Bank of America Corporation (BAC)
Chart Events
Performance Outlook
| Previous Close | 39.99 |
| Open | 39.99 |
| Bid | N/A x N/A |
| Ask | N/A x N/A |
| Day's Range | 39.85 - 40.38 |
| 52 Week Range | 20.10 - 40.38 |
| Volume | 28,161,208 |
| Avg. Volume | N/A |
| Market Cap | 345.263B |
| Beta (5Y Monthly) | N/A |
| PE Ratio (TTM) | N/A |
| EPS (TTM) | N/A |
| Earnings Date | N/A |
| Forward Dividend & Yield | N/A (N/A) |
| Ex-Dividend Date | N/A |
| 1y Target Est | N/A |
- Bloomberg
Oil Pares Gains With Market Awaiting Clarity on Demand Strength
(Bloomberg) -- Oil retreated from session highs with prices struggling to break out of the recent trading range as the market considers the jagged outlook for global fuel consumption.Futures in New York headed back toward unchanged after notching a gain of as much as 2.4% earlier Monday. New daily Covid-19 cases in Iran rose to a record overnight, while Austria’s capital extended regional lockdown measures until next month, highlighting the long road ahead in parts of the world even as demand is coming back elsewhere. Still, prices found some support as the U.S. dollar weakened, which raised the appeal of commodities priced in the currency.“At the end of the day, prices are still stuck in this range,” said Bob Yawger, head of the futures division at Mizuho Securities. It remains unclear “what the catalyst will be for a breakout.”Yemen’s Houthis said they attacked oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, as the group steps up strikes on the kingdom. While such attacks have increased this year, they rarely claim lives or cause extensive damage.Oil in New York has gotten stuck near $60 recent weeks, as traders look for more signs of a recovery in consumption from the Covid-19 pandemic. Trading volumes have slumped -- falling below their 15-day average every day last week -- as the market awaits a breakout. In the meantime, the OPEC+ alliance agreed to add more barrels from May.“It is U.S. optimism that is helping the oil market, as developments in other parts of the world are not moving toward the same direction,” said Louise Dickson, an oil markets analyst at Rystad Energy AS. “Populous countries like India and Brazil are seemingly getting deeper in trouble than ever before, failing to deliver on hopes for a quick economic recovery.”There are already signs emerging of the potential impact of a steady reopening in the U.S. on consumption, even in the beleaguered airline industry. United Airlines Holdings Inc. said it saw an acceleration in customer demand in March, while U.S. air passenger numbers remain near their highest level since March. However, the downside for jet fuel refining margins will likely last into 2022 with international air travel lagging the recovery in the U.S., according to Bank of America Global Research.Meanwhile, the broader outlook for the oil market may be getting weaker further down the line, Morgan Stanley analysts Martijn Rats and Amy Sergeant wrote in a report. That’s because Iranian supply may return quicker than expected, while U.S. drilling activity has continued to increase. It means price gains later this year could be limited, they said.Still, any revival in the 2015 nuclear deal will have to overcome increasing hurdles. In the latest potential complication for talks, the Persian Gulf country said it will respond to attacks on its largest uranium enrichment plant with further development of nuclear progress.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
Citi, BofA Want to Save Traders’ Time With Fixed-Income Platform
(Bloomberg) -- If Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. have their way, CLO traders are about to become a lot more productive.In the market for collateralized loan obligations, traders still spend the majority of their time helping clients manually compile bid lists for auctions known as “bid wanted in competition,” or BWICs. It’s a slow process, and there’s usually little revenue generated by the effort.“It’s very time-consuming,” Vitaliy Kozak, a managing director at Citigroup who oversees the firm’s secondary CLO trading business globally, said in an interview. “I started at Citi 12 years ago as an analyst on the CLO secondary desk, and the market was trading very similar to how it trades today.”So Citigroup and rival Bank of America are setting out to build a new platform for executing fixed-income trades, focusing their initial efforts on the CLO market. The new venue, which is being tested by both banks, will ultimately be a central place for trading desks to see data for structured credit and other underlying collateral markets, the companies said in a statement Monday. They’re planning to launch within a year and hope the effort will lead to more participation in the market.“It’s bold, ambitious, but overdue,” David Trepanier, head of structured products, global credit at Bank of America, said in an interview. “We’re really excited and expecting the industry to embrace this. It will change how the industry engages in this market.”Since the last financial crisis, issuance of CLOs -- bundles of loans made to junk-rated companies that get packaged into bonds -- has soared. The banks’ new platform comes as many of the biggest CLO players -- including Japan’s Norinchukin Bank, Wells Fargo & Co. and Fidelity Investments -- are returning to the $900 billion market after spending much of last year on the sidelines.Stock markets were the first to embrace electronic trading because equities are standardized and trade frequently. Some currency and bond markets have since followed suit, but not without push-back from traders who argued that their transactions were driven by relationships and that the products were too complex to be handled by computers.Despite that resistance, the transition, known in the industry as electronification, has continued as investors seek out advanced platforms to cut costs and provide data-crunching tools that give them a clearer view into markets. Now the push is making its way deeper into fixed-income markets.Even with increasing electronification, CLO traders still spend as much as 60% of their time manually compiling bid lists for the bid-wanted-in-competition auctions. But those efforts contribute to a small portion of the revenue they ultimately generate. With the new platform, Citigroup and Bank of America believe they can cut that time down by as much as 80%.“Technology has not really kept up with the increasing size” of the CLO and leveraged-loan markets, said Alex Naboicheck, head of U.S. leveraged-loan trading at Bank of America. With an electronic venue, “you don’t know you need it until you have it.”Project OctopusThe new platform doesn’t yet have an official name, though the internal code name for the effort is Project Octopus.Citigroup, for its part, is backing the effort through its spread products investment technologies group, or SPRINT, which makes investments in financial technology for the firm’s trading arm. Almost two years ago, SPRINT helped Citigroup introduce a new application for BWIC auctions. Since then, the lender has seen a more than 25% increase in the volume of trades it handles on the auctions.“As time went by, we realized that the platform had peaked as a single-dealer platform since it can’t really change market-structure dynamics,” Kozak said. “That’s when we decided we needed to go out and invite other dealers.”The new platform will use Citigroup’s existing technology, meaning much of the work ahead will focus on connecting the venue to other dealers and clients. In 2016, BofA launched Instinct Loans, an electronic platform for secondary trading of syndicated corporate loans.“Between us and Bank of America, we have enough scale to make this something that is interesting and impactful on Day One,” Matt Zhang, head of the SPRINT group and Citigroup’s global co-head of structured products trading and solutions. “That’s why a lot of other dealers may like to join us.”Data CostsWall Street’s biggest banks and hedge funds have grown vocal in recent years about the rising costs that third-parties charge for trading and market data. Sell-side firms spend about $140 million a year on such data, according to consultancy Greenwich Associates.Costs aside, banks are sitting on a mountain of unstructured data tied to their sprawling CLO businesses, with no way to use much of it. Part of the aim with the new exchange is to allow banks to use more of that data, a move that should lead to lower costs, said Katya Chupryna, project lead in SPRINT.“This is still a market that doesn’t have pre- or post-trade data capture,” Chupryna said. “What we’re creating is something that everybody on the sell side as well as the buy side will say that they need and want.”For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
- GuruFocus.com
Strong Job Growth Sends Wall Street to New Highs, but What's Next?
Banks may surprise on the upside, sending major equity averages to new highs, provided that new inflation numbers do not spoil the party
