10 things you need to know in markets today
Asian markets are falling after reports that North Korea has successfully tested a hydrogen bomb. North Korea reportedly detonated the device at the Punggye-ri underground test site in the far northeast, its official Korean Central News Agency said. Japan's Nikkei stock market is down 0.99% at the time of writing (6.20 a.m. GMT/1.20 a.m. ET) and the Hong Kong Hang Seng is down 1.04%.
But Chinese markets are rallying. The Shanghai Composite is up 1.79%, after an extension of a ban on large shareholders selling stock. The measure is meant to calm stock markets after they tanked by 7% on Monday.
It's service sector PMI day in Europe. From 8.15 a.m. GMT (3.15 a.m. ET) onwards we'll get news on how much service sectors grew by in December in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Britain, and the Eurozone as a whole.
Chinese conglomerate Wanda is venturing into healthcare, it said on Wednesday, with a $2.3 billion (£1.5 billion) investment in three hospitals in China, to be managed by a British company. Wanda plans to fund hospitals in commercial hub Shanghai, southwestern metropolis Chengdu, and the port city of Qingdao. The project is the first to be managed and operated by Britain's International Hospitals Group (IHG), the statement said.
Huawei Technologies the world's top three smartphone vendor, said on Wednesday that its smartphone shipments rose 44% annually to 108 million in 2015, thanks to strong sales in China and Western Europe. The Shenzhen-based company also said revenue for its consumer business group, which sells products such as smartphones and tablets, jumped 70% year-on-year to $20 billion (£13.6 billion) in 2015.
South Korean consumer electronics supplier LG Display expects earnings to improve starting in the second quarter of the year, despite challenging business conditions for the January-March period, the company's chief executive said. An LG Display spokeswoman on Wednesday confirmed remarks by Han Sang-beom, who also told reporters on the sidelines of the CES trade show in Las Vegas that the display industry's supply will likely exceed demand by 12% to 13%.
London-based Nevsky Capital's $1.5 billion (£1 billion) hedge fund is shutting down, part of a growing trend among money managers following weak returns in 2015. Bloomberg reports that the fund is closing because it believes its research focused approach is "increasingly incompatible" with the "algorithmically driven market environment."
Bob Dudley, the CEO of British oil giant BP, believes he's determined how much longer oil prices may decline, and when they may start rising again. "A low point could be in the first quarter [of 2016]," Dudley said in an interview broadcast by the BBC. "But 2016's third and fourth quarters could witness a more natural balance between supply and demand, after which stock levels could start to wear off."
JPMorgan Chase has been fined $48 million (£32.7 million) for failing to meet terms of a settlement to resolve mortgage servicing violations, US bank regulators said on Tuesday. JPMorgan was among a number of banks which participated in a 2013 nationwide settlement with regulators over the practice of robo-signing, in which banks pursued faulty foreclosures by using defective or fraudulent documents.
Deutsche Bank economists on Tuesday reduced their forecast on US economic growth in the fourth quarter of 2015 and first quarter of 2016 due to recent disappointing data on trade, construction spending, and manufacturing activity. They said in a research note they pared their view on domestic gross product in the last three months of last year by 1 percentage point to 0.5%, which they added "still might be too high in light of what could be much larger inventory liquidation than what we have assumed."