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By Jeffrey
Cane | Wednesday, December 29 Nearly Time. Although it may be hard to believe at 4
p.m., the days are slowly getting longer. The market day, however,
appears to be getting shorter and shorter as time runs out on
2021. Two more trading days to go! Today's session was fairly
quiet, although total composite volume was the highest it has been since
last Thursday. Stocks managed a small advance, ending not
far off their highs for the day. The S&P
500 closed up 0.1%, to its 70th record close of
the year. It was its fifth gain in the last six sessions. The Dow
Jones Industrial Average rose 0.2%, to its 45th record close for
2021. The Russell 2000 gained 0.1%, while the Nasdaq
Composite spoiled the party, ending down 0.1%. A quiet day in the market, perhaps, but
there was plenty of things to worry about in the world at large. The U.S. reached
a new high for Covid
infections, Hong
Kong police cracked
down on a pro-democracy news site, and President
Joe Biden and Russian President
Vladimir Putin plan to
talk tomorrow amid Russia's military buildup near the Ukraine
border. (Did I mention there are just two trading sessions left this
year?) Deal-making typically takes the last week of
the year off, but M&A chatter was in the market today. Shares of Biogen jumped more than 9% this afternoon after the
Korea Economic Daily, citing
unnamed investment banking sources, reported that the biotech
company was in talks to be bought by Samsung
Group. (Biogen told
Bloomberg that it would not comment on market rumors and
speculation.) The Korean report said that the deal being
discussed could value Biogen, the maker of the controversial Alzheimer's
treatment Aduhelm, at $42 billion. That's not much of a premium,
given that Biogen has a total enterprise value of nearly $39 billion,
according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. It's unlikely that would be the price
being discussed, given the rich premiums for large biotech and pharmaceutical
target companies in recent years. Some Acceleron
Pharma shareholders balked at even a 38%
premium in Merck's $11.5
billion buyout this year, while Bristol
Myers Squibb acquired Celgene in 2019 at a 54% premium
in its $74 billion deal. In any case, the report could prove
to be the starting gun on a race to consolidate in biotech in the new year. On a smaller scale in M&A, Darling
Ingredients, one of the country’s
largest producers of renewable diesel, reported after yesterday's market
close that it had
agreed to buy Valley
Proteins, which operates 18 major
rendering and used cooking oil facilities, for $1.1 billion in cash. Shares
of Darling rose nearly 2% today. Darling was
highlighted by Barron's Avi
Salzman earlier this month as a clean-energy stock
pick. Among other movers, Western
Digital climbed
5.2% on reports that Samsung had cut production at its memory
chip plants in Xi’an, China, after a spike in Covid cases in the region. Victoria's Secret surged 12.2% after it said
that it would buy back $250 million in stock under an accelerated
share-repurchase agreement with Goldman
Sachs. Travel-related stocks were weaker: American
Airlines was down 2.6%, United
Airlines, down 1.9%. In other markets, crude
oil was
higher, at $76.56 a barrel. Treasury
prices were little changed. The yield on the
10-year Treasury bond rose to 1.542%. Gold was lower, at $1,805.10 an ounce. Option
contracts on Bitcoin worth
more than $6 billion are set to expire on Friday, according
to CoinDesk, and that has weighed on the price of the
cryptocurrency. Bitcoin traded at $47,210 in afternoon trading. Finally, you may have heard about the
recent kerfuffle over Web3. Well, how about a stock story
about Web 1.0? VeriSign, the
internet domain and infrastructure company, has done something that few
of the survivors of the dot-com boom and bust have managed. VeriSign rose
1.4% today, to close at $255.93, its highest since February 2000. Cisco
Systems, in comparison, is still
20% below its all-time high in 2000. Time is relative. Barron's is now accepting nominations for the third
annual Barron's 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance.
The deadline for submissions is Jan. 15, 2022. Apply here. |
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DJIA: +0.25% to
36,488.63 The Hot Stock: Biogen +9.5% Best Sector: Real Estate +0.61% |
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