Ozempic craze sends beer and snack stocks plummeting

 Anti-diabetic drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy which are being touted for their weight loss and appetite-suppressing benefits are slamming stocks of beer and snack distributors — particularly after Walmart said that the medications were causing shoppers to pare back on groceries.

Swiss snacking conglomerate Nestle’s share price dropped by more than 2.5% on Friday while Mondelez International, the company behind brand names such as Oreo and Chips Ahoy, saw its stock drop by 2.7% as of 2:20 p.m. Eastern time.

The Kraft Heinz Company’s stock was down by nearly 1% while JM Smucker Company, which recently announced that it will acquire Twinkies maker Hostess, was down 0.7%.

The stock price of Constellation Brands, the US distributor of Modelo Especial, which has recently overtaken Bud Light as the nation’s most popular beer, is down 1.3% on Friday.

Kellanova, the cereal company that was formerly known as Kellogg’s before its recent rebranding, saw its share price dip by 1.5%

Investors reacted to comments made on Thursday by Walmart US CEO John Furner, who told Bloomberg News that Ozempic was the reason customers were buying “less units” and consuming “slightly less calories.”

“We definitely do see a slight change compared to the total population, we do see a slight pullback in overall basket,” Furner told Bloomberg News.

Walmart, which sells weight-loss drugs at its pharmacies, is able to study changes in sales patterns using anonymized data on shopper populations, according to the outlet.

With those data sets, the Bentonville, Ark.-based can see how many customers are on diabetes-turned-weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro and compare their shopping habits to those not taking the medications.

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The stock price for Oreo maker Mondelez International fell on Friday by some 2.7% as of 2:45 p.m. Eastern time.

REUTERS

In the first six months of the year, Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company behind Ozempic and Wegovy, has raked in profits of some $7 billion — up 32% from the same time a year ago.

Eli Lilly, the New York-based pharmaceutical company, made $1 billion in sales of Mounjaro in the second quarter of this year.

Users of the drugs, which reportedly cause some unpleasant side effects, have said that the appetite suppressant has cut their grocery bill by as much as 20%.

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Constellation Brands, the US-based distributor of Modelo Especial, also saw its stock fall on Friday.

REUTERS

“I still have a fully stocked kitchen, there’s chips and pretzels in there. I don’t find it tempting,” Carolyn MacBain-Waldo, who takes Mounjaro for weight loss, told The Wall Street Journal.

Morgan Stanley estimated that 7% of the US population, or 24 million people, will be taking hunger-suppressing weight-loss drugs by 2035 — cutting their daily calorie consumption by as much as 30%, according to the firm, which surveyed over 300 patients.

For a person on an FDA-recommended 2,000-calorie daily diet, that could mean eliminating a one-ounce bag of salted potato chips, a bottle of soda, and more each day.

https://nypost.com/2023/10/06/ozempic-craze-sends-beer-and-snack-stocks-plummeting/

How to Achieve the Goals You Set

 One of the most widely read TraderFeed posts in the last few years dealt with the topic of FIGS:  Focused, Intensive Goal Setting.  Too often, the goals that we set are not much more than good intentions.  New Year's resolutions are a notorious example.  How can we become better at actually achieving the goals we set?

As the previous post emphasized, when we focus our attention on fewer priorities and work consistently and intensively on those, we are much more likely to make progress than if we have a laundry list of changes to make and work on those as the need/desire arises.  So, for instance, if we want to get in good physical shape, dedicated daily time with gym equipment and running is a great start.  That time with lifting, stretching, and running has to challenge us, which means we always tackle more when a given level of effort becomes routine.  If our pursuit of goals is not focused, frequent, and intensive, we're unlikely to sustain a consistent growth path.

We are most likely to succeed if our goals become our commitments.  When I worked at a well-known hedge fund, the founder once commented that, "If it's not in your calendar, it's not part of your process".  This most certainly applies to our trading processes:  researching ideas, turning ideas into trades, monitoring markets, and managing risk/reward.  It equally applies to any of our purposeful activities, including the personal goals we set.

When we commit to our goal-seeking in the daily calendar and create a dedicated time for making efforts at improvement, we experience our desired future every day.  "Anyone who fights for the future lives in it today," Ayn Rand once observed.  Fighting for the future daily means that we experience a piece of our future consistently, making it an intrinsic part of ourselves.  What starts as passion and desire is expressed through regular effort and evolves into positive habit.  

Imagine that you have a single hour every day to pursue one goal that will dramatically benefit your trading, your health, your mindset, or your relationships.  Imagine that this is the first item to go into your calendar; routine work and home tasks have to fit around your one key objective.  Every day, without fail, you are going to use a slice of your day to be your own performance coach and bring your real self closer to your ideal self.  That way, you will spend a fraction of every day living in your future.

That is most likely to occur if we have very concrete targets to hit in pursuit of our goals.  If we want to lose weight, we want to define a challenging but doable objective.  If we are looking to improve our trading, we need to keep stats so that we can truly see our progress:  number of winning/losing trades, average sizes of winners/losers, overall profitability, etc.  If we are making improvements in our relationships, we want to very intentionally do more of the things that bring closeness, happiness, and fulfillment to our partners and to us.

Mental illness is when we live in the past every day.  Mundane life is when we simply live life each day at a time.  Greatness is when we live a consistent portion of each day in the future we are designing and building.

What future do you want to build?  How can you immerse yourself in that future today?

Brett Steenbarger, Ph.D.

https://traderfeed.blogspot.com/2023/10/how-to-achieve-goals-you-set.html

As Israel War Rages, Oil Traders Are Focused on Iran

 Crude traders don’t expect a massive price surge as there’s no immediate threat to supply. But all eyes are on Iran, a major oil producer and key backer of the Hamas group that launched this weekend’s offensive on Israel.

A retaliatory strike against the Islamic Republic would inflame fears over the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping artery which Tehran has previously threatened to shutter. There’s also the prospect of the US cracking down again on a resurgent flow of Iranian oil exports.

The “oil-disruption scenario,” according to Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group and a former White House official, “would be if conflict spread to Iran.” For now, that looks unlikely, he said.

But the threat has escalated just as global crude supplies have been depleted by months of sharp production cutbacks by Saudi Arabia and Russia, which last month briefly pushed Brent futures to almost $100 a barrel.

“It is unlikely to impact oil supply in the short term,” said hedge fund trader Pierre Andurand, founder of Andurand Capital Management LLP. “But it could eventually have an impact on supply and prices.”

The onslaught comes almost exactly 50 years after the Arab oil embargo, when Saudi Arabia and other OPEC producers choked off flows to the west in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

No-one expects Riyadh — which has been negotiating with Washington over normalizing relations with Israel — to turn off the taps in solidarity with the Palestinians now. At worst, the conflict may derail the normalization talks and scupper any additional Saudi oil flows that may have resulted.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/israel-war-rages-oil-traders-095536214.html

Arab League chief heads to Moscow for talks after Hamas attack on Israel

 Arab League Chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit headed to Moscow on Sunday for talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the situation in Gaza after Palestinian Islamist group Hamas launched the biggest attack on Israel in years.

Aboul Gheit, who served as Egypt's foreign minister during the final seven years of Hosni Mubarak's rule, will discuss the "ongoing escalation in the Gaza Strip," said a spokesman for the Cairo-based league of Arab states.

After Hamas's attack on Saturday, Russia expressed grave concern, calling on both Palestinian and Israeli sides to cease violence and blamed the West for blocking the Middle East Quartet.

Moscow said that a proper negotiation was necessary to provide for the creation of an independent Palestinian state within the borders of 1967 with a capital in East Jerusalem.

"We regard the current large-scale escalation as another extremely dangerous manifestation of a vicious circle of violence resulting from chronic failure to comply with the corresponding resolutions of the UN and its Security Council and the blocking by the West of the work of the Middle East Quartet of international mediators made up of Russia, the United States, the EU and the UN," Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. 

https://www.marketscreener.com/news/latest/Arab-League-chief-heads-to-Moscow-for-talks-after-Hamas-attack-on-Israel--45014962/

Autopay Is Making Us Worse at Managing Credit-Card Bills

 Setting up automatic payments is the easiest way to manage your credit-card bills. It is also costing many consumers money.

By setting up automatic payments, or autopay, you authorize companies to pull money directly from your checking account to settle recurring bills. It has been a standard feature for fixed expenses, such as cable, for more than a decade and is becoming more popular for bills that fluctuate from month to month, like credit cards.\The share of credit-card accounts enrolled in these automatic payments roughly doubled between 2015 and 2020 and continues to rise, according to data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, and industry executives.

In theory, higher autopay enrollment should lead to reduced credit-card fees since customers who sign up for automated payments are less likely to forget to pay and thus can avoid late fees and interest charges. Yet the total fees and interest paid by cardholders rose 19% to around $240 billion from 2015 to 2020, according to federal data.

Consumers often wind up underpaying when they autopay, according to a study by Jialan Wang, associate professor of finance at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a former economist for the CFPB. Borrowers who use autopay pay off between 8% and 17% less of their monthly credit-card balances compared with customers who make manual payments, according to the study.

Smaller payments then lead to paying more in interest, which might offset the benefit of avoiding late fees, especially as interest rates rise, she said.

When credit-card customers sign up for autopay, they typically have three options for monthly payments: the required minimum, the statement balance in full or a custom amount. Most people who enroll in autopay choose either the minimum payment or full balance, said Wang.

Those who pick “pay in full” when they set up their automatic payments are more likely to change their settings within the first 10 months since this option is less affordable in the long term, her 2022 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests. Those who pick “minimum payment” tend to keep that setting.

Today, more than three-quarters of people are using autopay for at least one bill, said Derek Swords, vice president of digital payments at Fiserv, a payments company. Automatic payments are becoming more popular because of their convenience, he said.

Most consumers are more comfortable setting up recurring payments as subscription models are used for everything from streaming services and gym memberships to coffee and lingerie.

“It’s a set-it-and-forget-it mindset,” Swords said.

Banks like it too. Customers who are on automatic payments pose half the risk of customers with similar credit who aren’t on autopay, said Max Axler, chief credit officer at Synchrony Financial, which services more than 70 million credit-card accounts.

“If I had my way, I’d have 100% of our population enrolled,” he said.

Credit-card companies usually give customers who occasionally miss payments the benefit of the doubt and assume they simply forgot. Late payments typically aren’t reported to credit bureaus until they are more than 30 days late.

Accounts that unenroll from autopay before their balance is paid in full or have multiple automatic payments returned for insufficient funds raise immediate red flags, said Axler.

“It’s not uncommon for that person to go delinquent,” he said.

While autopay enrollment has no direct impact on credit scores, being perceived as riskier by your bank could make it harder to get approved for more credit or lead to reduced credit limits, according to financial advisers.

At Capital Services, a credit-card company that manages the card portfolios for a number of regional banks, 0.3% of autopay plans are terminated every month for insufficient fees.

That churn rate isn’t high enough to raise alarm, but it is high enough to show that autopay isn’t viable for everyone, Sherry Tunender, senior vice president at Capital Services, wrote in a letter to the CFPB viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“Individuals who have enrolled in [autopay] but whose payments are getting returned should not have been enrolled in the first place,” she said.

The only surefire way to avoid fees and interest charges with autopay is to pay off your balance in full. But that only works for people with reliable income and steady spending habits. Overdraft fees can offset any savings from late fees if you spend more on your credit card than you have in your checking account.

You can avoid overdrafts by scheduling your automatic payments on days you are paid instead of using the default statement date, Wang said.

There is also value in paying your bill the old-school way, manually, according to financial advisers. Actively managing your account helps you stay on top of your spending and spot any fraudulent charges.

“Autopay has not really changed very much for many years, and whether or not consumers use it, it’s not necessarily serving them that well,” said Wang.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/autopay-is-making-us-worse-at-managing-credit-card-bills/ar-AA1hRbfC

Mideast Stocks Drop as Israel Goes to War After Hamas Attack

 

• Israel’s benchmark stock index drops most since March 2020
• Shares in Riyadh, Cairo, Doha, Kuwait also fall at open Sunday

The fallout from Saturday’s surprise attack on Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas reverberated through Middle East markets, sending stocks sliding and setting the tone for what’s likely to be a volatile week.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-08/mideast-stocks-drop-as-israel-declares-war-after-hamas-attack

'FBI Denies Targeting 'MAGA Extremists' Ahead Of 2024 Election'

 The FBI has denied a Newsweek report from veteran journalist William Arkin claiming that the agency has created a special category of extremists to target Trump supporters ahead of the 2024 election.

According to Newsweek, the FBI created a category to evaluate threats for anti-government and/or anti-authority violent extremism for those who don't fall under an anarchist, militia or sovereign citizen groups. The report cited more than a dozen current and former officials who say that the program targets Trump supporters.

In a statement to the Epoch Times, however, the FBI denied the allegations.

"Any allegation that the FBI targets individuals solely for their political beliefs is categorically false," said the agency.

'Solely,' eh?

"The FBI investigates those who commit acts of violence or threaten violence, and we do not take action based on political belief or any First Amendment protected activity," the statement continues.

According to the spokesperson, the "threat posed by domestic violent extremists is persistent, evolving, and deadly," adding that "The FBI's goal is to detect and stop terrorist attacks, and our focus is on potential criminal violations, violence, and threats of violence."

"Anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism [AGAAVE] is one category of domestic terrorism, as well as one of the FBI's top threat priorities," the statement continues. "This threat includes anarchist violent extremists, militia violent extremists, sovereign citizen violent extremists, and other violent extremists—some of whom are motivated by a desire to harm those with a real or perceived association with a political party or faction."

Those so-called extremists "have targeted both Republican and Democratic members of Congress," the spokesperson said, without elaborating. "We are committed to protecting the safety and constitutional rights of all Americans and will never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity, including a person's political beliefs or affiliations," the statement said.

In the Newsweek report, neither President Trump nor his Make America Great Again (MAGA) slogan were assigned to the aforementioned threat category. The article, however, claimed that unnamed "insiders" said that it applies to alleged "political violence ascribed to the former president’s supporters." -Epoch Times

That said, one anonymous FBI official told Arkin that Trump supporters are the "greatest threat of violence domestically …politically … that’s the reality and the problem set."

"But whether Trump and his supporters are a threat to national security, to the country, whether they represent a threat of civil war? That's a trickier question. And that's for the country to deal with, not the FBI," the official continued.

According to the FBI's data leaked to Arkin, the number of domestic extremism cases has dropped since Jan 6, but that "Sociopolitical developments—such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence—will almost certainly spur some domestic terrorists to try to engage in violence."

So - while the threat that the FBI has encouraged agents to inflate may have fallen, they're on the lookout!

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-denies-targeting-maga-extremists-ahead-2024-election