Live updates, Australia, China trade, oil prices

Following the news of K-pop girl group Blackpink renewing their contracts with agency YG Entertainment, Samsung Securities senior analyst Minha Choi said that a “significant burden” on the label’s stock price has been lifted.

On Wednesday, shares of YG spiked 25% after the contract renewal announcement, but pared gains on Thursday, falling about 2.3%.

In an email to CNBC, Choi forecast that even with the renewal of the four member group, he still expects YG’s earnings to decline in 2024, adding that if Blackpink did not renew with YG, he would expect earnings to fall further.

— Lim Hui Jie

Australia’s trade balance in October widened to AU$7.13 billion from 6.79 billion Australian dollars ($4.45 billion) the month before, but fell short of the AU$7.5 billion estimated by a Reuters poll of economists.

The country’s statistics bureau revealed that exports rose 0.4% month-on-month, or AU$182 million, driven by metal ores and minerals.

On the other hand, imports fell 1.9%, or A$763 million, from the previous month, mainly due to declines in imports of industrial transport equipment.

— Lim Hui Jie

The Chinese economy may have been in a funk this year, but Morgan Stanley sees promise in the tech sector – naming stocks to play the theme into the new year.

Looking ahead, the bank’s analysts expect 2024 to be “another year of an alpha-driven market as subpar macro improvements weigh on industry growth.”

“[We] expect alpha-driven performance for select stocks,” they added, naming four alpha stocks they are overweight on, and two stocks they have a conservative stance on.

CNBC

— Amala Balakrishner

Artificial intelligence has been a huge theme this year, with investors rushing into many AI-related stocks.

Nvidia soared over 200% year to date, and Microsoft around 56%.

Dave Sekera, Morningstar’s chief U.S. market strategist, said he would move to an underweight position on tech stocks now and take profit in overvalued stocks.

But he flagged opportunities in two derivative plays on AI that investors can consider. “Not everything in the technology sector is overvalued. While the obvious plays in artificial intelligence have already run up, we see opportunities in those stocks we consider as second derivative plays on AI,” Sekera told CNBC on Wednesday.

CNBC Pro subscribers can read more here.

— Weizhen Tan

U.S. crude fell 4% on Wednesday, closing at its lowest point since June with retail gasoline hitting its cheapest since January.

The West Texas Intermediate contract for January fell $2.94, or 4.07%, to settle at $69.38 a barrel, while the Brent contract for February declined $2.90, or 3.76%, to settle at $74.30 a barrel.

U.S. crude and the global benchmark have fallen for five straight days, despite efforts by OPEC+ to boost prices by promising to slash supply in the first quarter of 2024.

Prices at the pump in the U.S., meanwhile, have followed oil prices lower to hit $3.22 a gallon on average as of Wednesday, the lowest price since Jan. 3, according to AAA.

— Spencer Kimball

For all its efforts this year, the Federal Reserve seems to have pulled off a successful soft landing, according to Omar Aguilar, CEO and chief investment officer of Schwab Asset Management.

“Where we are now, it’s almost seeing exactly what the Fed wanted to have. It’s almost like the perfect Goldilocks scenario for what they have been working at throughout the year,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Wednesday.

As signs of this strength, he cited growing U.S. economic resiliency, decreasing wage growth and “inflation moving to the right places.”

“Clearly the soft landing scenario seems to be the most plausible case,” he added.

As for how to invest in 2024, Aguilar believes that the mega-cap tech names that outperformed this year will “probably take a backseat.”

Instead, he suggested investors focus on more traditional and sensitive areas of the market, such as materials and financials. Investors would be wise to practice being “very conservative” and rotating in and out of assets slowly.

— Lisa Kailai Han

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on Wednesday again criticized cryptocurrency, suggesting that bitcoin and its many cohorts in the $1.6 trillion space should be banned.

“The only true use case for it is criminals, drug traffickers … money laundering, tax avoidance,” the head of the largest U.S. bank by assets said during a Senate Banking Committee hearing. “If I was the government, I’d close it down.”

Earlier this year, Dimon called bitcoin a “hyped-up fraud,” a comment he later walked back, and prior to that, a “pet rock.”

Under questioning from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Dimon and the heads of other big Wall Street banks all agreed that crypto companies should face the same anti-money laundering regulations as they do.

—Jeff Cox

The U.S. economy is on track to show only marginal growth in the final quarter of 2023, according to an Atlanta Federal Reserve tracker.

GDPNow, which adjusts projections on a real-time basis according to incoming data, is now pointing to growth of just 1.3% in the October-through-December period, an update Wednesday showed. The latest reading was up from 1.2% in the previous update but well below the initial 2.3% estimate in late October.

Adjustments in the expectations for real spending growth and exports fueled the latest adjustments.

—Jeff Cox