(Bloomberg) -- China has penalized 10 of the country’s most popular livestreaming apps, suspending some of their operations in a renewed crackdown on fast-growing services backed by Tencent Holdings Ltd. and ByteDance Ltd.Regulators singled out ByteDance’s Xigua and three apps run by Tencent-backed firms -- Bilibili Inc., Huya Inc. and DouYu International Holdings Ltd. -- among those subject to punishments ranging from halting new user sign-ups to suspending content updates for “main channels,” the Cyberspace Administration of China said in a notice posted Tuesday. The watchdog said those services must rectify vulgar and other problematic content and that it’s blacklisted selected live-streaming hosts, without elaborating. NetEase Inc.’s CC Live and Baidu Inc.’s Quanmin were also among those named.Beijing is intensifying scrutiny over the country’s internet giants as they deepen forays into content and user contingents grow into the hundreds of millions. Livestreaming in particular has burgeoned in past years as platforms...
(Bloomberg) -- U.S. equity-index futures gained along with stocks in Europe after President Donald Trump reassured investors that the trade deal with China remains in place, and economic data from the euro area pointed to further signs of a incipient recovery from the virus slump.Futures on the S&P 500 rose after fluctuating earlier in the wake of White House trade adviser Peter Navarro being quoted saying the China trade agreement was over. Crude oil slid along with the offshore yuan, while the Japanese yen and Treasuries gained, before all the moves began reversing when Navarro said the remark was taken “wildly” out of context. Trump later tweeted that the deal was “fully intact.” Treasuries slipped with the dollar.Carmakers and banks led a broad advance in the Stoxx Europe 600 index as Purchasing Managers’ Indexes showed activity in France unexpectedly returned to growth in May, while gauges for Germany and the single-currency...
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- It’s growing more likely by the day that we’ve reached peak “bored retail trader” in the financial markets.Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal and seemingly every financial news publication has now profiled Dave Portnoy, founder of the website Barstool Sports, who has turned to day-trading stocks with sports on hold because of the coronavirus pandemic. Robinhood Financial’s trading app is all the rage, being credited with the shocking rally in shares of bankrupt Hertz Global Holdings Inc. that almost prompted an unthinkable offering of potentially worthless stock. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Matt Levine has called this entire phenomenon the “boredom markets hypothesis.” If this trend is close to running its course, more traditional investors might want to consider what happens when the music stops and Portnoy’s No. 1 rule — “stocks only go up” — doesn’t work so flawlessly. The S&P 500 Index’s sharp rally from its March lows is already starting to fizzle, with the index down more than 3%...
(Bloomberg) -- Oil resumed gains, clinging to a three-month high as signs of improving demand buoyed a market momentarily roiled by confusion over U.S.-China trade.Futures in New York rose 0.4% after President Donald Trump said the deal with Beijing was “fully intact” following remarks from a trade adviser that were interpreted as an end to the agreement. After earlier dropping 2.4%, crude is now back above $40 a barrel, bolstered in recent days by a lifting of lockdown restrictions in some U.S. states, while physical crude prices have also climbed.Oil has rebounded since plunging below zero in April and is now trading at levels last seen before Russia and Saudi Arabia engaged in a damaging, though short-lived, price war. The kingdom’s Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said last week that OPEC+ is on course to rebalance the market, and some of the world’s largest traders are seeing a rapid recovery...
