Market News

Investors searching for growth are increasingly looking beyond the more familiar emerging markets to 'frontier markets'. While it was rare for family office investors to invest in even the largest emerging markets such as China and India as recently as 20 years ago, now emerging markets are an established part of most family office investment portfolios. Frontier markets will likely make the same journey over the coming decades, and investors who can bear the risks of these markets will profit. For investors with long-term investment horizons who can withstand volatility and liquidity, frontier markets can provide access to attractive growth potential and offer portfolio diversification benefits. Frontier markets consist of rapidly growing and industrializing countries with less developed capital markets such as Kuwait, Argentina, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Nigeria. These countries are in earlier stages of economic development than their emerging market neighbors and have fewer investable companies. Frontier markets can be found all around the world, from Africa and the Middle East, to developing markets in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

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Rising global economic disarray and fears of a slowing in the U.S. economy caused the Federal Reserve to resist hiking short-term interest rates for a first time since moving off of 0% in late 2015.

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Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are the most vulnerable to a possible split of Britain from the E.U. given their sizable U.K.-based operating income, according to analysts at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.

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Gun-maker Smith & Wesson reported stronger than expected fourth quarter earnings results Thursday afternoon; on the strength of these earnings, shares of the company are soaring in late Thursday trading.

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Success in the cloud has helped Oracle offset the continued slowdown of its traditional software business.

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In early trading on Friday, shares of BioMarin Pharmaceutical (BMRN) topped the list of the day's best performing components of the Nasdaq 100 index, trading up 3.1%. Year to date, BioMarin Pharmaceutical has lost about 20.5% of its value.

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In early trading on Friday, shares of Chesapeake Energy (CHK) topped the list of the day's best performing components of the S&P 500 index, trading up 5.5%. Year to date, Chesapeake Energy has lost about 0.6% of its value.

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Legendary investor Warren Buffett advises to be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. One way we can try to measure the level of fear in a given stock is through a technical analysis indicator called the Relative Strength Index, or RSI, which measures momentum on a scale of zero to 100. A stock is considered to be oversold if the RSI reading falls below 30.

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Looking at options trading activity among components of the S&P 500 index, there is noteworthy activity today in Salesforce.com Inc (NYSE: CRM), where a total volume of 22,344 contracts has been traded thus far today, a contract volume which is representative of approximately 2.2 million underlying shares (given that every 1 contract represents 100 underlying shares). That number works out to 53.2% of CRM's average daily trading volume over the past month, of 4.2 million shares. Especially high volume was seen for the $72.50 strike put option expiring July 15, 2016, with 8,753 contracts trading so far today, representing approximately 875,300 underlying shares of CRM. Below is a chart showing CRM's trailing twelve month trading history, with the $72.50 strike highlighted in orange:

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