1.12.2010

The bulls returned and pushed Nordic Markets up by 2.5%. China’s and UK’s purchasing managers’ indexes surprising to the upside were given as causes for the broad based advance today. In reference to the news yesterday, Global Times newspaper from China has today carried the news of free-trade accord between China and Norway being put on hold indefinitely within an article about a protest letter sent to Norwegian Nobel Committee, citing AFP. Bank Of America denied that it will be the bank that WikiLeaks claims to be targeting next. There are also rampant rumours considering the ECB meeting tomorrow; for example CNBC has an anchor written viewpoint as main news speculating that ECB will start buying Euro Zone government debt. Rumours of ECB already enabling a carry trade by Portuguese banks to purchase sovereign debt have also surfaced.

Ericsson has completed an asset purchase from Guangdong Nortel Telecommunication Equipment Company Ltd. The purchase price was 50 million USD. Ericsson says these assets are a new key competence that complements the company’s R&D and services capabilities in the region.
Volvo surged up by over 6% after UBS upped to stock to ”buy”. Seadrill also benefited from an analyst upgrade and raced up more than 5%. Morgan Stanley said Nokia’s N8 is doing much better than they expected and the mobile phone behemoth gained 3%. Bavarian Nordic gained over 8% after it raised over 200 million DKK via an emission, securing funding for now.

Trigon Agri will enter Stockholm main list in one week’s time. The soft commodities production, storage and trading company, which has land in ownership and leased in Ukraine and Russia within the Black Earth region and dairy farming activities in Estonia and near Saint Petersburg gained over 8% for the day.

Helsinki police has started investigating several former members of Cencorp’s board of directors. They are suspected to have committed accounting violations and insider trading violations. None of the current members of Cencorp’s leadership are under investigation. The company believes the potential ramifications will not harm the company, since the bookkeeping has since been corrected. Later in the day Cencorp communicated it has completed certain acquisitions from Savcor Group (yes an effort to try follow that tree of acquisitions and ownerships is confusing enough to make your head spin) and that Savcor’s ownership of Cencorp is now as a result nearing 80%.