Forgery or Satoshi? COPA vs Wright Trial Day Two 👨🏻‍⚖️

🐺 Hi pack-mates,

This is Howling Markets, the newsletter that will give you a preferential treatment as if you were a Class A Shareholder!

Today we will be covering:

• Education: What Are A-Shares? 🔄

• Chinese Stocks Rebound as Aid Arrives 📊

• Forgery or Satoshi? COPA vs Wright Trial Day Two 👨🏻‍⚖️

• Equity and Debt Markets Daily Update ⚖️

• And more!

Market Watch 👀

What Are A-Shares?

When talking about shares the main distinction that is often made is between common and preferred shares, but the situation is slightly more complicated. When deciding which types of shares to issue, a company can choose between three types: Class A, Class B and Class C.

Each of these three categories encompasses a set of unique features that can be slightly modified and changed by the issuing company. Usually, the main difference between the three will depend on dividend priority, voting rights and liquidation preferences.

Traditionally, Class A shares have been reserved for the company’s management as they offered more voting rights than other classes of shares. So, for example, a Class A share could attribute 5 votes to the shareholder, while a Class B share could attribute only a single vote to the shareholder.

Additionally, Class A shareholders usually have a dividend priority, meaning that the company will first pay all Class A dividends in full and then divide the remaining earnings among the remaining shareholders.

Finally, liquidation preferences are exercised when a company goes bankrupt, and its assets are liquidated. In this case, Class A shareholders must be reimbursed in full before other classes of shares.

Chinese Stocks Rebound as Aid Arrives

After months of adverse market conditions and a weak try at stopping the trend, the China Security Regulatory Commission (CRSC) has decided to step in in a more powerful and active way.

Last week it had announced that it would ban short selling to stop speculators from driving the market down even further just to generate some extra profits. However, this time the CSRC also added that it will encourage institutional investors to hold A-shares for long periods of time, pushing the market towards a long-run stability.

On the other hand, many investors commented that the underlying issue of the Chinese markets is the current consumer sentiment which has been bashed for tens of years and even recently betrayed by the snowball derivatives.

Because of this, Wang Qi, CFO for wealth management at UOB Kay Hian in Hong Kong, said that stimulus packages will not be enough to initiate a bull run and that investors will need to see the government take the initiative and buy the market.

And this is exactly what happened. On Tuesday, Huijin Fund, a subsidiary of the sovereign China Investment Fund, announced that they would increase their ETFs purchase over the next period, initiating an extremely explosive rally.

Over the past two days the CSI 500 gained almost +15%, closing +7.75% on Tuesday and +6.32% on Wednesday. Could this be the beginning of a Chinese bull run?

Today’s Howling Question

And now, it is time for our howling question!

Today, Solana was struck by a significant problem in its validation protocol that caused an outage of the network that lasted around 5 hours.

The issue was so severe that the developers had to release a new patch right away and discontinue the previous version of the software, restoring the normal operating activities.

Considering Solana’s outage, how do you think the token closed the trading session?

a)  -3%

b)  -1.5%

c)  0%

d)  +1.4%

e)  +4.8%

Bonus Question: How did it perform throughout the day?

Try to answer the question by yourself, and then check the correct answer after the last interesting news!

Forgery or Satoshi? COPA vs Wright Trial Day Two

After a day of cross-examination of the new evidence deposited on Monday by Wrights’ legal team, on Tuesday the self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto was asked to explain quite a lot of inconsistencies regarding the material provided.

The trial restarted as it left off the previous day, with COPA accusing Wright of “industrial forging” of documents that would prove he is Bitcoin’s developer. The first answer to this accusation came minutes after the beginning of the trial in the form of the humble statement: “If I had forged that document, then it would be perfect” made by Wright.

The second day of the proceeding was essentially just a series of questions posed to Wright about the inconsistencies found in the evidence he provided. The inconsistencies ranged from obscuring the research bar when recording a video proof, to font mismatches to plagiarized content from a 2002 research paper.

Wright dismissed all the accusations by blaming his multitasking skills and by stating that he took inspiration from that research paper by using his own words.

The trial is expected to last at least until the 13^th of February, but on Tuesday the judge told Wright that he will most likely not be able to provide any further evidence for the remainder of the trial. How do you expect this proceeding to end?

Equity and Debt Markets Update

And now, our daily markets update!

On Tuesday, the stock market remained almost still as it initially fell during the trading session before recovering and closing just +0.23% up. However, despite this increase, the price did not manage to breach the newly set all-time high.

Bond yields, instead, performed a stronger and more volatile move during Tuesday’s trading session, partially retracing the rally caused by a later rate cut expectation. The 10 year US government bond yield fell by -1.39%, while still remaining relatively elevated above the 4% level.

Answer

The correct answer is d) +1.4%

Solana Concluded the day up +1.42% despite incurring a -3% intraday dip caused when the outage started.

However, because the outage was quickly resolved and it wasn’t caused by a malicious attack, the price of the token did not react much, and it continued its trend without significant impediments.

Howl-Worthy Memes 😂

🐺 See you next time!

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