News and analysis

CME Group is the largest market place for derivatives. CME stocks dropped by 25% from the beginning of 2022. The only reason for such a decline is the overall market correction and not any business issues. High volatility is a benefit for the company as it offers the most important derivatives to mitigate financial risks. Among those are the most popular S&P 500 index futures and other indexes linked to derivatives, agricultural products, gold, silver, and crude derivatives. So, the company continues to receive decent profit that allows for the payment of high dividends to its investors.

Free Cash Flow (FCF) of the company in 2022 is expected to hit $2.8 billion. CME is improving its efficiency as every Dollar received in 2021 was converted into $0.48 of FCF, while this year this figure is expected to rise to $0.55, and in 2023 to $0.57. Regular annual dividends is at $4 or 2.3% of share value. CME is also paying interim dividends. By doing so, it paid $3.6 regular dividend and $3.25 interim dividends in 2021, or $6.85 per share, slightly above FCF per share at $6.77.

CME has a solid business model and sound financials without substantial debt. These facts allow the management to take more care of the company’s shareholders. The current overall downside configuration offers great opportunities for investors to add CME stocks to their long-term investment portfolios.

Avalanche is ranked by Coinmarketcap at the 12^th position by market cap with $7.8 billion, which is 4% less than Ethereum’s market cap. AVAX prices dropped by 82% of its peak values, allowing investors to buy it at early 2021 prices. Avalanche’s infrastructure consists of three logically isolated networks, each of these with their own processing, validators, and own set of rules.

This platform is often compared to the existing internet web infrastructure with core connection protocols like HTTP, surrounded by a huge number of networks to their apps. Avalanche allow for the creation of public and private systems as a blockchain or DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) and for the use of different virtual machines for apps, including EVM engine (Ethereum Virtual Machine) that allows Enthereum network programs to be developed.

Avalanche includes C-chain to create smart contracts that are processed on an advanced EVM engine, P-Chain that coordinates validators that process transactions and also allows for the creation and management of new subnetworks, and X-Chain which is a directed acyclic graph regulating issuance and trade of cryptoassets. DAG systems record new transactions on top of the old ones, allowing for processing speed to be increased and for capacity substantially. It is quite different to other blockchains, where transactions are compiled in blocks in order to be processed.

The advantage of Avalanche is that it provides anyone with the opportunity to create his or her own isolated blockchain with its own set of parameters, including access to apps and the programming language with which it will work. Every subnetwork can process around 4,500 transactions per second compared to 14 processed by the Ethereum network.

ETH is a native token for the Ethereum blockchain and is one of the two most reliable digital assets in the market along with Bitcoin. Ethereum is the first platform that became a hub for thousands of blockchain apps and other digital solutions. The recovery of ETH prices to November 2021 peaks at $4,900 would bring investors 190% profit.

Second layer solutions (Layer2) were introduced to improve stability and effectiveness of the Ethereum blockchain. These are blockchain network add-ons that are added on top of the primary blockchain. The most popular add-ons are Arbitrum, Loopring, Immutable X, and Polygon that have recently partnered with Meta (Facebook owner). In other words, the Ethereum blockchain network has a much broader use than the native blockchain itself.

Ethereum developers promise to release a new Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocol in late 2022. This protocol will allow miners to stake tokens to a special deposit to mine blocks. Some networks within the Ethereum blockchain have moved to PoS protocol this summer, while others are expected to move to this protocol in the middle of September.  This move will allow for the increase of processing capacity of the network to almost 100,000 transactions a second from the existing 30 transactions and lower commissions. This would also allow for ETH to switch to the deflation model when coins are algorithmically burned, while some coins would be removed from circulation as they would be blocked by staking - more than 13 million ETH or 10% of overall coins in circulation are blocked by staking. The problem is that coins are blocked for a long period of time and cannot be sold or exchanged for fiat currency.

DYDX tokens suffered a lot during the ongoing market correction and lost over 95% off their peak prices. dYdX is an advanced decentralised exchange, where clients can exchange cryptocurrencies and derivatives with marginal collateral. There are no KYC procedures to be followed within the exchange, as well as no need to disclose your personal data.

dYdX is runs on the Ethereum blockchain, known for its expensive transaction fees. However, StarkWare solution allows for lower fees as only commissions for trading are charged. The platform now runs on Layer 2 protocol which is incorporated into Ethereum’s  main network. This solution allows for transactions to be conducted instantly, while traders do not have to pay miners for validating transactions.

Market players are closely monitoring the dYdX V4 vehicle, which is  a standalone Cosmos blockchain, featuring a fully decentralised, off-chain, orderbook and matching engine. In other words, developers are going to create the entire trading infrastructure to scale up processes without involving any third-party applications. The service  cancelled two stimulus programs in order to lessen the effects of inflation within the dYdX platform and to support token prices.

Costco Wholesale Corporation has presented quite disappointing earnings report for the Fiscal Q1 2023. Revenues were reported up 8.1% year-on-year to $54.44 billion missing expectations of $54.65 billion. This is obviously not the reason for long-term investors to remove COST stocks from their portfolios as the company is set to maintain strong financial discipline and cost structure, not to stimulate high growth in the short term at any cost.

The operational margin in financial Q1 2022 was at 3.4%, and in Q1 2023 it was 3.2%. Costco is aiming to provide the most reasonable prices on their products to keep their clients loyal. That is why the operational margin is suffering. Meanwhile, EPS was up by 4.4% to $3.1, and membership fees rose by 6% year-on-year. So, the strategy seems to be buying itself.

Inflation in the United States is expected to return under control over the next year. So, there will be no need to deliver various marketing activities like coupon sales and others while loyal clients will be grateful for the support during the period of uncertainty. Costco is planning to open 24 new stores in 2023, increasing its potential to generate revenues.