NatGas 8.1% Flash Crash in Futures on 8 June

Could electronic algos be to blame for clsoing the New York Mercantile Exchange floor for more than five hours when late Wednesday, when Nymex July natural gas dropped 39 cents, or 8.1 per cent, to $4.510 per million British thermal units?? After a few seconds, it bounced back up but the damage was done - anomalous price move registered.

In the US natgas has risen 15 per cent in the past month, nearing a one-year high of $5 per mBtu, as people switch on their air-cons in the hot weather and power plant masters boost output accordingly.

Copthall Avenue's Rencap enters US equity derivatives business

Rencap has hired Leonard Ellis in New York to lead Equity Derivatives and Structuring out there, picking him up from Capstone where he focused on idea- and event-driven volatility strategies. Ellis also managed equity derivatives at Citi, covering equity swaps, DMA, delta one and exchange market making.

Glencore IPO creates money for management and banks

The FTSE 100 will welcome the world's largest commodities firm (by revenue: 2010, $145bn) to its ranks, around May 24, 2011, on its first day of unconditional trading.

Glencore did its primary listing in London, selling 1.14 billion shares @ 530p, and secondary listing in Hong Kong, at 66.53 HKD (around 530p as well). Shares rose 11p to 541p in the first day of trading. At the 530 offer, Glencore has a market value of £36.7 billion.

Ivan Glassenberg, CEO since 2002, studied accountancy at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and got his MBA from University of Southern California, and will have a paper fortune of around £6bn following the flotation, being the owner of 15% of the company. Glencore was founded by Marc Rich (real name Marcell Reich) who started his career at Phibro (then known as Philipp Brothers, a firm founded in 1901) and is credited in a book as having created the spot market for crude oil.

Microsoft to Buy Skype for $8.5bn

The End of Crazy Acquisitions for BoA?

Ken Lewis, BoA's architect of disaster mergers, the last of which was Merrill Lynch, has been gazoomf'ed by his scion Brian Moynihan who has declared "NO MORE DISASTER MERGERS". Adding to the theme of no more acquisitions, he surmised: "We do not need anything".

Oracle's Java Brain Drain

Father of Java, James Gosling, along with other esteemed engineers like Tim Bray, have resigned from Sun following its purchase of Oracle. Why did Oracle let them leave?

Gosling is now Chief Software Architect at a company called Liquid Robotics (press release Aug 30, 2011) based in Sunnyvale, CA, who develop the Wave Glider (R) unmanned ocean vehicle.Tim Bray, who grew up in Beirut,  is now developer advocate at Google.

Hitachi says Bye Bye Disk Drives

Hitachi sold its disk drive unit to Western Digital for the sum of (around) $4.3.bn, causing a 2.18% rise in Hitachi's stock price (its peer Sanyo rose 2.4% on the news). The combination of Hitachi's HDD unit and Western Digital will make WD (hq'ed in California) the company with the largest global market share for hard disk drives (50% according to IDC), the next-in-line being Seagate STX with 29% market share (they own the Maxtor brand). The remaining share is held by Toshiba and Samsung.

The acquisition of HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) gives WD control over a large portfolio of global assets including the Hitachi San Jose Reseach Center and manufacturing plants in Shenzhen, China (substrate manufacturing is done in Sarawak, Malaysia - substrate (common examples, being aluminium and glass) is what is used to create the platter in the disc drive  - the core internals of the disk drive consisting of several layers of platter on a spindle).

Hitachi was set up in 1910 as a product company specializing in electrical engineering. Its first product was an induction motor (used in many household appliances). They went on to produce a bunch of electrical products, including transformers, ammeters and voltmeters. Their involvement in appliances (washing machines and refrigerators) It was founded by Namihei Odaira, an electrical engineering graduate who worked for several engineering companies before founding Hitachi around the age of 36, following his interest and research in developing induction motors.