The sun is shining and it is warm in New York city so naturally stock markets are down.

I am not over-weighting trivial factors. Consider what happened in Asia in the wee hours on Wednesday. A proposal to link the Chinese stock market of Shenzhen to the free-er one in Hong Kong was published by mistake. The news of the link had already come out in May (we reported it) and no enabling rules have yet been set up. Shenzhen is a short train journey away from Hong Kong.

In China's frenetic market, any bit of positive gossip is an excuse for neophyte investors to pile into stocks. And they did. Shanghai rose 4.3% and Shenzhen 5.1%. Hong Kong's Hang Seng only went up 2.1%.

A yen for mail? Meanwhile, across the water (still not claimed by China), Japan Postwas ipo'd as a private company and immediately rose 26%. Mail is not all that JP handles; it has vast banking operations that fund the government deficit and QE policies. Its army of letter carriers act as tax, health, and social workers to oldsters stuck in country villages far from their offspring.

All that service for the good of the elderly citizenry cuts profitability, why we did not spring for the privatized stock.

One theme on Wednesday was lady board members or having to name ladies to your board. Another is a grouse about how badly conference calls are transcribed and how information from Nasdaq is out of date. Another theme is yankee bonds.

*The Japan Post sale boosted the yen, leading me to (finally) exit our Pro Shares ultra short yen (and long-dollar) ETF, YCS. We sold half earlier.

Our Japan Small Cap Fund, JOF, fell 0.38% while Aberdeen Japan Fund dropped 0.4%. Both suffered as other Japanese shares were sold to buy JP.

Dropping too were our Japanese shares Dena, 2432, down 0.31%; Rion, 6823, down 0.35%; and Shinmaywa, 7224, down 0.99%. Everyone was rushing to get the mail.

Heavy Industries

*Veresen (FCGYF) produced its quarterly which Martin Ferera writes showed “steady results with the only significant weakness in natural gas liquids. It also lowered guidance.” It updated its distributable cash estimates for this year to C$0.99-1.07/sh from the earlier range of C$0.95-1.14. The drop was because of the lower loony, apparently. It also helped VSN keep down costs. The share rallied earlier this week. And we now get a 9% yield (C$1.)

Martin is cheered by the “strong indication that commercial discussions to finance” the Oregon (USA) gas liquefaction project are going well. VSN for Jordan Cove and Pacific Connector won the final economic impact statement from FERC to build a port, a 232-mi natural gas pipeline, and a liequefaction plant for the gas. The final order will come byDec. 29. Now VSN is signing up customers to ship natural gas through its network to the Pacific to the tune of about 1 bn cu ft/day by 2020. Gen. Joe Shaefer has sold the stock from the fund he runs but Martin persuaded us to hang in there. The divvie helped as did the rising oil price. FCGYF here; VNS there.

*Ormat Technologies, a US bonus share (NYSE-ORA) revenues beat consensus and hit a record of just under $163 mn in Q3, u[ 16% y/y. It upped its guidance. However net income had to be jiggled (excluding deferred taxes and related expernses) to produce a rise over last year at $23.4 mn or 46¢/sh vs. $16.5 mn or 36¢/sh. The Israel family-owned Nevada producer and operator of geothermal power generating systems and energy recovery signed a significant jv with Toshiba (TOSYY) last month to add flash systems from the Japanese firm to the binary geothermal systems it already offers. The first plant will be in Menengai, Kenya, owned by ORA. ORA opened its phase 2 plant in NV. It will pay 6¢ in dividend. Its Bronicki family director resigned and will be replaced by another Israeli woman.

*Veolia (VEOEY) won 2 Japanese biomass operating contracts jointly with Takeei, a local garbage firm. Together worth sales of euros 90 mn over the 20 years they run, they are a breakthrough for the French water and sewage firm in Japan. VEOEY is one of those lazy French firms Jeb Bush likes to make remarks about.

*Delek Group (DGRLY) is moving its HQ from its modest site in Netanya to finer quarters in posh Herzliya, buying for NIS 250 mn the former Dan Bus Co. office block which will be renamed Beit Delek. It will be 11 times as large and have a display room on the ground floor for the Delek Motors auto importing sub. Delek's low-key chairman Yitzchak Tshuva lives in Netanya. Not because of the move but because the government is going to speed up the development of its Leviathan offshore gasfield, DGRLY is up 3.8% in a restrained market earlier this week. (It is not very sunny in Tel Aviv which has been hit by a first terrible rains and then a sandstorm blocking the sun. I am not sure what conditions are in Netanya or Herzliya which are further north.)

*Agrium (AGU) reports before the opening tomorrow. The consensus is that it will earn 83 ¢ (US) on revenues of $3 bn. AGU.

Light and Service Industry

*Macq uarie upgraded Vodafone (VOD) to outperform with a target price of GBX 235. GBX stands for pence, the trading currency of London, currently about $36/ADR. The stock is up 0.44% on the news. It fell on concerns about hacking last week. UK police will require VOD to hold customer records for a year showing the applications they visited, to stop juvenile delinquent Muslims headed for ISIS.

*Nokia (NOK) was upgraded to outperform by Bank of Montreal on Tuesday. We own Yankee bonds issued by both VOD and NOK.

*Martin also reports that Indivior (INVVY) beat with revenues at $249 mn and EPS of 7¢/sh. The UK firm reports in US$s as its main business is suboxone, a sublingual opioid delivery system. He writes “even after the arrival of a 4^th suboxone generic, INVVY retains a 59% share of the US market.” It also has run into delays in its launches in Europe, but raised its guidance: “$990 mn-$1.01 bn in revenues (vs $935-965 mn earlier) on which net income will hit between $215-225 mn (vs $185-210 mn earlier.)” INVVY is suing 6 companies (including Teva) in a Delaware court over FDA applications for generic suboxone. It also won FDA approval of a nasal spray for delivering opioids safely. Nasdaq thinks the share is IZQVF, as it was during the spinoff and warns information is incomplete. Martin, out of Canada, writes on British, South African, and Australian stocks. After leaving his native Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) he lived in all 4 countries.

*Three tasks were performed during Tuesday's presentation of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) R&D outlook. Firstly, the call for GSK to be split up, coming from a UK drug analyst, was rolled back by predicting that there would be 20 new major drugs coming to market by 2020. Then too, the thesis that former academic Sir Andrew Witty had been outsmarted by Novartis (NVS) when he sold GSK's oncology pipeline to the Swiss firm could be countered by stressing new promising cancer therapies GSK had mostly acquired from outsiders since the deal. And turning down the bid from Pfizer (which would have resulted in enormous paper gains for GSK shareholders) had to be justified by focus on the in-house prospects.

British top analysts are less than convinced by Witty and his team. JP Morgan Cazenove rates GSK neutral with a target price of GBX 1370. Deutsche Bank has a higher TP, GBX1500, but the same rating. I have not yet written up my copious notes.

*Galapagos (GLPG) replaced a departing lady scientist on its board with another, Christine Mummery, who is a British trained professor of biology and embryology at Leiden University in The Netherlands. She was a Radcliffe fellow (sic; my former college is very backward) 8 years ago and worked on induced pluripotent stem cells.

*CEO Anat Cohen-Dayat's remarks over results at Iraeli drug discovery firm Compugen (CGEN) on Tuesday. The results were extremely badly transcribed by the partly Israeli-owned www.seekingalpha.com website. When she said “Compugen patents” the SA text read “competent patterns”, a sign the transcribers had no idea what they were listening to. I could not attend the cc because I was at the GSK R&D day. Apparently companies pay to have their cc's transcribed. And they are copyrighted so you cannot quote huge slabs of them.

What she was talking about was updates to the August deal with Bayer on immune checkpoints to treat cancer using two Compugen-patented antibodies, 1501T which is the more advanced; and 15022 which is proving “promising” as it has a novel mechanism of action which can boost cancer immune response. CGEN and BAYRY agreed that they are “excited” by the “progress toward potential novel therapeutics for cancer immunotherapy”, she added. “Each present a distinctive differentiation” vs already known checkpoints” having “potentially different mechanisms of action” to induce immune responses to treat cancer.

This is important and matters far more than the weak earnings numbers. But it was so garbled in the transcript I had to guess what she was saying. Dr Cohen-Dayat has an Israel accent but so do many of the founders of seekingalpha.com so there is really no excuse. The transcribers, who may have Indian accents, need a vocabulary list and must know the name of the company paying their bosses.

After the cc, analysts at FBR & Co (according to Zacks) cut CGEN to outperform from buy with a 2018 (sic) earnings estimate of 2¢, down from 3¢, but kept their target price at $14/sh.

The stock was, appropriately, up 6.63% earlier this week. I am not the only one who worked to decipher what Dr. Cohen-Dayat was saying.

*Now that the fiddle over the warrants for Benitec Biopharma has come to an end it is no longer possible to get a proper quote on the Q traded shares from the grasping market maker. It is posting $5.9 bid $6.1 asked, a nice margin if you can get it.

*Irish Alkermes will present at the Crédit Suisse healthcare conference in Scottsdale AZ Nov. 10 at 9 am MST or 11 am EST. ALKS was an inversion stock we opted to keep because of its central nervous system focus.

Funds

*In anticipation of its Nov. 12 investor day, Fibra Uno (FBASF) stock keeps inching up in London. The REIT trades here as FBASF.

*New Ireland Fund (IRL) published its end-Oct portfolio and as before 22.24% of its assets are in Ryanair but CRH at 17.85% is growing. It is also gaining form the boost in Paddy Power which we sold too soon, now 7.91% of the portfolio, and 3^rd. There is a newbie:Applegreen plc is at 3.8%. Despite the green name it runs gas stations and highway eateries. APGN comes after the usual suspects: Bank of Ireland, Kerry Group (dairy), andKingspan. IRL's Kleinwort Benson mgrs have begun buying into the hotel sector: Dalata,Hostelworld, and builder Grafton Group.

Services are growing hugely in the Auld Sod according to Irish purchasing managers' data (60.1 in Oct; down from the incredible 62.4 reading in Sept.) Because Ireland is a small country the numbers move around a lot. However the manufacturing PMI has lost 1.5% in the last half year vs the same period in 2014.

*After a Triangle-Shirtwaist-style fire hit a garment plant, Global X MSCI Pakistan ETF is up. PAK.