MARKETS SEE REMARKABLE FIRST QUARTER GAINS - Global stock markets have enjoyed a pretty stellar start to the trading year. With the first quarter just ended in New York, the S&P 500 is up 12% - its best start in 19 years. The Dow Jones is 944 points ahead - a record for the first three months of the year - and in Tokyo the Nikkei has marked its best start to a year since 1993.
Paul Sommerville, the founder of Sommerville Advisory Markets, says the first quarter of 2012 has indeed been quite remarkable on world stock markets due in part to improving US employment figures and less dismal economic growth figures from around the world. But Mr Sommerville says the gains are down mostly to Central Bank action and the flooding of liquidity into the markets.
This extra money is also boosting commodity prices, he adds. The analyst says that hedge funds have also been caught out as some of the negative bets they made have failed to materialise. He says that hedge funds had positioned themselves incorrectly in the last few months.
Mr Sommerville cautions that markets swing from pessimism to over indulgence and says that now is really a time for the professional traders to work. He also says that the euro zone debt crisis is far from over and warns that problems in Spain and Italy will blow up soon and this will have repercussions for Ireland and the rest of the euro zone.
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MORNING BRIEFS - Distribution group DCC - which is more usually a buyer of companies than a seller - is disposing of a technology firm called Altimate to French group Arrow Electronics. The price is €41m in cash. DCC bought the company back in 2000. DCC is also recognising an €8m non-cash charge in its accounts on disposing of Altimate - a reflection of the drop in its value since it was originally acquired by DCC.
*** Bono and the Edge have emerged as early stage investors in the technology company Dropbox. Dropbox is an online service that allows users to store and share various documents in their Dropbox (hence the name) online or "in the cloud" and access or modify them wherever and whenever they have internet access. Dropbox has just raised investment of $250m and overnight it informed the world via Twitter that it was welcoming Bono and the Edge on board as investors.
