Retailers Boosted by Record Sales During Black Friday Weekend

Consumers flocked to UK stores during Black Friday on 28 November 2014 for the biggest shopping day ever on the British high street. Barclaycard reports that this year's Black Friday was the highest spending day on record, with online sales up 37.5% compared to last year. Amazon UK, John Lewis and Worldpay also recorded a significant increase in sales over the Black Friday weekend.

Oxford Street was exceptionally busy during both Black Friday and Cyber Monday with consumers looking for bargains during this pre Christmas sales event. There was barely space to move on the streets with customers queuing at all major stores. Even Apple, which did not discount its goods during Black Friday, had an extremely long queue on Black Friday.

Online sales did not fare much better as we noticed the websites for a number of major stores such as Tesco, Argos, Currys and John Lewis were all down due to the huge volume of activity on their sites. It is worth noting that the Amazon website did not appear to suffer any downtime as it continued to operate seamlessly despite the huge increase in traffic. Amazon host their own cloud servers and were clearly equipped to deal with the surge in activity over the Black Friday weekend.

Black Friday was the busiest day on record for online retailer Amazon UK, with sales that "surpassed all expectations". The company said its website recorded orders for more than 5.5 million goods.

Ali Baba Floats on New York Stock Exchange in World’s Largest IPO

Chinese internet giant Alibaba (BABA) floated on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday in the world’s largest IPO. Alibaba shares soared 38 percent in their first day of trading as investors jumped at the chance to invest in the tech giant, which is the Chinese equivalent of Amazon and Ebay combined. The shares floated at the IPO price of $68.00 and rose to a high of $99.70 on the opening day of trading before settling down at $93.89. This gave rise to a market cap of a staggering $231 billion on the opening day. Alibaba is valued at 39 times its estimated earnings per share which is similar to Facebook’s price earnings ratio at the time of listing. The flotation is estimated to have raised between $20-$25 billion making Alibaba the world largest ever IPO.

The Chinese e-commerce company, which was founded by Jack Ma in his apartment in 1999, now accounts for 80 per cent of online sales in China and is set to grow in line with China’s burgeoning middle class. This is certainly one to watch.

Scotland Votes NO to Independence in Referendum

Scotland voted No to Independence in the Referendum last week. The vote turned out to be closer than was originally envisaged with 55% of the Scottish public voting No compared to 45% calling for a Yes vote.

The potential for a Yes vote for Scotland to break up from the UK gave rise to significant uncertainty and was met with a temporary drop in both the equity markets and to the value of the Pound. A successful Yes vote would have led to ramifications of a potential capital flight from Scotland due to uncertainty over whether the country would seek to use its own currency or join the Euro.

The rejection of Independence was followed by a sharp rise in the Pound on Friday and companies with Scottish links generated a rally to the FTSE 100 in the financial markets. Shares in the Royal Bank of Scotland, SSE, Weir and Standard Life were all up by approximately 2-3% following the news.

Turnout to the referendum on Scottish independence hit a record high for any election held in the UK since 1918 with a participation rate of 85%.