Hold the front page. Publisher Johnston Press (LON:JPR) sprung a surprise this morning by revealing it is in talks to buy the 'i' newspaper for £24mln.
Johnston owns the Yorkshire Post, which begs the question whether it will change the name of the paper to “aye”?
'Appen.
Having had to scrape the frost off my windscreen this morning, it is good to learn that both British Gas and rival EDF Energy have announced price cuts of around 5% today, albeit only for gas, not electricity.
"Our prices are under constant review and today’s announcement reflects falls in wholesale gas costs,” said Beatrice Bigois, managing director of customers at EDF Energy.
Customers might feel justified in saying “big deal” to Bigois, given wholesale gas prices have fallen around by 39% over the last year, and Amber Rudd, secretary of state for energy and climate change was quick to take to Twitter and post that the government expects all suppliers to pass on reductions in the cost of supplying energy to consumers.
Whatever happened to the free-market principle of always charging what the market will bear?
“Cheap holidays in other people's misery”, sang Johnny Rotten in 1977 and judging by recent trading updates from package tour giants TUI (LON:TUI) and Thomas Cook (LON:TCG), cheap holidays in certain destinations deemed to be at high risk of terrorist attacks might be available this summer.
“It is evident that there has been a significant shift in demand away from Turkey, with Summer 2016 bookings to that destination currently down around 40%,” TUI revealed last week, while this morning Thomas Cook (LON:TCG) said it had acted fast to offer its customers a broad range of alternatives to Tunisia and Egypt following the attacks on Paris and Istanbul (neither of which is Tunisia, but we get the idea).
Spain and the Canary Islands are the places to avoid this year if you don't want to rub shoulders with risk-averse sun-seekers.
Thomas Cook also made the claim that some customers value the greater security that a package holiday provides. I was going to suggest the claim is contentious, but it is not the claim that is open to doubt but the reasoning of customers who think congregating in the same place as everybody else makes them less likely to be the subject of a terrorist attack.
On the foreign exchange markets, traders can't get enough of the Japanese yen, apparently. Nothing to do with Japanese beer giant Asahi reportedly being in exclusive talks to buy a load of lager brands from SABMiller (LON:SAB) for a cool $2.9bn or so.
“The strength in the yen is driven to a large extent by the unwinding of carry trades which play upon the reliably low interest environment in Japan. As the yen appreciates to reflect this flight back to safety, the Japanese stock market is hurt by the perception that its export market will deteriorate. As long as the price of oil keeps falling and the yen keeps dragging the Nikkei lower, there is the expectation that European markets will continue to suffer,” suggested Joshua Mahony, a market analyst at IG Markets.
We'll take his word for it.
Shares in Renold (LON:RNO) took a bath yesterday, plunging from 44.25p to 29.875p, after the supplier of industrial chains and related power transmission products said underlying sales for the year to end-March are expected to be around 10% lower than the prior year.
At times like these, directors are expected to step forward, show willing, and demonstrate a bit of faith in the company in the form of a share purchase.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man, with the man in question being Brian Tenner, group finance director, who snapped up 100,000 shares at 33.25p a pop, taking his holding up to 558,396 shares, or 0.25% of the company.
As the company bean counter he clearly understands numbers; for an outlay of £33,250 he has helped send the shares 7.7% higher, lifting the value of his stake by almost fourteen grand.