Here are five things you need to know this morning:
Big Tech earnings in focus: It’s a busy day for earnings, with more than a dozen high profile companies revealing quarterly results, but numbers from tech megacaps will dominate the day. Meta posted results after the bell on Wednesday; numbers that beat the street expectation on sales and profit. The social media giant revealed that it had 3.27 billion users across all of its apps as of June 30, a seven per cent increase from a year ago. After the bell today we will get numbers from Amazon and Apple, two other members of the so-called Magnificent Seven that have been driving the market this year.
Banco Santander granted Canadian banking license: Spanish lender Banco Santander has taken a major step toward its yearslong goal of setting up banking services in Canada. According to a government notice, the Minister of Finance has issued letters patent incorporating the lender as a federal regulated financial institution. It’s a key hurdle cleared but the bank still has to get the OK from OSFI before offering banking services. Currently, the lender has a toehold in the Canadian marketplace by offering auto finance, but has been looking to expand. According to filings, the bank has 275 employees in Canada and posted revenues of 73 million euros last year.
CrowdStrike faces shareholder lawsuit over outage: CrowdStrike has been hit by a class action lawsuit on behalf of its shareholders stemming from its massive outage las month. A botched software update affected 8.5 million devices running on the Windows operating system, crashing systems of governments and businesses around the world. According to the lawsuit, the company’s controls were “deficient” and it was “not properly testing updates” before rolling them out. The company has lost about 40 per cent of its value since the July 19 incident. Companies like Delta, which saw its fleet of planes grounded for days as a result of the outage, have also contemplated legal action against the company.
Bank of England cuts rates from 16-year high: The U.S. Federal Reserve may have decided it is comfortable standing on the sidelines for now this week, but the Bank of England joined the rate-cut party on Thursday, cutting its benchmark interest rate from a 16-year high of 5.25 per cent, a level it hit last fall. The bank cut its rate to five per cent, its first cut in more than four years, and offered little guidance as to which way its policy stance is headed. The decision was far from certain, too, as the nine-person committee was split on whether or not to cut, with five members voting to cut, and four wanting to stand pat.
TSX tops 23,000 for first time ever: Canada’s benchmark stock index, the S&P/TSX Composite Index, topped the 23,000 point level for the first time ever on Wednesday, as investors rotate into value, commodity and low-volatility stocks. The index closed at 23,110 yesterday, its 14th record high of the year, but unlike U.S. markets that have mostly been riding the AI boom and technology shares to new highs, the TSX’s strength has been more broad based.
