Finance

Jim Cramer on CNBC’s Halftime Report.
Scott Mlyn | CNBC

KeyCorp (KEY) reiterated its financials Tuesday, sending its shares higher — a rally that’s been seen in the wider financial sector recently. The stock, however, edged lower after Wednesday’s open on Wall Street. That’s because, according to Jim Cramer, investors are focusing their attention on big banks, rather than smaller regionals.

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“There’s a big split right between investment banks, big money centers and the regionals,” Cramer said, cautioning that the recent banking sector rally may not be sustainable.

Wells Fargo (WFC) and Morgan Stanley (MS) — two holdings of Cramer’s Charitable Trust, the portfolio used by the CNBC Investing Club — have notched gains in recent sessions as well following a challenging year amid a crisis of confidence in the entire industry after the March failure of Silicon Valley Bank.

Here’s a full list of the stocks in Jim’s Charitable Trust, the portfolio used by the CNBC Investing Club. More

Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser announced a corporate reorganization Wednesday, saying the move would cut down management layers and accelerate decisions.
Fraser, closing in on her third full year atop Citigroup, said in a release that the firm’s five main business lines would report directly to her.
The changes will include job cuts, though the company hasn’t decided on a number yet, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Jane Fraser CEO, Citi, speaks at the 2023 Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, May 1, 2023.
Mike Blake | Reuters

Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser announced a corporate reorganization Wednesday, saying the move would cut down management layers and accelerate decisions.
Fraser, closing in on her third full year atop Citigroup, said in a release that the firm’s five main business lines would report directly to her.

The changes will include job cuts, though the company hasn’t decided on a number yet, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates. More

A member of the Mississippi National Guard receives a dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine in his arm, in Flowood, Mississippi.
Rogelio V. Solis | AP

Check out the companies making headlines before the bell.
Moderna — Moderna shares rose more than 3% in early trading after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended updated Covid vaccine shots for all Americans ages 6 months and older. Pfizer shares added 0.2%.

Apple — Apple dipped 0.4% before the bell, one after debuting its latest iPhone model and multiple updates, including a new Apple Watch and revamped AirPods.
Ford — Shares of the automaker rose 1.5% premarket after UBS analyst Joseph Spak initiated research coverage with a buy rating and a $15 price target implying 21% upside. Spak said Ford’s pro business, its commercial segment, should show more resiliency than expected and potentially mitigate downsides from issues in blue and electric car models.
BP — Shares rose more than 1% before the open one day after BP CEO Bernard Looney resigned a little more than three years after assuming the post. BP shares in the U.S. closed down 1.3% Tuesday, reversing an early 2.9% gain.
Xpeng, NIO — U.S.-based shares of Chinese electric vehicle makers Xpeng and NIO fell more than 3% and 2%, respectively, after the European Union said it’s considering imposing anti-subsidy tariffs on Chinese imports to protect domestic producers.
American Airlines, Spirit Air — American fell 3.1% after lowering its third-quarter earnings guidance, citing higher fuel prices and costs from a new labor agreement. The airline now expects per-share earnings in the range of 20 cents to 30 cents, lower than prior guidance of 85 cents to 95 cents. Spirit dropped 3.9% after cutting its summer profit forecast owing to higher costs.
— CNBC’s Samantha Subin, Pia Singh, and Sarah Min contributed reporting More

Arm is expected to begin trading Thursday in the year’s biggest listing. Instacart and Klaviyo are expected to list as soon as next week.
While they each operate in vastly different parts of the tech universe, the companies have one important thing in common: Goldman is a key advisor.
But with the sought-after title of lead advisor comes added scrutiny if the deals flop.

David Solomon, Goldman Sachs interview with David Faber, September 7, 2023.

The return of large tech IPOs this week after a prolonged drought isn’t just a test of investors’ appetite for risky new offerings — it’s a key moment for Wall Street’s top advisor, Goldman Sachs.
Chip designer Arm is expected to begin trading Thursday in the year’s biggest listing. Delivery firm Instacart and marketing automation platform Klaviyo are expected to list as soon as next week.

While they each operate in vastly different parts of the tech universe, the companies have one important thing in common: Goldman is a key advisor.
The stakes are high for everyone involved. Last year was the slowest for American IPOs in three decades, thanks to sharply higher interest rates, rising geopolitical tensions and the hangover from 2021 listings that fared poorly. Successful IPOs from Arm and others will boost confidence for CEOs waiting on the sidelines, and activity there would help revive other parts of finance including mergers and financing.
That would be meaningful for Goldman, which is more dependent on investment banking than rivals JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. Amid the industry’s slump, Goldman has suffered the worst revenue decline this year among the six biggest U.S. banks, and CEO David Solomon has contended with internal dissent and departures tied to strategic errors and his leadership style.
“This is the core of the core of what Goldman Sachs does,” Mike Mayo, Wells Fargo banking analyst, said in a phone interview. “Expectations are high, and they’re likely to meet those expectations. Should they fall short, there will be far more questions than anything we’ve seen so far.”

Lead-left bank

Goldman is lead-left advisor on Instacart and Klaviyo, meaning their bankers drive decisions, coordinate other banks and typically earn the biggest portion of fees. On Arm, Goldman shares top billing with JPMorgan, Barclays and Mizuho. Goldman also was named the deal’s allocation coordinator.

But the sought-after title of lead advisor comes with added scrutiny if the deals flop.
If shares of Arm or the other two IPOs fail to trade for a premium to the list price in coming weeks, dark clouds could form over the nascent market rebound. For Goldman, perceptions of a bungled process would feed doubts about the company under Solomon.
Unlike the bank’s unfortunate foray into consumer finance, Goldman’s position atop Wall Street’s league tables hasn’t budged. The bank has actually gained share in advisory and trading since Solomon took over in 2018.
But even in its traditional stronghold, there is room for cracks. Goldman is being investigated for its role advising Silicon Valley Bank in the days before its collapse.

What’s Arm worth?

Initial public offerings can be tricky transactions to navigate. Advisors need to properly gauge interest in shares and balance demands from clients while pricing shares so investors see upside.
While Arm’s offering is reportedly seeing high demand, there are nagging doubts about the company’s valuation, its large exposure to China and its ability to ride the artificial intelligence wave. The SoftBank-owned company’s valuation has waxed and waned in recent weeks, from as high as $70 billion initially to the roughly $55 billion that represents the top end of a target share price of $47 to $51.
“We believe investors should avoid this IPO, as we see very limited upside ahead,” David Trainer, CEO of research firm New Constructs, wrote Tuesday in a note. “SoftBank is wasting no time by offering Arm Holdings to the public markets, and at a valuation that is completely disconnected from the company’s fundamentals.”
Further, Arm is selling an unusually small slice of its overall stock, about 9%, which helps drive scarcity. That small public float means new investors will have fewer rights related to voting power and corporate governance, Trainer noted.
The IPO is expected to raise more than $5 billion for Arm and generate more than $100 million in fees for its bankers.
There are more than 20 tech companies weighing whether to go public in the next year or so if conditions remain favorable, according to bankers with knowledge of the market. While some have begun taking steps to list in the first half of 2024, according to the bankers, the situation is fragile.
“If those three don’t go well, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the IPOs or M&A because people will lose confidence,” one of the bankers said. More

French embedded finance startup Swan raised 37 million euros ($39.6 million) in a series B investment led by European venture capital giant Lakestar.
The latest fundraise takes Swan’s total money raised to 58 million euros. Accel, another venture capital firm, previously led Swan’s series A round in 2021.
Swan will initially use the money to expand its operations in the Netherlands in the coming months, before later expanding its operations in the Italian market in 2024.

Swan co-founder and CEO Nicolas Benady.

European venture capital giant Lakestar, an early supporter of fintech unicorn Revolut, has emerged as a prominent backer of French fintech startup Swan.
Swan raised the funds in a series B investment led by European venture capital giant Lakestar. The latest fundraise takes Swan’s total money raised to 58 million euros. Accel, another venture capital firm, previously led Swan’s series A round in 2021.

Swan CEO and co-founder Nicolas Benady said that, when he started out, it was “incredibly complex” to integrate banking and other financial services into existing platforms that didn’t have any financial components.
“What we had in mind with our co-founders was that it shouldn’t be that complex,” he told CNBC. “If it’s easy to accept payments — like the Stripes the Adyens, the Mollies of this world enable — it should be as easy to set up banking.”
“If you develop a big idea … at 2 a.m., it should be possible to come onto our website and have something up and running in the morning,” Benady added.
Swan will initially use the money to expand its operations in the Netherlands in the coming months, before later expanding its operations in the Italian market in 2024.
Benady said the Dutch market has unique features that set it apart from other European countries, making it more complex as a country to launch digital banking and payment capabilities in for its customers.

For example, the Netherlands has its own payments system, called iDEAL, which lets consumers pay online through their own bank and is supported by all the country’s major lenders including ABN Amro and ING Group.
Georgia Watson, a principal at Lakestar based in the firm’s London office, said the firm had been tracking Swan “for about a year.”
“We really like that they’re giving their clients the ability to create new product lines, new revenue lines, with attention for their end users,” she told CNBC.
She added that Swan’s clients “don’t have to think about the regulatory aspects when they want to add on new products, which can be very time consuming and create additional risk for the company.”
Swan is able to set up embedded financial solutions with businesses in as little as two weeks compared to many months for other competitors, according to Watson, who was previously with Goldman Sachs as a vice president managing the investment bank’s growth and venture deals.

Plans to forge partnerships

Luca Bocchio, partner at Accel, said Swan had proven its model was more scalable than competitors in the embedded finance world, such as Railsr and Solarisbank, which have faced struggles in their mission to plug payments and other financial products directly into companies’ platforms. Railsr earlier this year entered bankruptcy protection via a sale to a consortium of investors led by D Squared Capital.
Swan is able to handle large volumes of payments and run know-your-customer (KYC) checks with “very few people,” Bocchio told CNBC.
“Banking-as-a-service providers usually need to take care of many of their customers, who piggyback on their licenses. They need to take care of anti-money laundering, KYC and compliance costs for their customers.”
“Depending on what they’re serving, it means a high volume of requests if you’ve not created a fully automated platform,” Bocchio said. “It requires you to have lots of manual processes.”
Bocchio said that, where Swan differed to competitors was with its ability to process lots of tractions with more automated compliance processes. Railsr, he said, struggled to allocate the right number of people to figure out the challenge of developing an embedded finance experience while also considering how to scale it with compliance in mind.
Railsr, at the time of its restructuring announcement, said that it had “best-in-class technology” and would “get back to basics and manage the business methodically and constructively.”
Swan will also look to forge partnerships with more large, multinational corporates with an aggressive sales strategy following the fundraise. The company already works with the French retail chain Carrefour, which used its technology to develop a cashback project.
Swan plans to broaden its product offering out to include more payment collection methods such as direct debit and card payments, as well as new lending capabilities. As it rolls out these new products, Swan anticipates it’ll begin to serve new industries like travel, insurance and business-to-business marketplaces.
The proportion of payments that are embedded in platforms is expected to grow to 40% in the next few years, according to a note from Bain Capital Ventures. Embedded finance is expected to become a $384.8 billion market by 2029, according to data from Reportlinker. More

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, July 12, 2023.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters

Check out the companies making headlines in midday trading.
Oracle — Shares dipped 13.5% a day after the software company posted disappointing earnings and revenue guidance for its fiscal second quarter. Oracle’s revenue, which came in at $12.45 billion, was weaker than the $12.47 billion forecast by analysts. Its forward guidance of 5% to 7% revenue growth in the second quarter also fell short of the 8% implied growth expected by analysts polled by LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv.

WestRock — The stock rose 2.8% following news that the paper and packaging company will go through with a merger with Smurfit Kappa. Shares of Smurfit Kappa traded on the FTSE 100 tumbled 9.8%.
Apple — Shares lost more than 1.8% during midday trading as the technology giant is expected to unveil a new iPhone at its launch event kicking off at 1 p.m. ET.
Casey’s General Stores — The retailer added 11.2% on the heels of an earnings beat. The company reported an adjusted $4.52 per share on revenue of $3.87 billion. Analysts polled by FactSet forecast an adjusted $3.36 and $3.9 billion, respectively. Executives also reiterated forward guidance and forecast an increase to 2024 same-store sales by 3% to 5%.
Beauty Health — The HydraFacial parent company’s shares surged 23.6% after it announced a cost-cutting program. The first phase of the program is forecast to generate $20 million in annualized cost savings during the first quarter of 2024. Beauty Health’s board of directors also authorized a $100 million share repurchase program.
Advance Auto Parts — Shares fell 8.1% to a 12-year low after S&P Global downgraded the auto parts provider’s credit rating to BB+, the highest level of “junk,” or speculative, status, from BBB-.

CVS — The drug store chain climbed 2.6% following an upgrade to outperform from peer perform by Wolfe. The firm said the business could inflect over the next six to 12 months.
Block — Shares of the payments company advcned 0.7% after Baird reiterated an outperform rating on the stock and designated shares as a bullish fresh pick. The Wall Street firm said shares may be oversold after the company experienced a temporary outage on its payment processor Square.
Cintas — The stock gained 2.8% after Bank of America upgraded Cintas to buy from neutral, calling the corporate apparel maker a “best-in-breed company” that can benefit as recession risks wane. The firm attributed the new rating to its growing confidence in a potential soft landing for the U.S. economy.
Geron — Stock in the biotechnology firm added roughly 1.7% following an upgrade to buy from Goldman Sachs earlier Tuesday. Analyst Corinne Jenkins noted optimism over recent U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for myelodysplastic syndromes treatment imetelstat.
Exxon Mobil — Shares of the energy giant rose 2.9% as the price of oil continued to climb. Futures for U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude hit their highest level since November. Elsewhere, Morgan Stanley reiterated its overweight call on Exxon, saying the company was a top pick in its category.
— CNBC’s Yun Li, Samantha Subin, Hakyung Kim, Lisa Kailai Han, Jesse Pound, Pia Singh and Brian Evans contributed reporting. More

Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle Corporation, rings the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., July 12, 2023. 
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters

Check out the companies making headlines before the bell
Oracle – Shares fell 10% before the opening bell after the company posted weaker-than-expected revenue and revenue guidance for the second fiscal quarter. For the recent quarter, the software company reported adjusted earnings of $1.19 per share, versus the $1.15 expected by analysts polled by LSEG. Revenue came in at $12.45 billion, lighter than the $12.47 billion expected.

WestRock – Shares popped more than 6% before the bell on news that the paper and packaging company is going forward with its merger with Smurfit Kappa. Shares of Dublin-based Smurfit Kappa sank more than 8% on the news.
Apple – The stock inched higher before the bell ahead of the technology giant’s eagerly anticipated iPhone launch event beginning at 1 p.m. ET.
Cintas – Shares rose 1% in premarket trading after Bank of America upgraded the stock to a buy rating as the odds of a soft landing economic scenario mount.
Casey’s General Stores – The retail stock added more than 4% in the premarket after topping earnings expectations for the recent quarter. Casey’s General Stores reported earnings of $4.52 per share, topping the $3.36 expected by analysts polled by FactSet. Revenue came in at $3.87 billion, slightly behind the $3.9 billion expected.
Geron – The stock jumped nearly 5% before the bell after Goldman Sachs upgraded the blood cancer treatment firm to a buy from neutral rating ahead of its 2024 drug launch and indicated shares could rise as much as 70%. More

Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk hit the Chinese market Tuesday.
Publisher Citic Press Group raised the book’s selling price to 79 yuan ($10.84) on Monday, up from 59 yuan previously, according to Chris Sun, lead translator of Isaacson’s book into Chinese.
On online retailer JD.com’s app Tuesday, versions of the new Elon Musk biography in Chinese held the top three spots in the category of most popular finance and economics biographies.

A Citic Press book stand advertises for the release of the Chinese version of Walter Isaacson’s new Elon Musk biography.
CNBC | Evelyn Cheng

BEIJING — Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk hit the Chinese market Tuesday, several hours ahead of the U.S. release due to a time difference that puts Beijing 12 hours ahead of New York.
A day earlier, publisher Citic Press Group raised the book’s selling price to 79 Chinese yuan ($10.84), up from 59 yuan previously, according to Chris Sun, lead translator of Isaacson’s book into Chinese.

Citing conversations with the publisher, Sun said a rare, urgent additional printing was done during the pre-sale period and that the work was Citic Press’ “highest-level confidential project” of the year. That’s according to a CNBC translation of the Chinese comments.
Citic did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment. The Shenzhen-listed company reported revenue from operations of 872.65 million yuan for the first half of the year, up 2.9% from a year ago.

Sun said Citic was unable to provide sales figures of the new biography as of Tuesday.
On the online retailer JD.com’s app Tuesday, versions of the new Elon Musk biography in Chinese held the top three spots in the category of most popular finance and economics biographies.
In fourth place was Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs in Chinese.

About a decade ago, copies of the Jobs’ biography could be found at numerous street-side stands in China. They were almost always knockoffs, but the distinctive black-and-white cover stood out.
Sun pointed out that much has changed between the U.S. and China since then, as well as ordinary Chinese people’s awareness of such tech entrepreneurs.
When Jobs died in 2011, he was better known among China’s elites, while ordinary people were still learning about Apple’s products, Sun said.
Today, “ordinary people [in China] have a very high opinion of Musk,” Sun said, noting some people are proud to be Tesla owners. Ashlee Vance’s earlier biography of Musk has been popular in China as well.
Read excerpts from Isaacson’s new Musk biography here: More