Today's blog was delayed by an enormously complicated and wrong charge notice from American Express whose Amazon credit card was stolen from me back in November 2020. I sent all my credit card firms copies of the report after I reported the pickpocketing to my local police precinct. And it turned out that AmEx, whose shares I have long owned, was trying to bill me for payments I had in fact made using another autopay card. This is fraud in my view and I am going to sell my shares. The threat to my credit rating and the fines they said were pending were both known to be wrong by the fellow who demanded an immediate auto payment. They gave me lists of bills I owed that had been paid using a different Amazon card from Visa, so I didn't owe them at all for the bulk of what they were demanding about 40 payments. 

This is the baba Of course, my exit will not hurt AXP which is why I am sharing my experience with you. I am also plotting to inform the State of New York, home both of me and the company, of this nasty experience. AmEx needs not only payments but also protection of its good name. That is why I am sending my blog of today to American Express. I cannot believe that this kind of behavior is good for the company. By the way, the people who picked up the phone when I called (3x) never gave me their names or extension numbers which should have been a tip-off. They then hung up and I started all over. I know I used my corporate credit card to buy groceries at Whole Foods because I never got a second card from AmEx as I should have. But I then paid from my personal bank account to my corporate bank account to avoid having my company billed for the meatloaf.

The last week in May (because next Monday is Memorial Day) has begun and things are weird because Canada is celebrating its war dead today but will be open next Monday. We are close neighbors but cannot coordinate very well. The US dollar is up, in part because Canada is in mourning.

Today we have no reporting company, hip hip hurray! But we do have news. Let's start with copy and copycat:

*Coupang is up 6.34% because Bill Gates bought shares of the Korean online sales and finance group at the IPO, it was revealed today. Gates is a person lots of investors like to copy. We didn't pay the IPO price but bought too soon.

*Royal Dutch Shell was upped on Seekingalpha by anonymous writers called Portfolio Navigator. He or she wrote about both Shell stocks, the B which pays normal dividends, and the A which pays dividends chopped by Dutch taxes. The editors on Seekingalpha.com were too lazy to explain this and because A comes earlier in the alphabet, the poor readership was steered to the A shares, which are really only good for people on a polder. More on Shell in America's news below.

*Taiwan Semi Conductor, TSM, rose 1.44% after it was tipped by anonymous on Seeking Alpha.

Middle East News:

We start with Israel where markets were open yesterday:

*Israeli Magal Security fell 5.15% after it reported sales and eps which missed forecasts because of COVID-19. It sold its Integrated Solutions arm to an Israeli firm to raise $35 mn of $1.51/sh to keep going. Phew. We sold last year. MAGS systems check on the security of trucks and rented cars.

*Israel-American Ormat, a geothermal energy production and storage firm run from Nevada, bought power plants and transmission lines in Dixie Valley (NV) from Geowave, a Spanish firm, for $377 mn, of which $306 mn was the assumption of debt. ORA expects that sales will be boosted by 55 mn and EBITDA by 37 mn from the deal in 2022. Geowave belongs to TG Geothermal with which ORA opened talks last year.

*Teva Pharma is negotiating a deal over opioid compensation in the USA according to its CFO Eli Kalif, who was quoted in Globes Israel's English language website. Nothing is frozen (settled) yet and the matter is now further complicated by the start of a trial in Orange County, California, he added.

*Enlivex, ENLV, crashed over 6% today but is still up 111%. It got a $.1.1 mn Israeli grant last week.

*Israel continues to offer both classic listings in Tel Aviv (Glassbox) and SPAC deals (Memic, medical robotics).

*Another oldie, Nice Systems, beat with Q1 eps up just under 15% to $1.54/sh vs consensus at 1.49 on sales up 11% to $455 mn. NICE makes data analytics software and predicted eps in Q2 at $1.45-1.55.

*Israel will spend $1 bn on government and military cloud access with its proposed Nimbus project with Amazon and Alphabet (Google) after Microsoft and IBM were removed from the list of tech partners. I own the losers.

Asia News:

*NIO renewed early its deal with the Province of Jianghuai, where it is HQ'd to double the auto plant's capacity to 240,000 cars annually. Mean and lean NIO doesn't itself own an auto plant. Instead, it is the minority partner at 49% of the Jianghuai Auto company, in Jianghuai Advanced Manufacturing Technology. NIO stock is up 5.93%.

*Azure Power fell 2.82% as demand for solar power from railroad station roofs fell along with railroad travel because of the Indian pandemic.

*Canadian Solar signed a long-term power purchase deal with AxPo Halia solar plants in Sicily, Italy, for fixed electricity production using CSIQ modules. The talks began last year. Canadian Solar makes solar panels in China and it is diversifying sales outside Canada, to the US, Japan, and now Italy.

*Taiwan Semiconductor is up 1.44%. TSM was tipped on seekingalpha.com by anon. We told you 1^st.

*Nintendo is up because 2 of its Japanese stars who appear in its ads are getting married, actor Gen Hosino and singer and song-writer Yui Aragaki. The wedding will be on Switch.

*Astra-Zeneca's COVID-19's inoculation works against the Indian variant along with Pfizer and BioNTech jobs. The Indian mutation is more

Europe news

*Sterling rose modestly against the greenback but dropped 0.24% against the euro. The fall boosted British shares which were felt to be becoming overpriced. China issued a warning against commodity speculation in the wee hours of today, saying it would have “zero tolerance” for monopolies in spot and futures trading. The commodity cabal, in the words of one analyst, Connor Campbell of Spreadex, was up for the day.

*However there was one exception. Antofagasta fell 0.91% in a selloff of gold mining shares in Britain. ANFGF mainly mines copper which is not in surplus. It was one of the few losers from the Beijing warning about speculation, perhaps because it is Chilean and there was nobody defending its London price.

*Alibaba founder Jack Ma has been forced off the presidency of the business school he founded and funded in his hometown of Hangzhou after he criticized state sector regulators and banks last Oct. He is being erased from history. The biz school I called Hupan University and is said to be as tough as Harvard's. BABA is out of favor in Beijing. This was published on page 1 of today's Financial Times.

*The pink paper also explained that Vodafone's bid for Ethiopian telephony included South African Vodacom, a related company, and the British govt development finance outfit CDC plus private investor Sumitomo (SMFG).

*Bristol Myers got a positive opinion from EU CHMP for its Opdivo-Yervoy combo to treat colorectal cancer. BMY later got US FDA approval for its Yervoy biologics drug injection. The okays boosted BMY stock to a year's high.

*Merck's Keytruda combined with chemotherapy got approval for esophageal cancer.

*Tomra Systems jumped nearly 5% in European trading on no news. TMRAY is a Finnish financial conglomerate. 

Americas News

*Royal Dutch Shell will sell its 50% stake in Deer Park Refinery to its partner, Pemex. The Mexican state-owned oil company made a surprise offer for Shell's share in the 30-yr-old refinery at $596 mn for stock and debt. If it gets regulatory ok, the deal will close this year.

*Lazard will join New Visions for Public Schools to create new academies where students can enhance their readiness for college by attending summer. This good deed boosted LAZ stock by over 1.1%. It also boosted the price of LGI, the group's new fund of funds which cuts costs by buying into other closed-end funds rather than using home team managers. LAZ also distributed partnership cash to its shareholders and LGI distributed ordinary dividends as well.

*Cabot Oil & Gas (COG) and Cimarex Energy (XEC) did a so-called merger of equals over drilling sites outside the Marcellus Shale area where COG operates, into Permian Basin and Anandarco COG stock rose 1.6% on the opening but now it is down 7.4%. It will be the junior partner. CFRA kept its neutral rating for the firm and $18 target price, other analysts downgraded it. The dividend is expected to rise from the new partnership to 3.4% from ~2.5%. This is a long-term US holding of mine.

*Atlantica Yield, AY, fell today but its part-owner Algonquin AQN, rose 0.61%. The link is broken. AQN owns just under 20% of AY and the stocks used to march in unison.