China Boosts Netflix Shares as Investors Ignore Brexit Vote

| Updated
by Teuta Franjkovic · 4 min read
China Boosts Netflix Shares as Investors Ignore Brexit Vote
Photo: Netflix

Netflix shares jumped 6.5 percent after the video streaming company said it was raising prices for its U.S. subscribers. Other internet stocks, including shares of Alphabet Inc , Amazon.com Inc and Apple Inc, also rose following the announcement.

Netflix’s new rates represent between a 13% to 18% price hike and mark the largest increase since the company launched streaming 12 years ago. Netflix last raised its prices in October of 2017.

“We change pricing from time to time as we continue investing in great entertainment and improving the overall Netflix experience for the benefit of our members,” a Netflix spokesperson said.

The British pound wobbled after legislators soundly rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan governing the country’s departure from the European Union. While the deal’s defeat might herald more chaos for companies in Britain and Europe in the months ahead, the outcome of the vote was long expected and stocks didn’t react much.

Investors were encouraged to see China makes moves to stimulate growth. China is enduring its worst slowdown since the global financial crisis amid a punishing tariffs dispute with the U.S.

Lindsey Bell, an investment strategist at CFRA said:

“It shows clear signs they are worried about the economy. But to investors, who want China’s economy to pick up again, the latest steps were really welcome news.”

J.J. Kinahan, chief market strategist at TD Ameritrade in Chicago added:

“We’ve had good news today overall. China is helping to defuse the daily emotional roller-coaster that is tariffs, and that Netflix thinks it can raise its subscription prices is also really good.”

“No one was expecting anything great from the Brexit outcome,” said Keith Lerner, chief market strategist at SunTrust Advisory Services in Atlanta. “The market was able to shrug this off.”

On the other hand, it is worth to mention that JPMorgan Chase & Co the largest U.S. bank by assets, missed quarterly profit estimates due to a slump in bond trading revenue.

JPMorgan Shares Erasing Losses

JP Morgan shares erased the early losses and ended 0.7 percent higher. In China, the cavalry came to reinforce policy makers’ support of the economy, strategists said.

Assistant Minister of Finance Xu Hongcai indicated that there will be significant tax cuts and support for small- to medium-size companies and PBOC’s Deputy Governor Zhu Hexin said the bank would adopt “a more flexible monetary policy” given China’s “complicated” economic reality.

The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq still closed near the session’s highs, however. “No one was expecting anything great from the Brexit outcome,” said Keith Lerner, chief market strategist at SunTrust Advisory Services in Atlanta.

Just for reminder, two weeks ago, the DX.Exchange (cryptocurrency exchange) has launched, and it came with a pronounced twist that sets it apart from most others.

That twist is that people can trade shares on the platform as well as cryptocurrencies. Specifically, from launch, users can trade Alphabet (Google), Netflix, Facebook, Tesla, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Intel and other stocks.

Even more specifically, users will be trading crypto-fied shares as security tokens, transferring and managing them over the Ethereum blockchain.

By converting the shares to cryptocurrency, users can actually get complete control over their own assets. For example, rather than just being able to buy, hold and sell shares through a platform, you might be able to actually transfer ownership of those shares, or fractions of a share, anywhere in the world quickly and easily.

Daniel Skowronski, DX Exchange CEO said:

“By tokenizing stocks of some of the biggest publicly traded companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and more, DX is opening an untapped market of millions of old and new traders around the globe cutting out the middleman.”

In Skowronski’s view,  tokenizing securities is the first true use case where crypto collides with the real world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. With fractional ownership and no leverage like CFDs, these new digital stocks are a ‘more sound’ and safer investment that traders can take home in their wallet. This is the future of securities not just new issues but all the thousands of listed securities around the globe.

Interesting fact is that, if  you had invested in Netflix in 2007, when it first began its streaming service, that investment could have paid off big time: A $1,000 investment would be worth more than $90,000 as of Jan. 15, according to calculations.

While the company’s stock has performed well over the years, any individual stock can over- or under-perform and past returns do not predict future results.

Editor's Choice, Market News, News, Stocks
Related Articles