Tag Archives: social media

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Dollar Gains But Euro Weaker As ECB Considers Easing

Here’s Friday’s ‘Just A Minute’ bringing you a 60 second summary of what’s happening in the markets:

Main Trading Event Of The Day: GBP Current Account @ 09.30 GMT

WHAT WE’RE WATCHING TODAY

Dollar Gains But Euro Weaker As ECB Considers Easing

The dollar gained against the euro on Thursday as investors bet the Federal Reserve will start hiking rates before Europe’s central bank, which has signaled it could loosen monetary policy soon. Fed Chair Janet Yellen said that the central bank could potentially raise rates after a period of about six months from the end of its bond-buying program. That puts the first hike as early as next spring and has surprised market participants. At the same time, the euro has been under pressure on rising expectations the European Central Bank will move to further ease monetary policy in an effort to stave off deflation. The euro EUR/USD changed hands at $1.3744, down 0.3% on the day. The shared currency has weakened since ECB officials this week signaled the central bank would consider negative deposit rates and a move toward outright quantitative easing. The U.S. dollar added slightly to gains after the Labor Department said the number of people who applied for first-time weekly jobless benefits fell by 10,000 to 311,000 in the week ended March 20, the lowest level in four months. Economists had forecast claims of 320,000.

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Gold Near 6-Week Low; Heading For Second Weekly Loss

Gold recovered slightly on Friday after sharp overnight declines but the metal remained near six-week lows and on track for a second straight weekly decline, as improving sentiment over the U.S. economic outlook dented its safe-haven appeal. Bullion has dropped about $100 an ounce from a six-month high in the last nine trading sessions on strong U.S. economic data and comments by Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen that interest rates could rise in the first half of 2015. The sharp drop in prices in the last few days is expected to bring physical buyers back into the market and help gold prices consolidate although some analysts have expressed concern that there could be a further downside ahead for gold and that the metal will struggle in the face of weak demand and forecasted rising real interest rates in the U.S.

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Is Social Media The Future Of Trading?

Stock prices are driven largely by mass psychology while social media enhances people’s ability to share opinions and news on a large scale. As more individuals join the social networks Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, their role in spreading information will increase. Market information will be more easily shared amongst consumers of social media, decreasing the time it takes for potential investors to react to changing conditions. Simultaneously, the reaction time of potential investors to opinions will decrease. If there are rumours surrounding a stock or other investment and no factual information to check them with, social media users will consume the rumours as a substitute for fact. The mass psychology of the investing community will be more heavily dictated by social media. Looking to the future, traders will rely on social media for trading matters more and more.

That sums up Friday’s highlights! Keep up with all the trading news for the day via Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. We hope you have a profitable day on the markets.

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The Explosive Rise Of Chinese Social Media

Regular readers of Coffee Break may recall recently reading about the phenomenal growth of China’s Tencent and its mobile messaging app. It seems that emerging economy, China, continues to go from strength to strength…especially where the internet is concerned.

For both Chinese internet companies and users, these are undoubtedly good times. While the government continues an unprecedented crackdown on outspoken liberal bloggers, e-commerce sites are thriving with about 10 percent of China’s retail sales now conducted online. About 600 million people have internet access in China, with 450 million smartphones and tablets in regular use. None of the leading Chinese internet companies are state-controlled, and those listed overseas have a combined market capitalisation approaching $300 billion.

Sina Weibo is a Twitter-like site, with more than 500 million registered users. Even British Prime Minister David Cameron has signed up, albeit ahead of a planned diplomatic visit to China. It is popularly used as a news feed and as a way to follow celebrities, opinion-makers, and even government press offices commenting on the daily news. Meanwhile, popular musician and heartthrob Li Yundi also took to Weibo last week to introduce fans to his new girlfriend which at the time was the most-read post on the site!

With so many news junkies tuned into Weibo, traditional cost-per-click advertising and ads imported from e-commerce sites such as Taobao.com have high growth potential as an advertising-based business model. Tencent Weixin as we previously reported, also goes from strength to strength as it could potentially charge for subscriptions to online games, specialised news services, or further value-added services such as e-coupons to be used in online stores.

Predictions are looking rosy for players in the Chinese internet market as they continue to build significant global businesses of increasing value. It seems that monetising Chinese social media knows no bounds!

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Who Has 1 Billion Users And Is About To Overtake Facebook?

It’s not Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. It’s a company that most people in the West don’t know. That, however, is set to change, with the explosive growth of China’s Tencent and its mobile messaging app WeChat…Last week, Facebook, the current king of social networks, admitted that it’s losing teen users and that the overall growth in its monthly active users has slowed to 18% year-on-year. This isn’t helped by the fact that it and other Western social networks are banned in China. By contrast, Tencent recently announced that WeChat’s users have almost tripled from the 85 million of the year before. And Tencent’s reach unlike local Twitter-equivalent Sina Weibo and Facebook-equivalent RenRen is not just restricted to China. In just four months between May and September 2013, its overseas users have doubled from 50m to 100m. Tencent has managed to differentiate its product with some killer features that keep users coming back for more. WeChat has neatly fused together the open approach of social networks such as Twitter, where anyone can follow anybody, and more closed networks such as Facebook which rely on mutual friend connections. With a $101bn US market cap, Tencent joins Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon among the world’s most valuable internet companies. It is looking like Tencent will overtake Facebook, although partly because China’s population is bigger and partly because it has an unfair advantage over Western competitors blocked out of the Chinese market. This needs to change. Predictions for the next few years are that Tencent will build a significant global business of great value: with products and brands we’ll increasingly come to know, interact with – and maybe even love. That’s our ten cent’s worth!

What Will You Consume With Your Morning Coffee?

Half of U.S. adult Twitter users now consume news on the platform and get news through the social media platform, mainly on mobile devices, according to a new survey. The report by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation was released on Monday. The results are based on a survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults including Twitter and Facebook users.
Twitter users who consume news on the platform, defined as information about events and issues that involve more than just family or friends, represent only 8 percent of the U.S. adult population.
Almost half of all U.S. adults on Facebook use the social media platform founded by Mark Zuckerberg to consume news as well according to a study from the Pew Research Center released two weeks ago. But that group represents nearly one-third of all U.S. adults. Twitter has about 200 million users worldwide, while Facebook has 1 billion. The survey also underscores how young people consume news because almost half of Twitter news users are between the ages of 18 and 29. The network known for short messages of up to 140 characters is preparing to make one of the most closely watched initial public offerings later this week. It raised the price range for its IPO by 25 percent earlier on Monday, valuing the company at up to $13.6 billion…numbers that investors surely won’t have any problem consuming!