News and analysis

Shiba Inu (SHIB) has experienced a significant decline of 15.0% this week, reaching $0.0000252 per token. Despite this drop, SHIB's performance still outpaces Bitcoin's 7.5% decline. However, such fluctuations are not unusual for SHIB, especially considering its previous surge of 377% from February 26 to March 5.

This volatility is reminiscent of the events in May 2021 when SHIB skyrocketed by 2500% in a single month, only to later retract 88% of its gains. However, after a period of consolidation, SHIB rallied to new all-time highs at $0.0000887. Whether history will repeat itself remains uncertain.

From a technical perspective, SHIB is likely to continue its downward trajectory towards $0.0000200 after breaching the support level at $0.0000300. Whether prices will dip below this level remains uncertain. However, it's worth noting that the Shiba Inu team is actively incinerating tokens to address internal inflation, which could potentially mitigate further declines.

I feel it's the right to continue tactics of holding mid-term buy positions in Airbus (AIR) stock, even though its share price accelerated upward this month. The European aircraft manufacturer added nearly 13% since late February and also gave me $25 of pure income per share, which I initially bought at €142.50 at the very start of the year following a ripped plug incident on the board of Alaska Airlines' Boeing 737 Max. And, of course, my actual benefit is 5 times bigger, exceeding 85%, due to the effect of margin trading with an 1/5 leverage provided by Metadoro. Now, Airbus is fully sold out until 2030 for single-aisle jets and 2028 for widebodies, as I already noted, while its main rival Boeing suffers from mounting troubles in terms of its image, and probably orders as well.

A suspicious “suicide” of Boeing whistleblower John Barnett, a 62-year-old former employee of the aerospace corporation, is only one of the sad news for Boeing's management. This man was employed as a quality manager for most of his 32-year career. On March 7-8, he provided testimony for a civil case he decided to pursue against Boeing, raising questions about the safety of Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner, and later he was found dead in a truck parked in a hotel parking lot, before he appeared to give his third day of testimony. Yet, Barnett’s lawyers challenged the suicide claim by stating that there is no indication of he would take his own life, so that the police "need to investigate this fully and accurately and tell the public", with "no detail can be left unturned". A Barnett’s family friend told an ABC interviewer before this weekend that Barnett had warned her, “If anything happens to me, it’s not suicide”.

Assuming all of this was an unfortunate coincidence, of course, the whistleblower scandal could not add Boeing points in the eyes of consumers. Barnett spoke out about Boeing’s allegedly "negligent" practices, describing how Boeing "compromised quality control" in a manner that could be “catastrophic” for passengers, as his overriding goal, according to Barnett himself, was to “make the cash register ring.” He also tried to expose the role of Boeing’s military connections after the company's merger with McDonnell Douglas in 1997 by claiming the motto of a new team members was "we can do anything we want", including "not to document defects" and "to work outside procedures to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected”. Defaulting that all allegations are false, being the figment of a dismissed employee's evil imagination, I could clearly understand that much more new orders are going to come to Boeing's rivals.

Investigation showed four bolts were completely missing from the door plug that was lost in the air, according to the US National Transportation Safety Board. Misfortunes never come alone. Being under this kind of pressure, Boeing is now "weighing up the possibility of selling at least two of its defense businesses", including Boeing's Digital Receiver Technology Inc., Bloomberg said on March 19. Whatever the reasons, people "familiar with the discussions" said to Bloomberg financial advisers working on Boeing's behalf began to reach out to potential buyers long before the January plug incident so that contacts have been underway for about a year. Even if some unprofitable assets were discussed to improve the weakening balance sheet, this is another sign of potential crisis for the world's biggest aircraft maker.

For me, not only more bets in Boeing's rival Airbus group look as a justified approach, but even direct short selling of Boeing's shares is seemingly not the dumbest option, when possible targets from below at least in the range of $140-160 could be kept in mind, as price levels below $120 were detected last time in September 2022. Boeing's shares dipped to 6-month lows at $177.52 at some moment of yesterday's regular session on Wall Street and also tried to decline again on pre-market on March 20.

Google-parent Alphabet (GOOG) rose by nearly 6% in market value to exceed the psychological barrier of $150 per share at some point of the regular trading session on March 18. The search giant got a sudden boost from a Bloomberg News report that Apple is allegedly at a developed stage of business talks on building Google's Gemini artificial intelligence engine into its new iPhone. The report was citing "people familiar with the situation", which was enough for another round of an explosive rise of Google stocks. Journalists detailed the subject of negotiations as licensing Gemini generative AI chatbot, formerly known as Bard, for some features which are going to come to the iPhone software during the year, while particular conditions or branding of a potential agreement have not been decided yet.

A deal may be officially announced in summer, Bloomberg report says, with Apple's annual conference of developers in June as an option. Gemini is now considered by many users as probably the best available option for a conversion of text- and picture- based tasks into multimedia content. Apple stock price recovered only within 2.5% on the news, and then wasted most of its gains, while Google kept about 70% of its initial price jump before the opening bell on the next day. This may be explained by considerations that the cooperative work augurs well for a promising future of Google rather than Apple, which probably cannot rely on its own AI-related know-hows. Meanwhile, Google has a potential to expand its AI services to one or two billion active Apple devices, given that Google is now the default search engine on Apple's Safari web browser, which prevents rival services including Microsoft-sponsored ChatGPT from encroaching on Google's clear search dominance.

Less than one week ago, Microsoft representatives testified before EU antitrust regulators, focusing on the rivalry between Microsoft and Google. In their point of view, Google enjoys "a competitive edge" in the generative AI segment due to its "trove of data" and AI-optimised chips, as its "large sets of proprietary data from Google Search Index and YouTube enable it to train its large language model Gemini". "Today, only one company - Google - is vertically integrated in a manner that provides it with strength and independence at every AI layer from chips to a thriving mobile app store. Everyone else must rely on partnerships to innovate and compete," Microsoft said to the commission. It is YouTube, which hosts an estimated 14 billion videos, so that Google has access to such content, but other AI developers do not, Microsoft lawyers suggested.

So, there are two consecutive reasons in a short to remind investors of Google's even brighter-than-expected prospects in the AI field. Our ideas on Google stock's target price now extend to at least $175 per share, compared to about $147 at the time of this writing. The average Wall Street analysts' 12-month price target is now shifted to $164.17, which is also +11.5% upside from the current levels.

EOS has experienced a decline of 9.4% this week, falling to $0.917. The token faced significant downward pressure, particularly on Tuesday when it reached a monthly low of $0.878. This decline can be attributed to the overall weakness in the market, with Bitcoin (BTC) also losing 7.5% to trade at $64,187.

Notably, EOS seems to be closely following the movements of Bitcoin, mirroring its price fluctuations. The token breached its uptrend support level at $1.000 and subsequently retested it, suggesting potential further downside. As such, there is a possibility for EOS to decline further towards the uptrend support at $0.800.

It's worth noting that there have been no significant internal developments or news to support EOS, further contributing to its downward trajectory.