Octopus AIM VCT plc
08 April 2021
Net Asset Value
The Board of Octopus AIM VCT plc announces that as at 31 March 2021 the unaudited net asset value of the Ordinary shares was approximately 126.1 pence per share.
For further information, please contact:
Kate Tidbury
Octopus Investments Limited
Tel: 0800 316 2295
A chance conversation with a customer ended up saving Vincent Lipford, a self-employed barber in Memphis, Tennessee, more than $20,000. The 51-year-old single father was stuck in a subprime auto loan with a 25% annualized interest rate because he lacked the credit history that would allow him to obtain financing from traditional lenders. When Donald Hall, regional vice president at the Hope Credit Union, strolled in one Saturday for his weekly haircut, he was alarmed to learn about Lipford's situation.
The US dollar fell during Asian trading against the Japanese yen, but as the Europeans came back on board, the market started to recover again.
The oldest cryptocurrency is looking at a price support level around $54,000, with resistance around $60,000.
(Bloomberg) -- Currency traders have reaped gains this year betting on the U.K.’s vaccine success and against Europe’s stumbles. Now that trade in going in reverse.The euro is on course for its best week against sterling since September, trading above 86 pence on Thursday. Investors have been selling the pound on concerns relating to AstraZeneca Plc’s shot -- which the U.K. is heavily dependent on -- while the shared currency has been buoyed by projections the bloc will hit immunization targets earlier than expected.It comes after months of the U.K. currency outpacing that of its nearest neighbor, racking up multi-year records as traders bet Britain’s rapid inoculation program would leave the European Union in the dust.Now, investors risk getting left on the wrong side of the trade with leveraged funds’ long sterling bets close to their highest in a year, according to data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Hedge funds closed bullish pound positions on Wednesday.“We are observing a reversal of the vaccination euphoria,” said Petr Krpata, a strategist at ING Groep NV. “It is also exaggerated by speculative positioning, with the pound being the biggest speculative long in the G-10 FX space.”After Brexit trade discussions were sealed at the end of last year, the focus for pound traders pivoted to the U.K.’s vaccine rollout, which quickly established a lead over the EU. Britain has given around three times as many doses as a proportion of its population compared to the EU, according to Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker, with the bloc’s effort being curtailed by disputes and delays.Now, the U.K. campaign is hitting new snags. Vaccination centers and pharmacies are facing a “significant reduction” in supply of doses during April, meaning that older people waiting for second doses will be prioritized over younger people getting their first shot.Meanwhile, U.K. medical regulators advised that under-30s should not receive the AstraZeneca vaccine in a “course correction” to the country’s rollout plan. The pound dropped on Wednesday as shorts in the euro-sterling pair were unwound, according to a Europe-based trader.“It looks like many positives are in the price of the pound by now and the currency is looking overvalued and overbought, especially versus the euro,” said Valentin Marinov, head of G-10 currency research at Credit Agricole in London. “Sterling is no longer the vaccine champion of G-10 and, more broadly, the slowing pace of the Covid vaccinations in the U.K. could ultimately delay the government’s plans to reopen the economy.”To be sure, April is historically a supportive month for the pound, driven in part by the new U.K. tax year and corporate dividend repatriation of overseas income. The U.K. government, meanwhile, is insisting it’s on track to reach its target of vaccinating all adults by the end of July. It began giving out Moderna Inc. shots on Wednesday.“Compared to the EU, the U.K. will emerge first from lockdown, gaining a head start in its economic recovery,” said Stuart Cole, chief macro strategist at Equiti Capital. “Indeed, in the U.K. the talk is very much of the potential strength of the recovery, while in the EU they are still working out how to distribute their pandemic recovery fund.”Read more: EU Recovery Fund Outlook Faces Shadow of Doubt From S&P, PictetBut after finally breaking the 0.85 level against the euro last week, the pound hit its weakest level in a month on Wednesday as new vaccine headlines hit. It traded little changed versus the shared currency on Thursday at under 86.5 pence.“We are now very much at the stage where a lot of the good news on the vaccine front is now priced,” said Ned Rumpeltin, European head of foreign exchange strategy at Toronto-Dominion Bank. “This has left sterling exposed to risks of a correction against some of its main trading partners, just as some of the other major economies are starting to close the jab gap.(Updates prices.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
TOKYO (Reuters) -Crude prices fell on Thursday after official data showed a big increase in U.S. gasoline stocks, sparking concerns about demand weakening in the world's biggest oil consumer as crude supplies around the world rise. Brent crude fell 51 cents, or 0.8%, to $62.65 a barrel by 0648 GMT. While crude oil stocks in the United States fell more than forecast by analysts, gasoline inventories jumped sharply, also against expectations, the U.S. Department of Energy said on Wednesday.
Credit Suisse should be able to weather a $4.7 billion loss from the Archegos hedge fund and the collapse of $10 billion worth of Greensill funds, with no meaningful risk to the Swiss financial sector's health from the episodes, the IMF's country mission head said. Shares in Credit Suisse have dropped by 25% in the space of a month, with Switzerland's second biggest bank reeling from its exposure to the collapse first of Greensill Capital and then Archegos Capital Management. "Our assessment is that the incidents are not systematic and they remain manageable by Credit Suisse," Mark Horton told reporters after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published its report on Switzerland.
Iran’s possible return to a nuclear deal is unlikely to unleash a tidal wave of crude onto the markets as the country has been flouting U.S. sanctions and managed to keep its main customer well-supplied
BP stock climbed early on Tuesday, as the oil major said it would hit its net debt target almost a year earlier than expected, opening the door to share buybacks.
(Bloomberg) -- Suez SA agreed to sell its Australian business to Cleanaway Waste Management Ltd., with completion conditional on further talks about its own takeover by Veolia Environnement SA.Suez signed a deal to sell its recycling and recovery business in Australia to Melbourne-based Cleanaway for A$2.5 billion ($1.9 billion), the French water and waste-treatment firm said in a statement Tuesday. Under the terms, Suez can terminate the deal by May 6 if it gets taken over by Veolia, Cleanaway said in a filing.The arrangement leaves room for Suez to maneuver its own fate in its seven-month battle to convince shareholders that Veolia’s takeover offer is too low. Veolia bought almost 30% of Suez in October with a plan to absorb the whole company and create a new global leader in the sector.“We’re continuing to seek a friendly, negotiated solution with Veolia” with the aim of finding a solution by April 20, Suez Chairman Philippe Varin said on a conference call Tuesday. The valuation of the Suez asset sales, including in Australia, show that Veolia’s takeover offer, which it has resolutely maintained since October, “isn’t sufficient,” he said.Veolia said in a statement that Suez’s agreement to sell the Australian business creates another obstacle to a negotiated solution that will have a “negative impact” on its takeover offer. The company will continue to use “all legal means to prevent the sale of these strategic assets,” according to Veolia’s statement. Poison PillSuez on March 21 put forward a solution that would involve Veolia paying at least 20 euros ($23.63) per share -- 2 euros more than its offer -- and selling on over half of the company to Ardian SAS and Global Infrastructure Partners. It gave Veolia until April 20 to negotiate on that proposal.Alternatively, Suez wants a 22.50 euros per share bid by May 5, following which it would remove a so-called poison pill that’s meant to deter Veolia.Beyond that date, a legal mechanism has been put in place that would prevent any buyer from selling Suez’s French water assets until September 2024. It’s meant to complicate Veolia’s ability to resolve antitrust concerns after any deal unless it decides to sell its own French water business.Suez shares rose 0.3% in Paris trading, while Veolia was unchanged. Cleanaway surged 16% in Australia.The agreement with Cleanaway values Suez’s Australian assets at 12.9 times 2020 earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, the company said. Given that Suez currently trades at about 8.5 times its Ebitda, the Australian deal shows the company is worth more than 20 euros a share, Chief Financial Officer Julian Waldron said.If no agreement is found with Veolia in the coming weeks, other asset sales can’t be ruled out, the Suez chairman said.Veolia or any other company can also make a higher bid for Suez’s Australian assets by April 21. If the deal between Suez and Cleanaway isn’t completed, the Australian utility will still acquire a portfolio of two landfills and five transfer stations in the Sydney region for A$501 million, the companies said.If the Australia deal is completed, it would make Cleanaway among the largest waste treatment operators in the country. It’s still currently searching for a new chief executive after longtime leader Vik Bansal announced plans to step down following an investigation into his workplace conduct.Cleanaway said it plans to raise new equity to partially fund the deal.(Updates with Veolia comment in fifth paragraph.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
The departure comes just over a month after Nikola disclosed details on its hydrogen fuel-cell-powered product lineup that will include vehicles with a driving range of up to 900 miles. Schneider, who spent three years at the startup as an executive vice-president, oversaw the development of its fuel cell and hydrogen team, Nikola said in a statement. Nikola had publicly rejected all accusations.
The conditions are ripe for a rally in the AUD/USD and NZD/USD, but buyers may be waiting for the release of the Fed minutes before making their move.
The finance chief and two other top executives at Limetree Bay Ventures, operator of a long-stalled Caribbean oil refinery, are stepping down, according to an internal letter reviewed by Reuters. The 200,000-barrel-per-day refinery in St. Croix recently halted processing after a mishap, according to people familiar with the matter. It has run more than $1 billion over its original budget and well behind a plan to begin processing in late 2019.
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) -Amsterdam-based technology investor Prosus NV on Thursday said it netted $14.6 billion from its overnight sale of a 2% stake in Chinese gaming and social media giant Tencent in one of the world's largest ever block trades. "Our belief in Tencent and its management team is steadfast, but we also need to fund continued growth in our core business lines and emerging sectors," Prosus Chairman Koos Bekker said in a statement after the completion of the deal on Thursday. In a Hong Kong Stock Exchange filing, Tencent said Prosus sold 191.89 million shares for HK$595.00, reducing its stake to 28.9%.
(Bloomberg) -- Carousell, a Southeast Asian online marketplace that lets people buy and sell second-hand goods, said it plans to invest aggressively to grow its classified cars business in the region.The Singapore-based startup, last valued at $850 million, will bolster its classified auto business across Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore with OneShift -- a portal that connects sellers with buyers and dealers -- and Reno Financial, which offers loans and other financial services, the company said in a statement.Carousell’s ambition underscores intensifying competition in the online second-hand car market in Southeast Asia, where middle class consumers are expected to swell in number to 334 million by 2030. Rivals Carsome, backed by investors including Asia Partners, and Carro, whose backers include Insignia Ventures Partners, both claim to be the region’s largest automotive marketplace and are trying to expand rapidly.“Covid has accelerated the trend of users buying and selling online, including for cars,” said Gaurav Bhasin, chief strategy officer of Carousell, who leads the firm’s automotive strategy. “We want to go one step further to power our autos brands with transactional models.”Carousell said it’s the most-visited auto classifieds platform in the region, with one of the biggest inventories of auto-related listings. Its cars business is now Carousell’s largest vertical, contributing a third of the company’s revenue.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
Despite short-term volatility, bitcoin's uptrend remains intact. And some traders could be shifting to altcoins.
(Bloomberg) -- The purveyors of U.S. penny stocks now have a booming business in blue chips -- European blue chips.While Brexit drove most London equities trading to platforms in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris, some has migrated to New York’s OTC Markets Group, known primarily for owning the “pink sheets” where thousands of speculative U.S. stocks are bought and sold.Average daily trading in European Union companies on the platform increased 27% in January and 25% in February compared to December, according to OTC Markets. The jump has accompanied rising volumes from the frenzy in retail trading during the pandemic.“We’ve been the unexpected beneficiary” of Brexit, says Jason Paltrowitz, director of OTC Markets Group International Ltd. “We’re getting a look where we might not have gotten it before.”The increase in trading volumes in New York is another sign that Brexit is driving some business away from Europe entirely. New York-based derivatives trading venues have gained following Brexit from the EU’s decision to bar its banks from trading certain contracts on London platforms.Even before Brexit, the OTC Markets platform was used to trade shares in foreign companies, such as Siemens AG, BNP Paribas SA and EssilorLuxottica SA. They can have their shares “cross traded” on the platform without going through the rigorous process of going public in the U.S. and meeting the Securities and Exchange Commisssion’s disclosure requirements.OTC Markets is trying to entice more foreign companies, arguing that it’s an easier way for foreign firms to attract U.S. investors who can trade the shares during U.S. hours and in U.S. dollars.“We’re taking that data and absolutely using it as a springboard to increase our outreach to companies both in the U.K. and more broadly in western Europe,” Paltrowitz said.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
(Bloomberg) -- The Reserve Bank of India’s attempt to flush out excess U.S. dollars from the nation’s markets has offered a unique arbitrage opportunity for some banks.Lenders are using a regulatory loophole to profit from trading in the currency forward markets, according to people with knowledge of the matter. A large bank could easily rack up exposures of more than $1 billion, multiple traders said, asking not to be identified as the deals aren’t public.The strategy revolves around a February regulation change that dropped exposure limits local banks have to other sovereign assets, such as U.S. Treasuries, which allowed them to take advantage of a spread in the dollar-rupee markets. The RBI’s extensive intervention had driven implied 12-month yields for the currency pair to the highest in more than four years.The biggest beneficiaries have been foreign banks in the nation, which have easy access to large dollar stockpiles, the people said. As the biggest buyer of the greenback in the forwards market, the RBI is effectively funding some of the trading profits.Here’s how it works. Banks would convert rupee deposits into dollars using a buy-sell swap -- buying the greenback now while selling the same amount at a specified date in the future. They use the proceeds to purchase Treasuries, under the newly-relaxed RBI rule. The return is in the arbitrage: they pay around 3.5% on local currency deposits, while earning 4.9% on the one-year forward premia.In discussions, the central bank had made it clear that the lenders should deploy dollars from their own stockpile and not use swaps to make investments under the newly relaxed rules, the people said. However, the written rules don’t define what constitutes the banks’ resources to be used for investments -- creating a loophole for the lenders to get more greenback through swaps.Since there are no longer any limits on how much these banks can invest abroad, there are -- at least from a regulatory perspective -- no caps on the exposures they can have.Relaxed RulesThe trades aren’t illegal and there’s no suggestion of wrongdoing. An email to an RBI spokesman on Tuesday afternoon was unanswered.When RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das made the rule change on banks exposure to foreign assets two months ago, the expectation was that it would drive the lenders to use their excess dollars to buy Treasuries, rather than flood the local market with the greenback.While the banks have done so, they are profiting from the currency markets. To be sure, the February rule-change and these trades have helped to lower the 12-month forward premia to 4.9% from 5.4%, trimming hedging costs for companies.The RBI had been mopping up capital inflows -- driven by a buoyant stock market and acquisitions -- to such an extent that its foreign-exchange reserves grew to be the world’s fourth-largest. The intervention done through the spot market and sterilized in forwards led to a surge in the 12-month rate.Read: India FX Reserves Cross Russia to Become World’s 4th BiggestAs a result, the central bank’s long-dollar books jumped to $47.4 billion at end-January from a negative $4.9 billion in March 2020.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
(Bloomberg) -- The Swedes are learning that their once pioneering vision for a central bank digital currency might take a lot longer to enact than initially thought.The Riksbank just published the results of the first phase of a pilot project into what is essentially the most advanced exploration of a post-cash era to be undertaken by a major, western economy. It says the rapid pace at which cash is disappearing presents “potential problems” that a digital currency controlled by a central bank can address.The task is huge and Sweden’s central bank, the world’s oldest, keeps pushing back its timeline. After once suggesting it might be ready to move ahead with an e-krona by 2018, the Riksbank now says the current pilot project won’t be completed until early next year, and has even given itself room to continue trying until the end of 2026.Other central bankers have openly dismissed the notion that there’s any reward to be gained from being a first-mover in the field of digital currencies. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell recently said the U.S. would rather be right than first.“In most economies it will take time. And especially if lawmakers need to weigh in,” Johanna Jeansson of Bloomberg Economics.GLOBAL INSIGHT: Carpe Diem - Central Banks in Digital Future Mithra Sundberg, who heads the Riksbank unit that’s running the project from Stockholm, suggests it’s important not to settle on the technology before figuring out exactly what the digital currency needs to do. That’s as the Riksbank makes clear it’s not replacing cash, and that whatever it ends up creating -- if it moves ahead -- will probably require a new legal framework before it can be used.Meanwhile, cash in the form of bank notes and coins is slowly but surely petering out in the largest Nordic economy. Last year, Swedes used cash less often than the citizens of seven other “mature” markets, as a percentage of total transactions, according to the McKinsey Global Payments Report.But not everyone sees cashlessness as a trigger for embarking on a digital currency project. In neighboring Norway, another virtually cashless society, the central bank says there’s “no acute need” to introduce a digital currency.What Bloomberg Economics Says...“The motivation for introducing a central bank digital currency may change as policy makers explore the issue. Simply introducing a complement to cash for retail transactions may not make much of a difference in the economy. Using wholesale CBDCs in cross-border transactions has the potential to raise efficiency. Employing new digital tools for policy purposes could really alter the macroeconomic playing field. The bigger the step, the more thought it’s likely to require. Expect that to take time.”-- Johanna Jeansson, Scandinavia economistSundberg says Sweden’s e-krona pilot project hasn’t yet explored the monetary policy ramifications of such a transformation. But she and her team have “looked at the technical possibilities of being able to charge interest,” she says.The Riksbank’s pilot project shows that it would be possible to apply interest rates on a CBDC, regardless of whether it’s account-based or token based. If a negative interest rate is to be applied, the end-user can hold the tokens, but not a separate key that provides access to those tokens.“The compatibility of an interest-bearing ekrona, positive or negative, with a distribution model as tested in phase one, is a much broader question than the purely technical possibilities and limitations,” the Riksbank said.For now, the Riksbank is focusing on a so-called two-tier model, in which it would be responsible for the issuance and redemption of a CBDC. In such a framework the so-called participants, such as banks or payment firms, would have direct contact with the end-user, according to Micael Lindgren, the technical project manager at the Riksbank.Ultimately, politicians and not central bankers will decide what the future of money will look like in Sweden. Lawmakers will judge whether the information produced through the pilot project persuades them that an e-krona is even necessary, and if so, what form it should take.(Adds comment from Bloomberg Economics)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
Deutsche Bank warns the stock market could be at risk for a sizable pullback in coming months. Here's what would trigger the sell-off.
Stocks in Europe reached record highs on Thursday, buoyed by optimism in Britain over easing lockdown restrictions, while a benign outlook for U.S. interest rates was set to push Wall Street to new heights. "In terms of economic re-opening, there is enough optimism built in at the moment to drive markets quite a bit higher from here, and the Fed has reiterated it's going to remain on hold for a while," Hewson said. Minutes of the Federal Reserve's last policy meeting, published on Wednesday, showed members felt the economy was still far short of target and were in no rush to scale back their $120 billion a month of bond buying.
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