News and analysis

Maker (MKR) has experienced a 2.7% decline this week, falling to $2885 amidst negative trends in the broader cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin (BTC) similarly dropped by 3.0% to $62,800 during the same period.

MKR currently faces two key support levels located around the $3000 mark: a horizontal support level and the support of the ascending channel. Maker project developers are also delivering positive fundamental factors. Spark, a Maker SubDAO-built DeFi infrastructure, has injected $100 million in new DAI liquidity through Morpho Blue, Morpho’s lending protocol. This initiative enables users to leverage efficient positions backed by MakerDAO, borrowing Ethena’s stablecoins, USDe and sUSDe. As investors require MKR to obtain DAI stablecoin, the demand for MKR is anticipated to rise.

Considering both technical and fundamental factors, MKR could potentially reach $3500. However, this scenario is contingent upon BTC maintaining a value above $60,000 per coin.

Abundant upward moves of Microsoft (by nearly +4.5% to fully offset the previous day's 2.5% decline on Meta's 15% slump) and Google-parent Alphabet shares (by more than 11% to hit new all-time highs) in extended hours trading after long-awaited quarterly reports of the two giant companies on April 25, as well as a rapid rebound of the S&P broad market indicator from under a round figure of 5,000 points with a high closing price at 5,087.30 the same night, compellingly prove my general assumption. The bullish direction remains intact on Wall Street, unaffected by impacts of individually overbought large businesses' strong falls in market value, which including the recent double-digit drop in Meta Platforms, a 7% decline of Caterpillar and a 8% drop in IBM as a few of most striking examples. I should be happy that my analysis allowed me to avoid adding those temporary losers to my portfolio, as most rapidly declining stocks showed some weakness in their forward guidance or big investment houses just took their chance to latch on to their growing cost expenses or their performance in separate segments like it happened with a consulting part of IBM business, as it was considered not strong enough compared to the company's revenue and profit in its major hardware and computing divisions. In fact, Microsoft's CFO Amy Hood also admitted that capital expenditures would increase "materially" to help meet demand for its generative AI offerings, yet nobody cared of these kind of additional expenses as Microsoft is a producer of Chat GPT-like technologies to sell it to others, and not mostly the AI consumer, as it mostly happens in the case of Meta. This produces a big difference for the market's interpretation, so that Meta is falling, while Microsoft is growing on the same story of growth in expenses, as one may say.

All in all, some stocks are going down, but most stocks and Wall Street flagships are going up. And this is purely a normally mixed behaviour of various assets that used to accompany any reporting season, rather than global changes in the markets. With this belief, I am sure, most people in the crowd would continue to calmly and thoughtfully build further investment plans for May and summer months, while only paying closer attention to the details of particular reports' perception by the expert community and using a selective approach when forming and changing in their portfolios' composition. In this contest, the only thing, which is important in dealing with any investment strategies is not to be engaged in a "wholesale" approach of buying everything that can move, but better continue to rely on financial and technical analysis, as well as common sense and former investing experience, taking into account also the readiness of the market's majority for certain movements of specific companies at the moment.

OMG Network (OMG) experienced a 5.3% decline to $0.650 this week, marking the fourth consecutive day of retreat in prices. This trend raises the likelihood of the token testing the support level at $0.500. The first instance of this test occurred two weeks ago amid geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. Despite a slight recovery after this initial drop, the token has struggled to regain momentum, particularly as Bitcoin (BTC) declined by 0.7% over the same period. If the leading cryptocurrency fails to recover, OMG may face further downward pressure, potentially breaching the $0.500 support level.

Visa Inc (V) was able to hold only a poor 0.34% of nearly 3.2% initial gains on April 24, in a reaction to a very solid quarterly release. The powerful and penetrating all the corners of the world, the payment card provider recorded its ever-highest EPS (earnings per share) of $2.51 to beat the crowd's average projection of $2.44. Another jump in its business return was achieved on a historically peaked $8.78 billion of revenue from January to March. Most of the crowd decided to "score" and take profit, without even trying to re-test Visa's highs of March above $290 per share.

This sounds unfair to the company which is easily charging each and every payment or transaction on consumer cards, including rent for homeowners, purchasing of food, energy bills etc, but not be limited to, as Visa management continuously diversifying its sources of income by investing in startups, to add to mostly guaranteed and quite predictable card-based revenue. Overall volume of payments climbed by 8% during, while cross-border contribution (without intra-EU calculations) reportedly jumped by 16%. Visa comments showed the company's own public projections for revenue growth in the whole year of 2024 lie "in the low double-digits" as well, while its EPS growth is expected "in the low teens". Well done forecast, which could attract more investing activity with Visa assets in the nearest two or three weeks, if not before this weekend already. It seems to me that only a rather sharp recent correction in several flagship stocks on Wall Street, including chip makers and some megacaps, prevented the market from a more positive manifestation of their hopes for extending the bullish trend in Visa. So, betting on making up money on Visa shares again is now my choice for May and until mid-summer.

Today's complimentary news is that Visa joins AWS (Amazon Web Service) partner network in order to enhance payment services even more. This collaboration will help cross-border solutions, easing global money transfers and multi-currency holdings and integrating all these into AMS customers' existing operations environment, as well as "reducing the challenges faced by financial institutions and enterprises by making Visa's solutions easily accessible on diverse platforms,” according to Vanessa Colella, Global Head of Innovation and Digital Partnerships at Visa. It may enhance cloud-based connectivity by allowing companies to process payments through VisaNet via AWS, with a measure that may be considered as a potential cost-saver for clients who will not need to spend on local data centers and specialized payment hardware. Startups enrolled in Visa's Fintech Fast Track program can receive up to $100,000 in AWS Activate credits. This could potentially form a bonus to the existing business scheme of both Visa and Amazon, adding to their market values.