize capital spending to blockchain. The Monetary Authority of Singapore announced Monday a token-based prototype for multicurrency payment it has developed in collaboration with JPMorgan and Temasek Holdings Pte, the island nation’s investment firm. With Chinese President Xi Jinping announcing a “blockchain+” national strategy, there will be deep changes in Asia in the way flows of goods and assets are recorded in ledgers and financed.To stay relevant, Singapore banks will have to invest more in tech. And they will have to do it amid ho-hum prospects for the one asset they dominate: local property. A 16-month downturn in mortgages might start to fade as interest rates become more affordable. But that’s about all banks can expect. The government may not want another cheap-money-fueled property bubble. Tight curbs on immigration and high taxes on residential real estate are expected to stay in place, at least until the next general elections due by 2021. The banking market itself will become more contested with the arrival of online-only banks. In the mid-2000s, Citi won greater access to local savings thanks to the U.S.-Singapore free trade agreement. Now, Singapore is throwing open the local banking market for the sake of the city-state’s own competitiveness. Expect the Chinese fintech trinity of Baidu Inc., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. to show deep interest.No, 2020 won’t be a banner year for Singaporean lenders. Lower-for-longer global interest rates will hurt, though if they sit down and do their digital homework, the pain will be considerably less. To contact the author of this story: Andy Mukherjee at amukherjee@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Patrick McDowell at pmcdowell10@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Andy Mukherjee is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies and financial services. He previously was a columnist for Reuters Breakingviews. He has also worked for the Straits Times, ET NOW and Bloomberg News.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
Gold Suffers Worst Week in Three Years as Bulls Run for Cover
(Bloomberg) -- Gold headed for the biggest weekly loss in three years as progress in U.S-China trade talks hammered demand for havens and sent miners’ shares tumbling.The metal dropped 3.7% this week, the most since November 2016, as China and the U.S. indicated they are heading toward an interim deal to halt the trade war. Some signs of stabilization in the global economy have also dented gold’s allure, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. closed out their bets on the traditional haven.Other precious metals also plunged, with silver losing 7.6% of its value this week.Gold prices got a lift this year from trade frictions, interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve, and robust demand from investors and central banks.That trio of drivers is now under attack as the two largest economies near an initial pact, with the sides agreeing to a tariff rollback as part of any deal. At the same time, the U.S. central bank recently indicated that, after three rate cuts, policy makers are now pausing.“The dollar appears to be in an uptrend pattern after a month of sideways action and fresh weakness on the charts early today suggests the bear case in gold is still unfolding,” according to the Hightower Report.Gold remained under pressure on Friday even as stocks took a breather after Thursday’s gains.The large long positions in gold left the metal vulnerable to sharp drops, said Georgette Boele, an ABN Amro Bank NV strategist.“If only a small amount of positions is closed, gold prices are back at $1,400,” she said. A profit-taking wave could turn into a “bearish vibe,” causing investors to doubt the positive outlook in gold prices, she said.Spot gold was down 0.8% on Friday at $1,457.31 an ounce, after tumbling 1.5% on Thursday. Australia’s Newcrest Mining Ltd. hit a five-month low and AngloGold Ashanti Ltd. dropped to the lowest since Oct. 1.“The principal driver behind the weakness in gold has been increasing optimism about the trade outlook,” John Sharma, an economist at National Australia Bank Ltd., said in an email. “However, it should be remembered that the trade deal is not done and dusted.”\--With assistance from Swansy Afonso.To contact the reporters on this story: Krystal Chia in Singapore at kchia48@bloomberg.net;Elena Mazneva in London at emazneva@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Lynn Thomasson at lthomasson@bloomberg.net, Liezel Hill, Nicholas LarkinFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
Global Bond Sell-Off Persuades Some Investors to Buy the Dip
(Bloomberg) -- Recent losses in Treasuries, which crescendoed Thursday into one of the worst days since Donald Trump was elected president, look like a buying opportunity for many investors who have a grim view of the economy’s prospects.And it appears some are pouncing, with traders cashing out bearish wagers and buy-the-dip buyers rushing in. The rekindled interest in the safety of bonds nudged yields on the 10-year, which had climbed to a three-month high of 1.97% on Thursday, down to as low as 1.89% in early European trading Friday before bouncing back to around 1.94%. European bonds rebounded after French and Belgian yields had climbed above 0% Thursday.Signs of progress in U.S.-China trade talks have thrashed bonds for days, and the two countries agreed Thursday to roll back tariffs on each other’s goods if a deal is reached. The Treasury market has seen a huge turnaround since August, when fears that global growth is slowing prompted the biggest monthly rally since 2008.“Sentiment factors have shifted the needle quite quickly from, ‘Oh, it’s the end of the world,’ to ‘Wow, there are no problems,’ and that’s a massive overreaction,” Aberdeen Asset Management’s James Athey said in an interview this week with Bloomberg Television. The sell-off has “absolutely, without question” created a buying opportunity, particularly if the 10-year yield hits 2%, he said.The U.S. is the most attractive government-bond market to own, given that the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency and the Federal Reserve has the most room to cut rates before it gets to zero, “if you believe like I do that we’re headed to a recession,” Athey said.Athey was joined by Barclays Plc, which recommended investors enter long positions in five-year Treasuries, and JPMorgan, who said traders should bank the profits made by shorting their three-year counterparts.Money manager Raymond Lee at Kapstream Capital also expects the sell-off to be contained, saying there’s value in developed markets with positive bond yields such as the U.S.“I don’t expect to see two or three years of rates backing up in a sustained way,” he said in an interview in Singapore. “Yields may bounce around on headlines a bit, but inflation is still contained and rates are likely to stay low.”Option TradersFor some Treasury options traders, the sell-off was reason to scoop up profits on lucrative one-week bets that called the recent climb in yields. The trades were struck last week when the 10-year yield was around 1.70% and netted a profit of more than $40 million as the level breached 1.90% on Thursday.Diminished appetite for government debt is pushing the 10-year yield toward 2%, a level it hasn’t surpassed since Aug. 1. It’s also sent yields on French and Belgian 10-year securities above zero for the first time in months.Some are suggesting the sell-off hasn’t gone far enough. Bond valuations “still look rich,” particularly in Europe where negative yields are pervasive, said Scott Thiel, chief fixed-income strategist for BlackRock Investment Institute.As Athey sees it, trade policy wasn’t the biggest factor behind broader worldwide weakness in the past 12 to 18 months. Instead, China is undergoing a secular shift in the pace and make up of its growth that leaves the country “less impactful” on the global economy. There’s “really not much left in the engine of global economic growth at this stage,” he said.(Updates yield levels.)\--With assistance from Ruth Carson and John Ainger.To contact the reporters on this story: Vivien Lou Chen in San Francisco at vchen1@bloomberg.net;Edward Bolingbroke in New York at ebolingbrok1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Benjamin Purvis at bpurvis@bloomberg.net, Nick Baker, Boris KorbyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Reuters
Citi, Deutsche get go-ahead to probe regulator witnesses in landmark cartel case
Citigroup Inc and Deutsche Bank AG may cross-examine four antitrust investigators involved in a criminal cartel prosecution against them, an Australian court ruled on Friday, a win for the defence in a closely watched legal battle. Citi, Deutsche, ANZ and eight of their staff were charged last year with withholding crucial information from shareholders about the sale.
- Bloomberg
Wall Street and the City of London Have Rattled Berlin
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Germany’s finance minister Olaf Scholz acknowledged this week that the European Union needs to make progress on cementing a banking union. The bloc’s growing reliance on American and British banks to underwrite the bulk of its capital markets activity, combined with the prospect of Brexit putting up barriers to European lenders accessing London-based capital, helps explain his new urgency.While domestic politics is playing a part in Scholz’s newfound warmth for the project (as my colleague Leonid Bershidsky argues here) and his insistence on important red lines may hinder progress (as Ferdinando Giugliano suggests here), he described his key motivation in an article for the Financial Times succinctly:Now that the U.K., home to London's capital markets, is on the verge of withdrawing from the bloc, we must make real progress. Being dependent for financial services on either the U.S. or China is not an option. So if Europe does not want to be pushed around on the international stage, it must move forward with key banking union projects, as well as the complementary project of capital markets union.Companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa have raised more than $78 billion in equity offerings this year. In equity underwriting, Wall Street banks are becoming more dominant as Deutsche Bank AG and BNP Paribas SA, the EU-27’s biggest players in this field, cede market share.More than 40% of that underwriting business was led by JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. Deutsche Bank’s market share has more than halved in three years.There’s a similar picture in the league tables for international bonds, where borrowers have raised more than $3.8 trillion this year. JPMorgan’s position as top lead underwriter in that category gives it a market share of almost 8% for the past three years, double that of Deutsche Bank. While BNP has increased its share to 4.4%, it remains well behind JPMorgan, Citi and Bank of America Corp. as well as London-based HSBC Holdings Plc and Barclays Plc.So Scholz is absolutely right to worry that the EU risks being starved of capital if its financial services industry continues to stumble from crisis to crisis and its markets remain fragmented. The plan earlier this year to create a national banking champion by merging Deutsche Bank with Commerzbank AG — a project endorsed by Scholz — was doomed to fail. But a cross-border European champion able to compete with Wall Street and the City of London is sorely needed.To contact the author of this story: Mark Gilbert at magilbert@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: James Boxell at jboxell@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Mark Gilbert is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering asset management. He previously was the London bureau chief for Bloomberg News. He is also the author of "Complicit: How Greed and Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable."For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Yahoo Finance
Why the Dow will hit 30K before the next election
Overall, we are in an equity-friendly environment because the economy is growing, the consumer is strong, and the global central banks are on the market’s side.
- Reuters - UK Focus
Second U.S. law firm plots rival London forex class action
U.S law firm Hausfeld plans to battle Scott & Scott for a high-profile London class action against major banks over alleged foreign exchange (forex) rigging, a London court heard on Wednesday. Hausfeld, which co-led a similar U.S. case against 15 banks with compatriot Scott & Scott and helped secure $2.3 billion in settlements for American claimants, has written to defendant banks to say it plans to file its own, so-called collective proceedings order (CPO) by the end of November, the court heard. JPMorgan, Citigroup, Barclays, UBS and RBS already face a potentially vast class action since being fined more than 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) by the European Commission in May over cartels dubbed "Essex Express" and "Three Way Banana Split".
- Zacks
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Apple, Intel, JPMorgan Chase, United Technologies and Home Depot
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Apple, Intel, JPMorgan Chase, United Technologies and Home Depot
- Bloomberg
JPMorgan Has a Plan to Help Amazon and Airbnb Look More Like Banks
(Bloomberg) -- JPMorgan Chase & Co. has long feared that technology giants will act more and more like banks. The firm’s surprising solution: help them do it.The bank has spent the last year developing an e-wallet tailored for companies such as Airbnb, Lyft Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. that it says could help online marketplaces and companies in the gig economy defend against getting cut out of the businesses they helped create. In the process, they’ll look a little more like banks.The JPMorgan product would give tech companies the ability to provide millions of customers virtual bank accounts and to offer perks such as car loans or discounts on home rentals to those who keep money stashed there. The more customers use their virtual accounts to pay for services, the less the companies would have to spend on payment-processing fees to third parties such as JPMorgan.“A company’s biggest fear is that once they establish a commerce-type relationship, they can’t maintain the end-user, and they leave the ecosystem because they now have a direct relationship with the seller,” Matt Loos, a managing director in the JPMorgan’s global payment strategy and product group, said in an interview. The goal is to create incentives for customers to stay, he said.It sounds counterintuitive to help tech companies wade deeper into financial services. The catch is the companies can only use the offering if they let JPMorgan handle all payment processing and cash movement for them. It’s all part of a move to bolster a fast-growing wholesale payments business that on its own contributed 10% of JPMorgan’s $109 billion in revenue last year, and which moves $6 trillion of cash every day for corporations around the world.Killing the MiddlemanThe largest players in the gig economy and the biggest global banks are grappling with the same existential threat known in industry jargon as disintermediation -- being pushed out of transactions entirely. For cautionary tales, they could look to the travel agencies and bookstores that their own technology has helped consumers sidestep.In payments alone, banks over the next five years risk losing 15% of their revenue -- around $280 billion -- due to escalating competition from non-banks such as Adyen and massive tech companies from PayPal to Apple, according to a September report from Accenture.The nightmare for the U.S. financial industry is that a technology company replicates the success of Alipay and WeChat in China, where money flows through digital systems without the need for banks at all.“There’s no doubt in my mind that e-commerce platforms are thinking about how to do what you would call traditional retail banking or insurance products more than they did in the past,” Takis Georgakopoulos, who runs wholesale payments for New York-based JPMorgan, said in an interview.For JPMorgan, the path to survival involves ceding some control in order to build a moat around its global payments offering, a business that McKinsey & Co. has called “the beachhead” of the entire banking relationship.“The same way a company like Amazon wants to keep everything under their control, we want to keep as much money movement as possible under our control for each individual client,” Georgakopoulos said.Pay In, Pay OutMany U.S. companies feast on fees from accepting and processing payments, but JPMorgan is the only U.S. bank that has businesses that do both. Its merchant-services operation collects a fee on so-called “pay in” -- when a customer pays for a good on the platform -- while its treasury service unit generates revenue handling the “pay out” to the supplier or seller on the other side.JPMorgan said it’s targeting the 10 biggest e-commerce and gig economy companies, a group that includes Amazon, Uber Technologies Inc., Airbnb and EBay Inc., among others.“We’re talking to all of them,” Georgakopoulos said. “We want the whole industry to use it.”JPMorgan says its e-wallets use virtual account technology that can simplify an e-commerce company’s refund process, expedite payouts to sellers and boost loyalty. The ideal candidate would have international customers requiring complex cross-border transactions that would benefit from JPMorgan’s technology.The goal is to wrest payments business from traditional bank competitors such as Citigroup Inc. and from non-banks that offer similar e-wallet capabilities.One potential obstacle: Some tech companies have found ways of accomplishing the same thing without relying on JPMorgan.Uber last week said it’s working with Green Dot Corp. to roll out e-wallets that let drivers and riders track earnings, manage and move their money, and “discover new Uber financial products” as part of an effort to keep riders loyal and build out its financial-services offering. And last year, PayPal bought Hyperwallet, a payout provider, in a bid to boost its ability to handle cross-border payments for e-commerce platforms and marketplaces.JPMorgan says it plans to offer its e-wallet and payments services at a discount to what it costs to work with multiple providers.“You stop paying all of the transaction costs for people bringing money in or out, you increase engagement and generally speaking it’s kind of nirvana for the e-commerce guys,” Georgakopoulos said.The bank plans to go live with the technology with at least one client before the end of the year, he said.\--With assistance from Jenny Surane.To contact the reporter on this story: Michelle F. Davis in New York at mdavis194@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, Steve Dickson, Dan ReichlFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
Masa Son Desperately Needs That Second $100 Billion
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- SoftBank Group Corp. Chairman Masayoshi Son is in the kind of pickle that even Jamie Dimon can’t get him out of.Earnings for the September quarter show just how badly his Vision Fund is performing, and accelerate the need to raise a second incarnation just to keep the money flowing through SoftBank’s books.While its stake in the $97 billion Vision Fund accounts for less than 15% of SoftBank’s holdings, that investment vehicle made up 53% of operating income last year. Crucially, 68% of that contribution came from unrealized gains on the valuation of investments. In other words, SoftBank is heavily reliant on paper profits.As a result, the dive in shares of Uber Technologies Inc., Slack Technologies Inc. and Guardant Health Inc. during the three months to Sept. 30, combined with a 498 billion yen ($4.6 billion) write-off on WeWork, weighed not only on the Vision Fund but on the company itself, forcing SoftBank to an operating loss of 704 billion yen, its first in more than a decade. The fund alone lost 970 billion yen for the quarter, which means that it was underwater even before WeWork came along. The only thing that stopped it blowing out further was yet another paper profit: a $2.6 billion gain in the value of its stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. To really understand what’s going on, however, we need a deeper dive into SoftBank and its relationship with the Vision Fund. Only a handful of the fund’s holdings are in publicly listed shares, whose value can be assessed in real time. What’s more, the biggest contributors to the fund’s gains to date come from buying and flipping two investments: Nvidia Corp. and Flipkart Online Services Pvt. Ironically, its single biggest winner to date — Nvidia — was bought and sold in public stock markets, not through venture investing.The rest of its shares are private, including marquee unicorns such as Didi Chuxing Inc., ByteDance Ltd., Grab Holdings Inc. and The We Co. — the official name of WeWork. Many got their sky-high valuations because of SoftBank-led investment rounds. Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., a major backer of WeWork, already learned his lesson. He told CNBC this week, “Just because a valuation prints at a certain level by one investor doesn’t mean it’s the right valuation. That’s not price discovery.” If Son isn’t listening to Dimon, then let’s hope investors are, because the message is clear: We only know what these shares are worth after they list. Even the bailout and SoftBank’s 83% devaluation of WeWork doesn’t mean the office-rental company is truly worth its new $8 billion number; that’s merely what Son and his team think. The falling price tag on Uber, Slack, Guardant and WeWork all show us to be wary of SoftBank’s ability to correctly value a company. And how the Vision Fund and SoftBank make their money — quarter in and quarter out — is heavily dependent on how much Son thinks his stable of more than 80 companies is worth.Even if the fund doesn’t make a dime, it’s on the hook for close to $3 billion per year in coupon payments on around $40 billion of preferred shares that pay 7% per year. This cash need is probably what prompted the fund, and not SoftBank, to take out a $4.1 billion three-year loan led by Mizuho Financial Group Inc., JPMorgan, UBS Group AG and Saudi Arabia’s Samba Financial Group.A more accurate account of how much SoftBank has made from the Vision Fund might come from the money it has actually received. It plays two roles here: SoftBank the investor — just like the Saudi and Abu Dhabi governments — receiving a distribution when the fund sells an investment at a profit; and SoftBank the fund manager, earning a fee for sourcing and executing deals.All this explains why SoftBank not only wants to raise a second $100 billion fund, but truly needs to: From the fund’s inception through to June 30 this year, it earned $3.2 billion in management performance fees, twice the $1.6 billion it received in distributions as an investor. That distribution is supposed to rise over time as more investments come to market or get acquired, but the decline in publicly traded shares and the cooling mood toward unicorns doesn’t augur well for the future.With the first Vision Fund tapped out, there’s not a lot of money around to keep pushing up valuations, which in turn drive earnings of both the fund and SoftBank. And with public markets turning sour, hopes of a steady flow of distributions from cashed-out investments are also dimming. That makes fees the most reliable way to keep the machine ticking over. On Thursday, Softbank announced that “preparations for the full-scale launch of SoftBank Vision Fund 2 are underway.” So far that’s been a tough sell as would-be investors, including those who are part of the first fund, balk.Thankfully for Son, there’s a patron who owes him a favor. Having dodged questions over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi agents, and telling Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that SoftBank wouldn’t abandon him, now seems about the right time to expect a check in the mail. The Saudis can probably afford it. It helps when your own company is about to become the most valuable in the world. To contact the author of this story: Tim Culpan at tculpan1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Rachel Rosenthal at rrosenthal21@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Tim Culpan is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. He previously covered technology for Bloomberg News.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
Peloton Tumbles as Wall Street Seeks Signs of Path to Profit
(Bloomberg) -- Peloton Interactive Inc. tumbled after frustrating investors with a focus on growth rather than profitability.“For us, profitability is a managed outcome,” Chief Executive Officer John Foley said on a call with analysts. “I believe if we pulled back on growth, we could be profitable tomorrow, but that is not what the board and the leadership of Peloton believes we should do.”The stock sank following the call, after being up more than 7% in early trading when the earnings were published.Wall Street is increasingly looking for realistic paths to profitability over growth-at-all-costs. Investors have shunned other IPOs this year that hewed to that model, including Uber Technologies Inc., Lyft Inc. and Slack Technologies Inc., which have all dropped at least 15% since their IPOs.New York-based Peloton, which sells a stationary bike, a treadmill and a subscription-based app for live and on-demand classes, said its loss narrowed in the first quarter to $49.8 million, or $1.29 a share, from $54.5 million, or $2.18. That beat analysts’ prediction for a loss of $114 million. But earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization aren’t expected to be positive until 2023.After pricing shares at $29 in September, Peloton has fallen as low as $21.08. The stock was trading at $22.78 at 10:47 a.m. in New York, down 7.4%.In an interview, Foley described the market rout after the IPO as a “perfect storm of being lopped into all kinds of buckets that were unfortunate and wrong.” While various factors, from fitness fads to an IPO hangover and the overall economic environment, conspired against them, Foley said he had no regrets on the timing of the stock listing. “We’re all playing for the long game,” he said in an interview.Sales will be $1.45 billion to $1.5 billion in the year ending in June, Peloton said Tuesday in a statement. Analysts, on average, projected $1.39 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. First-quarter revenue more than doubled from a year earlier to $228 million, compared with estimates of $199.4 million.Founded in 2012, the company describes itself as the “largest interactive fitness platform” in the world. It added 52,000 connected fitness subscribers in the first quarter to almost 563,000, slower growth than what it had experienced in the previous quarters, though the three-month period ended Sept. 30 is historically slow heading into the holiday season, the company said. Peloton, in a presentation to investors, said the fiscal second and third quarters are the strongest for revenue and subscriber growth “when we benefit from holiday sales, New Year’s resolutions and colder weather.”Peloton also has an app that shares its exercise programming with users who don’t own the hardware, but are willing to pay a monthly subscription fee for classes, which include yoga, meditation and strength training.Foley said sales in Canada and the U.K. “are ahead of expectations” and also “dramatically further ahead than at the similar time in the U.S.” Peloton will launch in Germany on Nov. 20, giving it a presence in the three largest fitness markets in the world, according to the company. Germany will also mark the first non-English offering. Sales and marketing expenses for these new areas and a continued push in the U.S. is a key reason why the firm is still operating at a loss.Peloton quietly acquired a Silicon Valley engineering firm, Gossamer Engineering, earlier this year to help it ramp up in-house development of products, according to people familiar with the transaction.The company launched a 30-day in-home free trial in early September, which could help with New Year’s fitness goals looming, JPMorgan Chase analyst Doug Anmuth wrote in a recent note to investors. The company is also planning to open new studios in New York and London, which could boost the stock, according to MKM analyst Rohit Kulkarni. On the call, the firm said that this will impact member churn in the coming quarters, since users that decided to send the hardware back within the 30-days will be counted.(Updates with comments from analyst in fourth paragraph.)To contact the reporter on this story: Julie Verhage in New York at jverhage2@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Mark Milian at mmilian@bloomberg.net, Andrew Pollack, Molly SchuetzFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Reuters - UK Focus
JPMorgan CEO says lessons learned from failed WeWork IPO
JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon defended the bank's work advising WeWork on its failed effort to go public, but added that the bank learned lessons from the experience. "I do think we helped WeWork get to a proper conclusion" but there were "a lot of lessons to be learned on the way," Dimon said in an interview on CNBC. "Companies going public should have proper corporate governance before they go public," said Dimon, who is also chairman of JPMorgan Chase, which was the lead of the investment bank advising WeWork on its attempted IPO this year.
- Zacks
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Facebook, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Dutch Shell, Starbucks and Celgene
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Facebook, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Dutch Shell, Starbucks and Celgene
- Zacks
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Bank of America, Fannie Mae, JPMorgan, Citigroup and Wells Fargo
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Bank of America, Fannie Mae, JPMorgan, Citigroup and Wells Fargo
- Zacks
5 Stocks Driving Three Major Indexes to Record Highs
The stock price movement of five corporate behemoths, which are common members of all three major stock indexes, acted as major driver of the indexes' rally.
- Zacks
Should iShares Russell Top 200 Value ETF (IWX) Be on Your Investing Radar?
Style Box ETF report for IWX
- Bloomberg
China’s Megvii Considers Delaying IPO on Blacklist Concerns
(Bloomberg) -- China’s Megvii Technology Ltd. is considering whether to delay its initial public offering given uncertainty over whether it can secure its existing $4 billion valuation while on an American blacklist, according to people familiar with the matter.The artificial intelligence startup is discussing with advisors whether to proceed with the planned Hong Kong share sale this month or hold off as they try to get off the U.S. “Entity List,” which cuts off access to key American technology, the people said, requesting not to be named because the matter is private. Investors are hesitant to buy shares and Megvii may have trouble securing even a $3.5 billion valuation, one of the people said.Megvii and its biggest competitor, SenseTime Group Ltd., are among China’s fastest-growing technology startups, but their futures have been thrown into jeopardy after the Trump administration blacklisted them over alleged involvement in human rights violations against Muslim minorities in China. Both are trying to get off the blacklist and say they have done nothing wrong. Megvii, backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Sinovation Ventures, was valued at about $4 billion in its last fundraising round, people familiar with the matter have said.“The U.S. is feeling increasingly threatened by the rise of Chinese AI as this is the next frontier in tech leadership, and also has widespread military, security and political implications,” said Mark Tanner, founder and managing director of Shanghai-based consultancy China Skinny. “The disparities in ideologies between the U.S. and China is also going to play out in AI algorithms, so it is unlikely that Washington will be delivering policies that support, fund and purchase Chinese AI services.”No final decision has been made and Megvii is still planning to hold a listing hearing this month in Hong Kong, the people said. It’s still early in the process and discussions around valuations remain fluid. A representative for Megvii declined to comment.Read more: U.S. Blacklisting Undermines Megvii IPO, China’s AI Ambition (1)Megvii filed its IPO documents in August and may need the cash. It lost 3.4 billion yuan ($480 million) in 2018, partly due to changes in the value of preferred shares. It listed 1.4 billion yuan in cash, equivalents and bank balances at the end of June, while it used nearly half of that for operations in the first six months of the year. Its term deposits, which refers to short-term bank deposits with maturities of three to twelve months, stood at 3.3 billion yuan as of June.Both companies have been trying to reduce their reliance on American software and circuitry by developing their own chips. The blacklisting could further decouple the two Chinese companies from the U.S. in terms of tech and funding. Megvii has said it “strongly objects” to the U.S. blacklisting and that the company complies with all regulations in the markets in which it operates.“We believe our inclusion on the list reflects a misunderstanding of our company and our technology, and we will be engaging with the U.S. government on this basis,” the company said when the blacklist was announced. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. are the underwriters for Megvii’s IPO.Read more: World’s Most Valuable AI Startup Scrambles to Survive Trump BanMegvii’s IPO was supposed to have been China’s artificial intelligence industry’s unofficial debut on the global stage. Uncertainty is mounting amid months-long anti-government protests in Hong Kong and increasing scrutiny from the U.S. government.Chinese AI has raised hackles in Washington like no other segment of the country’s vast corporate machine, in part because of the welter of headlines daily proclaiming how it may surpass the U.S. Broadly defined as anything from autonomous driving and robot waiters to facial recognition systems, names like Megvii and SenseTime are joined by established players including Huawei, Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Didi Chuxing in an effort that’s intended to seal China’s place at the nexus of the modern global economy.SenseTime said at the time of its blacklisting that “the decision by the U.S. government is unwarranted,” and it’s working to address any questions or concerns the U.S. might have regarding its technology or products.(Updates with analyst’s comment from the fourth paragraph)To contact the reporters on this story: Manuel Baigorri in Hong Kong at mbaigorri@bloomberg.net;Carol Zhong in Hong Kong at yzhong71@bloomberg.net;Lulu Yilun Chen in Hong Kong at ychen447@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Peter Elstrom at pelstrom@bloomberg.net, ;Fion Li at fli59@bloomberg.net, Edwin ChanFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks
Square Q3 2019 Earnings Preview: Buy Struggling SQ Stock on the Dip?
Square (SQ) is set to report its quarterly financial results after the closing bell on Wednesday, November 6. The fintech firm has struggled over the last year. Now the question is will earnings be the positive catalyst that Square stock needs?
- Business Wire
JPMorgan Chase Files Form 10-Q for the Quarterly Period Ended September 30, 2019
JPMorgan Chase & Co. has filed its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended September 30, 2019 with the SEC. The report is available on the SEC's website at https://www.sec.gov and will be available on the Firm's Investor Relations website at www.jpmorganchase.com/investor-relations under SEC & Other Filings.
