Todays Market News and Views

Market News and Views

The FTSE 100 is called to open lower this morning on profit-taking after closing at its highest level since late April on Thursday. Investors will await news from day 1 of the G20 meeting of financial leaders in South Korea which will keep the dollar in focus and the possibility of more quantitative easing in the US. There is no major economic data of note as we finish the week.

Today's Company announcements

BSkyB Q1 Results saw adjusted operating profit up 25% to £255m in the 3 months to end September on revenues ahead 15% at £1.53bn. There was net customer growth of 96,000 taking the reach of households to 9.956m with 2.3m customers now taking all three of TV, broadband and telephony packages with it adding that there was further good growth in HD with net additions of 215,00 to reach 3.2m customers.

African Barrick Gold Q3 Report notes EBITDA down 3% in the period to end September to $89m but up 58% to $286m year to date. There was a drop of 23% in gold production to 164,996 ounces in Q3 due to production setbacks although there was a 29% rise in achieved gold prices to $1,233/oz. The company reaffirmed guidance to produce 716,000 ounces in 2010, in line with last year's output after cutting its guidance twice recently.
Betfair IPO. The company has priced its IPO at £13 a share, which is at the top end of its indicated range to give it a market value on float of £1.39bn. Betfair shareholders are selling 15.2% of the stock raising gross proceeds of £211m with no new capital being raised. Conditional dealings are expected  to start today with unconditional dealings and admission to trading on the main market due to begin on 27 October 2010

360investgroup

Source: Gaurdian newspaper.

What's the carbon footprint of ... email?

The sending, sorting and filtering of spam email alone accounts for 33bn units of electricity each year

Spam

The carbon footprint of spam:
0.3g CO2e: A spam email
4g CO2e: A proper email
50g CO2e: An email with long and tiresome attachment

Sending and receiving electronic message is never going to constitute the largest part of our carbon footprints. But the energy required to support our increasingly heaving and numerous inboxes does add up.

Very roughly speaking (remember that all complex carbon footprints are really best guesses), a typical year of incoming mail for a business user – including sending, filtering and reading – creates a carbon footprint of around 135kg. That's over 1% of of a relatively green 10-tonne lifestyle and equivalent to driving 200 miles in an average car.

According to research by McAfee, a remarkable 78% of all incoming emails are spam. Around 62 trillion spam messages are sent every year, requiring the use of 33bn kilowatt hours (KWh) of electricity and causing around 20 million tonnes of CO2e per year.

McAfee estimated that around 80% of this electricity is consumed by the reading and deleting of spam and the searching through spam folders to dig out genuine emails that ended up there by accident. Spam filters themselves account for 16%. The actual generation and sending of the spam is a very small proportion of the footprint.

Although 78% of incoming emails sent are spam, these messages account for just 22% of the total footprint of a typical email account because, although they are a pain, you deal with them quickly. Most of them you never even see. A genuine email has a bigger carbon footprint, simply because it takes time to deal with.

The average email has just one-sixtieth the footprint of a letter, according to a back-of-the-envelope comparison. That looks like a carbon saving unless you end up sending 60 times more emails than the number of letters you would have posted in days gone by. Lots of people do. This is a good example of the rebound effect – a low-carbon technology resulting in higher-carbon living simply because we use it more.

If the great quest is for ways in which we can improve our lives while cutting carbon, surely spam and unnecessary email have to be very high on the hitlist along with old-fashioned junk paper post. But what can be done?
Here's one radical idea: a tax of a penny or cent per message sent. Obviously this wouldn't be ideal from the perspective of digital access, and it might be impossible to implement. And no-one likes an extra tax. But it would surely kill all spam instantly. The funds could go to tackling world poverty, say, or to help unlock a global emissions deal by supporting adaptation and technology transfer payments. The world's carbon footprint would go down by a substantial 20 million tonnes even if genuine users didn't change their habits at all. The average user would be saved a couple of minutes of their time every day and an annual fund of up to £170bn would be made available.

Source of article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2010/oct/21/carbon-footprint-email

360investgroup

carbon trading

Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley up carbon investments

Investment banking giants continue push into carbon markets

 

They might no longer be certain what the future holds for the financial sector, but two of the world's largest banks have this week signalled their ongoing support for the carbon market.

DWS Investments, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank's asset management division, announced yesterday that it is setting up a new carbon fund that is expected to invest in the burgeoning global carbon market.

The fund, which will be aimed at retail customers, is seeking to raise about €250m.

Deutsche Bank has been one of the most vocal supporters of the global carbon market and earlier this year launched its own trading platform designed to streamline trading processes and limit the risks associated with the purchasing of credits.

Meanwhile, carbon trading specialist EcoSecurities announced yesterday that the Institutional Securities Group and Global Wealth Management arm of US banking giant Morgan Stanley had increased its stake in the company to more than three per cent, gaining voting rights in the process.

The move comes just days after the company saw its share price slip, after announcing it had recorded a loss of €11.1m during the first half of the year.

However, the company insisted that despite a series of delays in its pipeline of new UN-approved carbon credits, it remained optimistic that the flow of carbon credits into the market would continue to accelerate.

The moves from DWS Investments and Morgan Stanley appear to provide further evidence that the carbon market will continue to prosper, despite the recent turmoil that is affecting global markets.

Experts predicted last week that with the carbon market underpinned by an expanding regulatory framework, it could present a "safe haven" for investors increasingly concerned about the stability of more established financial markets

Source: http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2226824/deutsche-bank-morgan-stanley