A quick look at the week ahead
This is a holiday-shortened three-day trading week; on the PSE, the scheduled events start (and end) today with the Alternergy [ALTER 0.76 unch] ownership group’s shares coming out of mandatory lockup. Approximately 50% of ALTER’s 3.9 billion common shares will become active and available for trading this morning. In international markets, there aren’t really any big events scheduled either. The parade of central banks announcing interest rate decisions will continue, but this is more of the B-tier and C-tier markets that don’t have a big impact on global sentiment, like Ghana (today), Hungary (
MB bottom-line: ALTER was an all-primary offering, so I’m always curious to see if there will be any in the ownership group who are looking to raise some personal cash that they couldn’t realize through the original IPO. ALTER’s usual volume is about 300k to 400k shares per day. I don’t expect to see selling pressure here, but I’ll do a follow-up and we’ll take a look at the data next week to see if my hunch was correct. On the inflation front, I think we’ll see a lot more posturing from stakeholders domestically on the actual drivers of inflation. Businesses are getting sweaty daydreaming about a lower rate environment, but our “sticky” inflation is causing the BSP to be more cautious than those in the business community would like. We all know that consumers are not the ones to blame for inflation. It’s not like the price of rice has gone up because people suddenly decided to eat more rice and engage in bidding wars for the right to consume that extra rice; the issue has been (for quite a while) one of scarcity, and (unfortunately) that’s an issue that the government is in the best position to address.
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