Global

The Institute for Supply Management said its index of national factory activity fell to 49.7 from 53.5 the month before, missing expectations of 52.0, according to a Reuters poll of economists, and below even the lowest forecast of 50.5. Refresh chart  Edit chart New orders dropped to their lowest level since April 2009: Refresh chart [...]

Rupert Murdoch seeks to realize full value of News Corp.’s assets through the company’s split – will it work? Rupert Murdoch and his board of directors have come up with the most convincing way yet to make investors warm up once more to the shares of scandal-tarnished News Corp. (NWSA.O) with his plan — now [...]

Crude oil prices are falling; stockpiles are rising. Is the economy really so troubled, or are energy markets recovering from excessive speculation and reacting to oversupply woes? Crude oil prices hit their lowest levels since late 2011 yesterday, with West Texas Intermediate falling below last October’s levels to hit $78.20 a barrel, down 4%. Brent [...]

Where there is chaos there is money to be made: Inside the Euro Zone. The key to making money – or avoiding losses – in the Euro Zone today may come from tracking the gap between analysts’ perceptions and stock market reality. Released: June 20, 2012 Length: 3 Minutes Request a free trial of StarMine [...]

Risk aversion by investors has left some global market valuations at very cheap levels. U.S. stocks experienced their best week so far in 2012 last week, a welcome relief for investors fed up the fact that the indicator signaling whether global financial markets are in “risk on” or “risk off” mode has been stuck firmly [...]

Beware of what you wish for: you may get it. The fundamental truth at the heart of that old adage is probably causing some misery within swathes of the energy industry, as large and steady gains in natural gas output and the rate at which exploration and development companies exploit newly discovered reserves, have caused [...]

While most sectors of the stock market have seen an uneven advance, replete with many false starts and lots of volatility, since global stock markets hit a post-financial crisis low in the early spring of 2009, luxury retailers seem to continue to enjoy a very different kind of experience. Since March 2009, the MSCI textiles, [...]

April may, indeed, be the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot once declared. At least, April 2012 dashed the hopes of many investors that the eurozone worries would remain on the back burner and that the U.S. stock market rally would continue to gain momentum. True, U.S. stocks didn’t lose all that much ground overall – [...]

Over the last decade or so, more often than not, when stock markets were rallying, so were prices of the commodities that drive the values of most commodity indexes, notably crude oil and industrial metals. There has certainly been – historically speaking – a correlation between the two, probably because the growth in both can [...]