European stocks were little changed, after six consecutive weeks of gains, as investors pondered prospects for economic growth and monetary policy.
Petrofac Ltd tumbled 17 percent after forecasting “flat to modest” profit growth next year. Sugar producer Suedzucker AG fell 15 percent after saying earnings will not match expectations. Aberdeen Asset Management PLC jumped 11 percent after Lloyds Banking Group agreed to sell its Scottish Widows Investment Partnership division to the money manager.
The STOXX Europe 600 Index lost less than 0.1 percent to 322.77 this week. The 600-share regional benchmark has surged 15 percent this year, reaching its highest level since May 2008, as central banks around the world pledged to continue their support for economic growth even as the US Federal Reserve gets ready to consider tapering its monetary stimulus.
The Euro STOXX 50 Index, a measure for euro-area shares, gained less than 0.1 percent this week.
“Tapering is an inevitable development that could be taken negatively in terms of market sentiment, but, however, it is fundamentally sound,” Ilario Di Bon, head of equities at Alliance Trust in London, said by phone. “It means that the recipe of the Fed starts to have an effect on the real economy. We are mending the system, as opposed to living in artificial support forever.”
Fed officials might reduce their US$85 billion in monthly bond purchases “in coming months” as the economy improves, according to the record of the Federal Open Market Committee’s Oct. 29 and 30 gathering, released on Wednesday.
Economists in a Bloomberg survey expect the central bank to begin reducing bond purchases in March.
The European Central Bank is considering a smaller-than-normal cut in the deposit rate if officials decide to take it negative for the first time, according to two people with knowledge of the debate.
The central bank this month refrained from cutting the deposit rate, even as it reduced its key refinancing rate to a record low 0.25 percent.
National benchmark indices rose in nine of the 18 Western European markets this week. Germany’s DAX gained 0.6 percent. The UK’s FTSE 100 and France’s CAC 40 both slipped 0.3 percent.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
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