Global Markets Brief

Salesforce Stock Surge on Strong Earnings

Salesforce Inc shares rose by as much as 25% on Wednesday to hit an all-time high of 277.90 per share following positive earnings growth for the second quarter of 2020.

The tech company’s revenue rose by 29% Year on Year to $5.15 billion while gross profit was up 27% to $3.84 billion. Net income grew to $2.6 billion from $91 million.

Peter Thiel’s data-analytics company Palantir Technologies has filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange.

“We expect our operating expenses to increase, and we may not become profitable in the future.” the company said in a filing with the SEC, the US markets regulator.

According to Forbes, Palantir was co-founded in 2003 by PayPal founder Thiel, president and secretary Stephen Cohen and Karp; they are all on the board and control about 50% of the company goes public. Thiel was the first major investor in Facebook and sits on the company’s board.

Alibaba Stock Surge

Alibaba Group shares hit a new record high on Wednesday mainly driven by news that its Fintech subsidiary Ant Financial Group has filed to go public on the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges.

Facebook says iOS 14 will impact ad business

Social media giant Facebook Inc. has warned that Apple updates to iOS14 mobile operating system will significantly affect its Audience Network advertising business.

“For developers and publishers using Audience Network, our ability to deliver targeted ads on iOS 14 will be limited. As a result, some iOS 14 users may not see any ads from Audience Network, while others may still see ads from us, but they’ll be less relevant. Because of advertisers’ reduced ability to accurately target and measure their campaigns, app developers and publishers should expect lower CPMs on Audience Network and likely other ad networks on iOS.” the company said in a blog post.

Bitcoin Price

Data from peer-to-peer marketplace Paxful shows that Bitcoin price rose by more than 1% on Wednesday to trade at a high of $11,549.800. The world’s most famous cryptocurrency is up up by more than 15% over the last one month.

The rally in Bitcoin price is mainly driven by the most recent data which showed that the bitcoin hashrate; the estimated number of tera hashes per second dedicated to mining blocks, rose to a new all-time high of 129.03 tera hashes per second.