Global news： Nasdaq’s eight consecutive Yang and Dow stabilized at historical highs. The situation in the Red Sea continued to be tense, and oil prices rose sharply.
On Monday, local time, two other officials poured cold water on the expectation of interest rate cut next spring after Federal Reserve officials suppressed the market interest rate cut expectation last week. However, US stocks still rose strongly, with the Nasdaq reaching eight consecutive years, the S&P approaching a historical high, and the Dow closing flat, but standing at a historical high.
Specifically, on Monday, Cleveland Fed President Meister said that she expects to cut interest rates three times next year, and believes that the market’s expectation of early interest rate cuts next year is ahead of the Fed; Goolsbee, president of the Chicago Federal Reserve, said that he was surprised by the expected reaction of the market to cut interest rates, and the market was a little ahead of schedule. The market expected the Fed to normalize its currency quickly, but he didn’t think so. Moreover, he seems to confirm Williams’ statement that the Fed did not discuss interest rate cuts last week, saying that it did not speculate on specific policies in the future.
Looking at the situation in the Red Sea and the deteriorating shipping safety situation in the Red Sea, Yemeni Houthi armed forces attacked two merchant ships again on Monday. More and more oil companies and ships choose to avoid or stop the routes passing through the Red Sea. The latest two are BP and Equinor of Norway. There was no intraday rise of 4%, but at the close, oil prices retreated most of the increase. In the context of relatively weak supply and demand, geopolitics has limited boosting effect on oil prices.
On the enterprise side, Christmas is supposed to be the peak sales season for a consumer electronics giant like Apple, but due to patent disputes, Apple suffered a blow. Apple will stop selling the latest versions of its smart watches, Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2, in the United States this month. This is related to the patent dispute of Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor, and the related technology can enable the device to calculate a person’s blood oxygen saturation. Apple’s share price fell by 1.6% on Monday, and finally closed down by nearly 1%.
On the AI side, OpenAI has new moves. Following the last internal personnel earthquake, OpenAI issued a series of guidelines aimed at tracking, evaluating, predicting and preventing "catastrophic risks" brought by AI models. It stipulated that only AI models with a rating of "medium" or below after risk mitigation can be deployed, and if the rating cannot be reduced to "high" or below after risk mitigation, the development of models will be stopped. OpenAI will set up a new team to repeatedly evaluate the risk level of its unreleased state-of-the-art model. The CEO and other company leaders can decide whether to release the AI model according to the report of the team, and the board of directors has the right to overturn their decision.
Some netizens broke the news that OpenAI is suspected to be conducting GPT-4.5 grayscale test. According to leaked information, the pricing of the most advanced GPT-4.5 model of OpenAI was exposed, and the multimodal function was greatly upgraded-supporting multimodal functions across languages, audio, vision, video and 3D, as well as complex reasoning and cross-modal understanding. The ability of AI continues to evolve.
In addition, on December 18th, Weilai Automobile announced that it has signed a new round of share subscription agreement with Abu Dhabi investment institution CYVN Holdings, and will make a strategic investment of about US$ 2.2 billion in cash to Weilai through its subsidiary CYVN Investments.
It is worth mentioning that at 8: 00 on Monday night, three days after the suspension of the broadcast, Dong Yuhui returned to the selection studio in the East to broadcast live with Yu Minhong, and the fans selected by the East returned to 30 million. Yu Minhong revealed that an independent studio will be set up for Dong Yuhui, with separate accounts and live broadcast rooms. He said that the small composition storm was a group error correction behavior and should not have happened. After the opening of New Oriental overnight, it rose by nearly 10%, and finally closed up by 5.68%.
[overnight U.S. stocks]
Among the large Chinese stocks, Alibaba fell by 0.93%, Baidu by 1.63%, Netease by 0.02%, Tencent Music by 1.46% and Pinduoduo by 0.04%.
Among the large US technology stocks, Apple fell 0.85%, Amazon rose 2.73%, Google A rose 2.41%, and Nye soared 2.98%.
[global index]
In European stock markets, the FTSE 100 index rose slightly by 0.50% to 7614 points. The French CAC40 index fell slightly by 0.37% to 7569 points. Germany DAX index fell slightly by 0.60% to 16,651 points.
[global goods]
The main contract of Brent crude oil closed at $78.04 per barrel, up 1.95%; The main contract of crude oil in the previous period closed at 559.30 yuan per barrel overnight, up 2.55%.
Overnight, the Shanghai gold main contract closed up 0.14% to 475.68 yuan per gram; The main contract of Shanghai Bank closed down 0.10% to 5989.00 yuan per kilogram.
[overnight news]
Three senior officials of the Federal Reserve put out the fire in anticipation of radical interest rate cuts in the market.
Following last week’s "hawkish" views expressed by many Fed officials, trying to calm the market’s speculation about a sharp interest rate cut next year, at the beginning of the new week, three more Fed officials stood up and said that the market "advanced" the interest rate cut next year, which was somewhat confusing to the market. So far, many officials of the Federal Reserve, whether hawks or doves, have emphasized similar remarks.
The Fed turned, and the dollar showed a "net short position" for the first time in three months.
Michael Cahill, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, pointed out in a report last Friday that Goldman Sachs made a comprehensive adjustment to its exchange rate forecast after the Federal Reserve issued a signal that it would quickly implement a "non-recessionary interest rate cut".
Goldman Sachs previously predicted in the 2024 currency outlook released on November 10th that the US dollar index will fall by 3% in the next 12 months, and the US dollar will only fall into a "shallow" depreciation. Now Goldman Sachs thinks that the US dollar may be weaker than previously predicted. In addition, most analysts surveyed by the media believe that the dollar will weaken next year.
It is widely expected that the Bank of Japan will stay put, but Ueda and Kazuo may be "hawking"
The Bank of Japan will announce the interest rate resolution, and the market generally expects to "stay put", but Ueda and Kazuo may "put the eagle on the ground" and "do it" early next year after fully communicating with the market. After the shift of the Federal Reserve, there is not much policy space left for the Bank of Japan.
More and more oil companies and tanker owners have avoided the Red Sea, and American Oil once rose by 4%.
BP, a British oil company, and Equinor, another European oil and gas giant, also announced on Monday that they would suspend all transportation through the Red Sea. However, at the close, oil prices retreated most of the increase, indicating that geopolitics has limited boosting effect on oil prices under the gloomy macro background.
[company news]
Apple will stop selling Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 in the United States this week.
Apple announced that it will soon stop selling its flagship Apple Watch model in the United States. Starting from later this week, Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 will no longer be sold. Apple and medical technology company Masimo have long had a patent dispute over Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor technology. After ITC made a ruling, Apple took this action.
OpenAI releases AI security guide: the board of directors has the right to prevent the release of new AI models.
On Monday (December 18th) local time, the artificial intelligence (AI) research company OpenAI published a set of guidelines on preventing AI risks. One of the rules worthy of attention is that even if the CEO and other company leaders think that the AI model is safe, the board of directors can also prevent it from being released.
Some netizens broke the news that OpenAI is suspected to be conducting GPT-4.5 grayscale test.
According to leaked information, the pricing of the most advanced GPT-4.5 model of OpenAI was exposed, and the multimodal function was greatly upgraded-supporting multimodal functions across languages, audio, vision, video and 3D, as well as complex reasoning and cross-modal understanding.
Dong Yuhui was promoted to senior partner, and will set up a new live broadcast room to select fans from the East and return to 30 million.
At 8 o’clock on Monday night, after three days of suspension, Dong Yuhui returned to the East to select the live broadcast room and broadcast live with Yu Minhong. Yu Minhong revealed that an independent studio will be set up for Dong Yuhui, with separate accounts and live broadcast rooms. He said that the small composition storm was a group error correction behavior and should not have happened.
Weilai Automobile received a $2.2 billion investment from Abu Dhabi Sovereign Fund.
CYVN will invest a total of 2.2 billion US dollars (about 15.6 billion yuan) in cash, subscribe for 294 million shares of newly issued Class A common stock of the company at the purchase price of 7.50 US dollars per share, and will beneficially hold about 20.1% of the total issued and outstanding shares of Weilai.
Adobe and Figma agree to terminate the merger agreement.
On December 18th, Adobe and Figma announced that they had reached an agreement to terminate the previously announced merger agreement. The two sides jointly assessed that there was no clear way to obtain the necessary regulatory approval from the European Commission and the British Competition and Market Authority. Shantanu Narayen, chairman and CEO of Adobe, said in a statement that Adobe and Figma strongly oppose the recent regulatory results, but both sides believe that it is in their best interests to go it alone.
[financial calendar]
