US FINANCIAL MARKET

S&P 500 Wavers After Big Rally as Treasuries Climb: Markets Wrap – Bloomberg, 11/27/2023

• Stocks struggled for direction after hitting overbought levels in a rally that sent the market toward one of its biggest meltups of the last 100 years.
• The S&P 500 wavered after softer-than-estimated new-home sales data. Wall Street’s “fear gauge” — the VIX — halted a slide that drove the volatility gauge to pre-pandemic levels.
• The Nasdaq 100 rose 0.1%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was little changed.
• Energy, industrial and financial shares led losses.
• Retailers were mixed as Cyber Monday kicked off, with Amazon.com climbing and Best Buy down.
• The yield on 10-year Treasuries declined four basis points to 4.42%.
• West Texas Intermediate crude rose 0.3% to $75.75 a barrel.
• Spot gold rose 0.6% to $2,012.18 an ounce.
• The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was little changed.
• Meantime, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said there’s evidence of softening in the region’s jobs market, which officials are watching to assess the impact of monetary tightening.
• Bets that US policymakers are done with the rate-hiking cycle have fueled a four-week, 11% S&P 500 rally, pushing short-term volatility expectations to the levels last seen in November 2021.
• While some used the opportunity to buy protection on the cheap, it’s been far from ubiquitous, and calls saying the market environment is getting too placid are on the rise.
• In earnings, Crowdstrike Holdings will underscore how businesses are prioritizing cybersecurity after recent high-profile corporate hacks, while Salesforce and Dell Technologies are expected to post slower sales growth when they report this week, as overall corporate expenditure tightens.
• Elliott Investment Management has revived calls for changes at Crown Castle after disclosing a roughly $2 billion stake in the tower operator.
• Shopify said merchants set a Black Friday record with a combined $4.1 billion in sales.
• The Stoxx Europe 600 fell 0.1%.

Cyber Monday Forecast Boosted After Record Online Holiday Sales – Bloomberg, 11/27/2023

• US shoppers will spend up to $12.4 billion online during Cyber Monday, according to Adobe, which adjusted its initial forecast of $12 billion upward based on stronger-than-expected spending on Black Friday and the popularity of buy-now-pay-later features that let shoppers stretch their budgets with credit.
• It would cap off a Cyber Week that has already seen record online spending: Black Friday topped projections at $9.8 billion, up 7.5% from a year earlier.
• Thanksgiving spending of $5.6 billion was up 5.5%, according to figures released early Monday from Adobe.
• Flexible spending options, including buy-now-pay-later features online, have helped shoppers stretch budgets otherwise battered by inflation.
• Consumers used such promotions to spend $7.3 billion from Nov. 1 to Nov. 26, up 14% from a year ago, according to Adobe, underscoring how credit is helping retailers spur spending.
• US shoppers spent $10.3 billion online Saturday and Sunday, up 7.7% from a year earlier.

The Biggest Delivery Business in the U.S. Is No Longer UPS or FedEx – Wall Street Journal, 11/27/2023

• Amazon.com has grabbed the crown of biggest delivery business in the U.S., surpassing both UPS and FedEx in parcel volumes.
• The Seattle e-commerce giant delivered more packages to U.S. homes in 2022 than UPS, after eclipsing FedEx in 2020, and it is on track to widen the gap this year, according to internal Amazon data and people familiar with the matter.
• The U.S. Postal Service is still the biggest parcel service by volume; it handles hundreds of millions of packages for all three companies.
• Before Thanksgiving this year, Amazon had already delivered more than 4.8 billion packages in the U.S., and its internal projections predict that it will deliver around 5.9 billion by the end of the year, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
• UPS has said that its domestic volume this year is unlikely to exceed last year’s 5.3 billion, which includes packages delivered to customers through the postal service.
• FedEx’s domestic Express and Ground parcel volume reached around 3.05 billion for the fiscal year ended May 31, 2023.

US ECONOMY & POLITICS

US New-Home Sales Fall as High Mortgage Rates Weigh on Demand – Bloomberg, 11/27/2023

• US sales of new houses fell in October after a downward revision to the prior month as decades-high mortgage rates weighed on demand.
• Purchases of new single-family homes decreased 5.6% to a 679,000 annualized pace last month, government data showed Monday.
• The pace missed all estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists.
• The median sales price of a new home fell to $409,300, according to the report from the Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
• Even with the decline — now down more than 17% from a year ago — prices remain well above pre-pandemic levels.
• Sales fell in the Midwest to the lowest in nearly a year and declined in the West as well.

EUROPE & WORLD

Apple iPhone maker Foxconn to invest $1.5 billion in India as it looks to build beyond China – CNBC, 11/27/2023

• Foxconn Technology will invest more than $1.5 billion in an Indian construction project to fulfill the Apple supplier’s “operational needs” the company announced in Taiwanese security filings Monday.
• The $1.541 billion investment was made through a Foxconn subsidiary, Hon Hai Technology India Mega Development, which has been registered in India’s Maharashtra state since 2015, according to one of the securities filings and Indian corporate records.
• A concurrent filing said that the same subsidiary would budget the equivalent amount in Indian rupees for a construction project to fulfill “operational needs.”

Europe Is Guzzling Diesel From India, a Key Buyer of Russian Oil – Bloomberg, 11/27/2023

• Europe banned most oil shipments from Russia almost a year ago, but it’s binging on diesel that may well have been made from Russian crude.
• The region’s imports of diesel from India, one of the biggest buyers of Russian crude, are on course to soar to 305,000 barrels a day, the most since at least January 2017, data from market-intelligence firm Kpler show.
• While it’s not possible to say with certainty that the molecules originated in Russia — India also processes oil from elsewhere — Moscow’s deliveries have given Indian refineries an ability to produce abundant diesel and boost exports.
• Arrivals into Europe in November include a rare shipment from Mumbai-based Nayara Energy, which imported almost 60% of its crude from Russia this year, according to Kpler.
• Reliance Industries, Europe’s top supplier of Indian diesel, draws more than third of its crude from Russia, the figures show.

Talks to Extend Israel-Hamas Truce Go Down to the Wire – Wall Street Journal, 11/27/2023

• Mediators were working to secure a two-day extension to the four-day truce deal in the war in Gaza that ends later on Monday, and pave the way for more Israeli hostages to be released from Hamas custody.
• International pressure is rising on Israel to extend a pause in its military offensive in the Palestinian enclave devastated by fighting that caused thousands of civilian casualties, triggered a spiraling humanitarian crisis and forced most of the two million residents from their homes.
• For the U.S. and Israel’s other allies in the West, an extended truce could achieve two objectives: getting more hostages out of Gaza, including American citizens, and encouraging Israel to hold off on its offensive in the south until there is a plan to minimize civilian casualties.
• Egyptian and Qatari negotiators expressed optimism that they would be able to work out the disagreements and secure assurances from Israel and Hamas to extend the fragile truce and allow for the release of more Israelis held in Gaza in return for the release of Palestinians held in Israel.

TikTok’s Owner Wanted to Create a Hit Videogame. It Failed. – Wall Street Journal, 11/27/2023

• TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance has bet billions on videogames since 2019, setting up its own creative unit and acquiring buzzy game makers.
• Now it is winding down those efforts, its latest pullback from experimental forays into education, property brokering and virtual reality as it faces regulatory and economic headwinds at home and abroad.
• ByteDance has told senior managers at its videogame unit, Nuverse, to terminate games under development by December and is laying off hundreds of employees at the division, people familiar with the matter said.
• The firings account for the bulk of Nuverse’s staff and come soon after ByteDance similarly stripped back at its VR headset unit, Pico, this month.
• ByteDance is streamlining operations to focus on core businesses and improving profit, the people said.
• Senior management—including founder Zhang Yiming and Chairman Liang Rubo—have been unsatisfied with the videogame division’s performance, as its titles have struggled to retain users and the unit hasn’t managed to score a global hit, the people said.
• ByteDance said Monday that it is restructuring its videogame business to focus on “long-term strategic growth areas,” without specifying.
• Senior managers at the unit said it would continue to explore artificial intelligence technologies and applications in the videogame sector.

Panama Canal Adds Extra Queue-Jumping Auctions for Stuck Ships – Bloomberg, 11/27/2023

• The Panama Canal Authority said it will add extra slots allowing ships to pay big premiums to transit the waterway, which has become congested due to an ongoing drought.
• The special auctions allow vessels that have been waiting for a long time to pay a one-off fee — at times recently reaching several million dollars — in order to transit the canal.
• Only vessels that have been waiting for 10 days or more will be eligible to participate, according to an advisory.
• The sales of slots to get from one side of the conduit to the other via auction have been increasingly lucrative in recent months, with shipping companies paying a total of about $235 million so far this year to get through.
• That has left vessels with a handful of options: wait a long time to transit, divert and sail thousands of extra miles around South America, or pay up to access a quicker transit slot.

Factmonster – TODAY in HISTORY

• Thirty-five Amistad survivors return to Africa. – 1841
• Alfred Nobel signed his last will, which established the Nobel Prize. – 1895
• New York’s Pennsylvania Station opened. – 1910
• Pope Paul VI was attacked at the Manila airport by a Bolivian painter disguised as a priest. – 1970
• Gerald R. Ford was confirmed by the Senate to become vice president, succeeding Spiro T. Agnew. – 1973
• President Bush secretly flew to Iraq to spend Thanksgiving with the troops. – 2003

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