Happy St. Patrick's Day. Naturally, today IRL, the Irish closed-end country fund, opened up 0.38%. Note that the Japan Small Cap Fund, JOF, gained even more. 0.43% but it is not a Japanese holiday. Irish cement maker CRH, ex-dividend, lost 1.23%. The Dow is up and both Nasdaq and the S&P are lower, but as we have seen in recent days, the markets fluctuate a lot. One reason is the new money being tossed into the market by recipients of stimulus checks, boosting shares like Game Stop GME which is up nearly 8% today. Another is the regulatory upheaval in China hurting stocks with a wide global following like Baidu, Pinduoduo, and Alibaba. BABA today had its browser banned by Beijing as part of the crackdown on internet companies.

But the main cause of lower stock prices is the rise in interest rates on US Treasury 10-yr notes for fear of inflation which started the drop in share prices late yesterday and continued today. Too much stimulus leads to inflation.

Some years ago we visited Iceland en route to London, nearly 2 decades after earthquakes hitting transatlantic traffic kept us from the Madrid wedding of a niece. We hit all the hot spots in the Reykjavik area including the mid-Atlantic one where we clambered down steps to see the land break between Europe and America. Now after 50,000 earthquakes of varied size in the past week, Iceland is again firing up and there are also quakes in Siberia. It is barely noticed because quarantine is stopping air travel.

Image by sam99929 from Pixabay

Tech & Tel

*Coupang allowed an early stock lockup agreement release for 34 mn shares held by employees, following the Korean e-commerce giant's IPO last week. CPNG went public at $35/sh and opened at $63.50 before dropping to ~$50. This was based on 3 days of trading above the IPO price and will go into effect on March 18. The result was a nice drop in the CPNG price to $46/sh which was my limit. In fact, the shares are a penny lower than my bid right now. There are 1.8 bn shares out. I bought my shares of CPNG at $46 and they are now $45.98-9.

*Mercado Libre, which I expect Coupang to match in growth, today lost 2.5% because of covid-19 risks in MELI's top market, Brazil.

*Vodafone rose 1.1% today and 5.4% Tuesday after Britain sold spectrum to new mobile networks for which VOD paid a relatively modest £176.4 mn.

*BCE of Canada rose fractionally. TD Ameritrade is one of the few brokers who rate it a buy.

*New Cosan shares were distributed to existing owners, including me and the stock rose 3.8%. This matters because I named CZZ, now CSAN, as a pick for 2021. It is Brazilian but not suffering over the virus yet.

Drug-makers

*Teva managed to get its share up independently by about 3.3% and is now over $11.4. This has hurt the smaller drug firms which lost traction in the switch to TEVA. The only exceptions: Spanish Grifols, GRFS. which rose about 2% on a stock buyback move, Bristol-Myers, Japan's Eisai (ESALY), and Takeda (TAK, which will make JNJ's covid-19 jab), and Canada's Aurinia Pharma AUPH which reported new positive news on cutting kidney damage with its lupus drug Lupkynis published by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review.

*It turns out that Germany put out a misleading accusation that Astra-Zeneca's covid-19 jab caused blood clots which led to bans in the EU countries and beyond to protect its pols. One result is that the USA will get an extra half-million doses of AZN's antibody-based inoculation which the World Health Organisation insists is safe. Having risen during the furor, today AZN stock fell 1.22%.

Energy

*Canadian Solar reports tomorrow and the consensus expects a loss of 55¢/sh compared to a gain of $1.04 a year ago, according to Benzinga. Sales are expected to rise 8.5% to $997.88 mn from prior year's $919.71 mn. CSIQ stock has gained 192.5% in the past year but fell 5% today on the forecast.

*BP plc rose 0.81% today after it was retained as outperform by Raymond James brokerage. Royal Dutch Shell and Schlumberger both fell, RDS-B by 0.08% and SLB by 0.9%. RDS-A set the Euro and sterling rates for its 2020 dividend payable on Mar. 29 which we already reported in dollars for the B shares. A shares have to pay withholding tax, but B's don't. SLB will report on its Q1, to the end of this month, on April 23. Oil prices are down a bit today.