Diageo and Starbucks are the latest companies to pull advertising from social media platforms in response to the handling of hate speech, MarketWatch reports. These companies join Ben & Jerry’s, Coca Cola and Unilever in dropping advertising on various platforms. Facebook’s share price climbed 1.55% yesterday, while rivals such as Twitter and Snap saw share prices down 0.19% and up 0.89%, respectively.
Midweek market confusion
The bulk of major indices across Asia swung back to positive yesterday, boosted by reports of strong Chinese economic figures. The picture was less clear in Europe, where the FTSE 100 and others dropped amid muted markets. The same was true for US benchmarks, although James Paulsen, analyst at Leuthold Group, thinks there’s “potential for considerable upside in the coming year,” after analysis of previous early-stage bull markets, Bloomberg reports.
- FTSE 100 – 6,320.12 (-0.90%)
- Dow Jones – 25,546.90 (-0.19%)
- S&P 500 – 3,072.82 (+0.64%)
- NASDAQ – 10,081.61 (+1.21%)
- Stoxx 600 – 360.78 (+0.25%)
- SSE Index – 2,984.67 (+0.78%)
Calm Chinese markets register eight-year record
The CSI 300 Index, which tracks the performance of the top 300 stocks on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, has maintained 30-day volatility below that of its US counterpart the S&P 500 since early March. This is the longest period it has done so since 2011, Bloomberg reports. It has also posted 14 positive sessions in June.
Zoom’s all-time high
The video communications platform has been one of the standout successes of the past quarter, its stock hit an all-time high of $259.51 on 25 June to take it to a year-to-date gain of 281%.
Hoping to deliver
The food delivery wars are heating up. Uber — still reeling after it was snubbed by GrubHub in favour of a merger with Just Eat — is engaging rival food delivery platform Postmates in a proposed $2.6bn deal, The Wall Street Journal reports. The deal between Uber and Postmates, which had also recently been planning an IPO, could be confirmed as early as next week, the publication suggests.
Lululemon moves into home workouts
The athleisure company’s share price climbed 1.66% on Monday after it announced that it was to acquire home fitness platform Mirror for $500m. The platform offers live and on-demand workout classes. The move is in no doubt to help capitalise on the momentum similar ‘stay-at-home’ stocks, like Peloton, have seen.
Tesla’s $1,000 birthday gift
Tesla rose 5.2% to close at $1,009.35 on Monday, boosted by the optimism of its enigmatic CEO Elon Musk. The stock peaked above the milestone again after Musk sent a note to employees, seen by Bloomberg, suggesting the company could break even in Q2. The peak came a decade to the day since the company debuted at just $17.
