Swen Lorenz

Keep the leverage under control and be ready (and able) to go again should the downdraft extend this afternoon.

Trading firm Knight Capital is being forced to raise money after an erroneous trading position wiped out $440 million of the firm’s capital, Knight said in a statement on Thursday.   Problems at Knight Capital Group Inc, one of the largest firms that buys and sells stocks to provide liquidity to the markets, emerged at…

Quick snippet – European markets have done a large volte face on Mario Draghi’s comments and the standing pat of both the BoE & ECB central banks with interest rates to make it a straight treble following the Fed last night. Not good for the bulls – always “buy the rumour and sell the facts”…

Todays RNS from HMV –  HMV Group plc today announces the appointment of Trevor Moore as Chief Executive in succession to Simon Fox. Trevor Moore joins from Jessops where he was Chief Executive until recently and he has a strong track record in consumer facing businesses including hsbc and Whitbread. Simon Fox has decided to…

  Last week we felt that the bearish argument had not been won, despite the minor panic when Spanish yields hit fresh record highs above 7.6%. So the light rally posted in the past few days has come as no real surprise. The question for the days ahead is whether this buying can continue to…

The story of public services contractor Mouchel is another stain on the record of quoted UK equity. How the management of this company (and similar ilk) can even look at themselves in the mirror let alone sleep at night is beyond me…Like Connaught, Mouchel is one of these companies that appeared to grow exponentially during the…

Below is a chart of the once mighty pound against the seemingly all conquering Australian dollar. We can see a material 10% depreciation over the last 3 months with the last week in particular displaying renewed strength to the downside. The all time low against the so called “Aussie” is just over 1.46 and we…

We turned buyers of Avocet just over 3 weeks ago at the 65p level and following todays interim results that have reassured the market and underscored the strength of the Group’s balance sheet, feel it prudent to book a near 20% profit (ungeared) on this stock to complete the winning string of trades. Highlights from…

Investors and traders have been anxiously waiting for an opportunity to return to equity markets with full strength, especially to the European markets that have been suffering the most since the beginning of the financial crisis. While Germany, the US and the UK have performed exceptionally well from the crisis bottom, Spanish and Italian equities…

In another example of how you should (nearly) always lean against the crowd at the very end of an extreme move, our Trading Buy call on Nokia on the 18th Jul 2012 going into the 2Q results has been closed today for a very useful 70c (almost a 50% – even without gearing – return).…