“Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered.” — unknown

1. Strong Start to Holiday Sales Season — Cyber Monday hit record revenues of $6.59B, making it the largest U.S. online sales day ever, in the latest report released. In comparison, Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day brought in $5.03B and $2.87B respectively. The internet holiday shopping season has so far (Nov. 1-27) driven a total of $50B in revenue, a 16.8% increase.
2. Bitcoin Shoots for $11,000 — a day after breaking above the $9,000 level, bitcoin has cracked $11,700, boosted by growing signs of mainstream adoption. About 100,000 Coin-base accounts were added over the Thanksgiving holiday, while CME will list bitcoin futures in the second week of December.
3. Samsung Develops Graphene-Based Battery, Quicker Charge than Lithium — Samsung Electronics has successfully developed a graphene-based battery that would take just 12 minutes to be fully charged, compared to current lithium-ion batteries, which take about an hour. Graphene has been dubbed a “miracle material” in the global electronics industry given its strength, electrical conductivity and elasticity.
4. OPEC/Russia Agree on Oil-Cuts Extension to End of 2018 — OPEC agreed to extend its oil-production cuts to the end of 2018. OPEC and other oil exporters led by Russia have kept 1.8 million barrels a day off the market since January, helping to boost crude prices about 40 percent from the lows of the year. Saudi Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih told reporters “My preference is to go for nine months, we will meet again in June and we look at not only how we have done in first half of the year, but also our outlook for third and fourth quarters of 2018 and act accordingly.”
5. Amazon is in Exploratory Talks with Generic-Drug Makers — Amazon has held preliminary talks with makers of generic drugs about its potential entry into the pharmacy space, according to CNBC. The conversations, including with generics giants Mylan and Sandoz, a unit of Novartis. Stocks of drug distributors and others in the pharmaceutical supply chain, such as pharmacies and pharmacy benefits managers, have been pressured by the specter of Amazon entering the space.

The week ahead — Economic data from Econoday.com:

Tags: Bitcoin

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2017 at 9:20 am and is filed under Weekly Summary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.