Chemicals Archives - GrowthRater

Category Archives for "Chemicals"

PPG – rising costs exposes weak pricing power. An increasingly common story

Tax reductions, tariff walls and a trillion dollar plus increase in Federal debt to fund the party and one might have thought that bond markets would be fretting about inflation. Perhaps surprisingly and despite the absence of Fed price distortions as a buyer of its own junk, the inflation rate implied from the TIPS-fixed Treasury […]

Wazzup – 23rd May 2017

Chemicals day at Wazzup. – Yesterday’s $14bn merger announcement between Huntsman and Clariant show that it can be done, notwithstanding Akzo Nobel still playing ‘hard to get’ in face of PPG’s multiple advances. With the sector also at the cusp of pushing through price rises to recoup earlier increases in raw material and […]

Spinmeisters in an age of algorithmic trading

When over three quarters of equity trading volume is driven by algorithmic trading, who do you think company press releases are increasingly being written for? If you want your news item or blog to even get ranked you need to follow the SEO rules. If you want the algo bot that is going to decide […]

Chemical bonding as Dow and Du Pont (reportedly) hold merger talks

Du Pont and Dow Chemical reported to be in merger talks? When we flagged Du Pont’s new, but supposedly ‘temporary’ CEO, Edward Breen as a man to watch (6 Oct post “du Pont – So bad its now good!), given his record at TYCO, we had not expected him to have such a rapid impact […]

du Pont – So bad its now good!

Guidance slashed and CEO dumped. Shares bounce however on appointment of break-up artist and more layoffs. Up until today (6 Oct 2015) the narrative of a weakening underlying performance from macro and fx headwinds (particularly around Brazil and Agriculture) was trumping the speculative aspirations of activist shareholders such as Peltz and an EPS guidance […]

Correlation <> causation, but sometimes maybe!

When I was but a nipper, a wise old Chairman of a large and successful financial information business gave me a valuable piece of advice:Â That mediators extract better margins in poor information environments and when price discovery is obscured. As his business, amongst others, picked off and commoditised market after market with real-time pricing, […]