I was going to blog about this last night, but I was too beat:
AP: BHP Billiton profit more than doubles to $6.1 bln. From the article:
The company said global economic conditions had improved over the past six months, as the United States and Europe lifted industrial output from previously depressed levels and China returned to double digit growth.
But BHP remains cautious about the speed and strength of the global economic recovery across the developed world.
“It appears that stimulus measures that supported the recovery have not fully addressed structural issues such as weak labor markets and excess production capacity in developed economies,” it said.
The company said a further variable would be the impact of any measures to control loan growth in China.
“It is evident that in the short term, the Chinese government will focus on containing asset inflation,” it said.
BHP said commodity markets will continue to be largely dependent on Chinese and Indian demand.
BHP Chart
I mentioned in a recent post that I had bought a few puts on BHP as a quasi-hedge against what I saw as the main exogenous risk associated with AYSI. Had BHP gone up on its earnings news today, and those puts gone down, I would have considered buying a few more of them.
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