MetLife Expands Asset Management

The asset management arm of MetLife which manages $600bn in assets is buying PineBridge Invesments from Pacific Century Group (with interests in TMT and real estate) owned by Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li in a deal worth up to $1.2bn. Exclusions include PineBridge's private equity funds group and a joint venture in China named Huatai-PineBridge.

Nissan and Honda in Merger Talks

The potential tie-up between Honda and Nissan is aimed at taking on Chinese rivals like BYD who are increasingly dominating the EV car market.

Databricks raises $10bn from Investment Groups

Thrive Capital led the funding round for Databricks. Existing investors such as the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (OTPP) also participated. This is one of the largest VC funding rounds in history. ICONIQ Growth, MGX and Sands Capital were new investors in this round.

Oil Falls on Demand Concerns, Brent at $72 a barrel

Oil has fallen amid concerns over slowing growth and lesser demand from China. Brent is at $72 a barrel, and WTI at $69 a barrel.  The Brent-TI premium stands at $3. China state-owned refiner Sinopec said Chinese demand could peak in 2025. BP has a partnership with Sinopec in ethylene derivatives.

Perplexity Declines to Comment on Purported $500m Funding Round

Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, has purportedly closed a $500m funding round at a valuation of $9bn. OpenAI's ChatGPT Search is a competitor. Perplexity is currently fighting a lawsuit on copyright infringement.

Vultr Wins New Financing

Vultr, the world's largest privately-held cloud infrastructure company, has completed a round of financing led by LuminArx Capital Management and AMD Ventures. Vultr was founded in 2014 by David Aninowsky. "We are pleased to welcome our new equity investors," said David.

Maginative is an AI News Platform

Maginative is an AI news platform bringing the scoop on OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, Meta, NVIDIA and more.

Marginal Gains as UK joins Pacific Trade Pact

The UK has joined the CPTPP an Asia Pacific trade pact that includes Australia.  It stands for the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership first signed in March 2018. CPTPP countries accounted for 8% of UK exports in 2019. Mexico, Chile and Peru are the South and Central American nations currently part of this group.

Activist Hedge Fund Bluebell Closing After Capital Raising Challenges

European activist investor, Bluebell Capital Partners, launched in 2019, is set to close. Co-founders have a background in banking and MBAs from Columbia Business School. In April 2024, they unsuccessfully targeted BlackRock in an attempt to oust Larry Fink.

Trafigura ex-COO on trial for corruption

The case, being heard by the Swiss Federal Criminal Court, exposes how Trafigura used third parties to channel bribes including the alleged bribery of an Angolan official between 2009 and 2011. The former executive on trial is Mike Wainwright. This is the first case where executive leadership of a major commodities trading house has been on trial despite being in the sights of prosecutors for years.

Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares Resigns

Tavares led Stellantis since its founding in 2021 following the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot SA. Competition from Chinese vehicle manufacturers has been cited as one reason for a profit warning in September 2024.

UK Infrastructure Bank renamed National Wealth Fund

This change was announced at an International Investment Summit in London by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. The new name indicates a remit beyond infrastructure.

Lithium Stocks Up with Takeover Speculation

The world's largest lithium producer, Albemarle, saw its stocks lift 5.9% on Friday, and Arcadium, another large producer saw its stock lift 9.2%, on speculation Rio Tinto (NYSE: RIO, LSE: RIO, ASX: RIO) might buy them. 

Rio is facing challenges developing its Jadar lithium (and boron) mine in Serbia where activity has halted since 2022 due to fears of environmental damage. It has the potential to be the biggest lithium mine in Europe. 

Lithium prices have dropped 88% over the past two years. Rio has shown increasing interest in lithium mining, reportedly previously attempting to buy a stake in SQM in 2021.

Strategic Buyers like Docusign Dominate Tech M&A

Strategic buyers are trumping private equity in tech acquisitions in 2024. 

An example is Nasdaq-traded Docusign's (DOCU) acquisition of Lexion, an AI-powered agreement management tool, for $165m.  It is an interesting example of expanding in AI through acquisition. Lexion is essentially an intelligent contracts database, that does all the smart interpretation of contracts. They started focusing on law firms and expanded into corporates. They spent time building their machine learning stack which required upfront investment.

Bain and Hellman & Friedman tried to acquire Docusign in February which fell through following failure to agree on a price shortly after which Docusign announced 400 layoffs. 

Docusign has 1.5 million clients in 180 countries.

Royal Mint Announces Precious Metals Recycling Facility in South Wales

The UK's oldest company with a history of over one thousand years. the Royal Mint, found in 886 AD, has announced a modern facility in South Wales which extracts gold from Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs). Up to 4,000 tonnes of PCBs (found in TVs, laptops and mobile phones) from E-waste will be processed annually. Sean Millard, Chief Growth Office of the Royal Mint, stated the factory underpinned the company's commitment to sustainable precious metals.

Market intelligence platform AlphaSense acquires Tegus for $930m

Tegus research platform, data and workflow tools are in scope. 

AlphaSense has stated the transaction will add breadth to its private company data. Integrating the data will enable clients to extract proprietary insights easily, such as by using AlphaSense's AI and Search capabilities.

Gold Orbits Around $2400 Mark, 25% up in the year ending July 2024

Gold has gained 25% in one year, shooting from 1925 on 10 July 2023 to 2384 on 8 July 2024. In five years, gold has gained 70% from a level of 1425.

Japanese Yen Falls to Record Low versus USD

USDJPY is trading at 160 yen to the dollar (26 June 2024), down from the 140s in January 2024, and 130s in January 2023.  Relative strength indicators suggest the yen is oversold. When USDJPY hit 160 on April 29th, Japan started buying yen for dollars, according to market participants. Currency traders however remained strategically bearish on yen based on expectations on the interest rate differential - the premise that Japanese rates will remain low in contrast with relatively high US interest rates. Standard Chartered reflected that the April intervention is unlikely to be a "one and done move".

Abu Dhabi backed Redbird IMI selling Telegraph and Spectator

Prospective owners can bid from June 21st.

Walmart Tops the 2024 Fortune 500

Top companies are Walmart, Amazon and Apple. The threshold to make the 2024 list was $7.1 billion in revenue. The Fortune 500 makes up two thirds of US GDP. US GDP was 25 trillion in 2022.

UBS and Credit Suisse Merger to Close on 31 May 2024

The merger of UBS AG and Credit Suisse AG is expected to complete on 31 May 2024. 

Merger of the US intermediate holding companies and Swiss specific entities is on hold for future quarters pending regulatory approvals. 

UBS made a net profit of 1.8bn USD in Q1 2024 with underlying QoQ revenue growth of 15%. A reduction of USD 16bn in RWA for non-core and legacy was achieved reflecting active unwinds. RWA now stands at 526bn USD. It spent 523m USD on integration expenses in Q1.

Musk raises $6bn for xAI

 xAI has raised $6n from investors including Andreesen Horowitz to bring its “first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies.” Some of this money will go into data centers with some expensive GPUs. Founder Elon Musk is also suing its competitor OpenAI for its partnership with Microsoft citing an abandonment of its mission to benefit humanity.

Griffin Urges Al-Mat to Embrace "Western Values"

Citadel hedge fund manager Ken Griffin has stopped giving funding to Harvard over how it has handled campus protests. He has stressed a necessary return to values of meritocracy, speaking at the Managed Funds Association Conference in Miami.

Trend Followers Triumph in Q1 2024

SocGen has showed quant hedge funds gained 12% for the year to the end of March with positive outcomes for Man Group. Aspect Capital and Winton, helped by soaring cocoa prices.

Klarna Preps IPO after 5th annual consecutive loss

Swedish BNPL (buy now pay later) fintech Klarna is prepping for an IPO reputedly in New York in order to boost investment. It posted a 2.5bn SEK loss (£191m), an improvement over a 10.4bn SEK loss in 2022. Sebastian, its Chief Executive, said the company was a path to long term profitability but in the short term had decided to invest in growth.  Once one of Europe's most valuable companies, its valuation has been hit by higher interest rates. It has around 150m active users.

Oversupply in BattMats Leads to 80% Fall in Lithium Price in 1 Year

Lithium, a key raw material in batteries for electric vehicles, has fallen in price, with oversupply and a scaling back in EV production forecasts. 

Lithium carbonate trades at around 95 000 CNY/tonne from around almost but not quite 500 000 CNY/tonne at the same point last year. Its absolute peak was in November 2022 at just over 600 000 CNY/tonne. 

At the time of this update, 1 USD buys 7.18 CNY.

China is the world's largest electric vehicle market, where EV penetration continues to grow but at a slower rate. At the end of 2023, Goldman Sachs cited the trend in a report entitled "The Short Trade Must Go On" highlighting both supply and demand drivers.

For a good introduction to lithium's role in the energy transition, the following report from IRENA (the International Renewable Energy Agency) is worth reading.

Clearlake and Insight to Acquire Alteryx for $4.4bn

Clearlake Capital Group LP with Insight Partners (co-founded by Colorado-based Twitter investor Jerry Murdock) have agreed to acquire Irvine, CA-based Alteryx (NYSE:AYX), a cloud analytics platform company, in a $4.4bn definitive agreement. Regulatory and stockholder approvals are required.  Alteryx will then become a privately held portfolio company of Clearlake and Insight.

Competitors of Alteryx include Tableau, DataDog and even Microsoft Power BI. 

DataDog has more of a niche around cloud infrastructure metrics and supports AWS, Azure, GCP, RedHat OpenShift and VMWare amongst others and raised substantial capital in a Series D funding round led by ICONIQ Capital.