Between recording this month's vidcast (“A 44 billion tweet…”) and writing this blog (May 14), Elon Musk announced that he was reconsidering the acquisition of Twitter because he feared that “fake accounts” represent more than the 5% announced by the target.

On March 18, when Coinbase's stock price reached $186 for a market capitalization of nearly 50 billion US dollars, Jim Chanos sold short (you borrow the securities with the promise to return them accompanied by a contractual remuneration, then you sell them hoping that the price collapses…) a little more than 4% of the firm's shares.

Due to their low financial performances, the leading consumer staples have been confronted with shareholders' activism for the last five years. Nestle and P&G in 2017, Danone in 2017 and 2021, Campbell Soup in 2018, and Unilever in January 2022 managed different activists' events.

After 150 years of existence and 25 years of listing, ST Dupont will leave the Paris Stock Exchange at the instigation of its controlling shareholder, the entrepreneur Dickson Poon, based in Hong Kong and operating in the distribution of luxury goods.

By announcing the doubling of its sales forecasts for the iconic F-150 pick-up in its electric (EV) Lightning version, Ford (classified as “oldies” in the compilation of manufacturers) saw its stock price instantly increase by 10%.

On April 29, 2021, while presenting brilliant financial results for the first quarter, Unilever announced a significant share buyback program, covering almost 2.5% of its capital for an amount of 3 billion euros.

The news for this November are pretty loaded, starting with company spin-offs. The conglomerates are not popular with financial theorists or with investors who punish them with a discounting of up to 30%. 

Financial theory offers no credible solution. Indeed, the resulting methods focus on the utility of investors who will always consider that it is necessary to catch the fish today because it will probably be gone tomorrow.

Bitcoin is a financial innovation that generates, as such, a certain fascination but financing medium-term assets with liabilities for a duration of more than 7 years leads to taking a very significant risk of the slope of the yield curve. 

In announcing that Tesla had purchased $1.5 billion worth of bitcoins, Elon Musk sharply raised the price of the crypto-currency, then lowered it by reversing the decision to allow the purchase of vehicles paid for in bitcoins...