Stock market news today August 8

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Mutual funds are bleeding cash at an unprecedented rate,
warns Moody’s 

It’s not getting any easier for stock pickers to hold on to their
clients.

According to Moody’s, investors have pulled cash from actively
managed equity mutual funds in the US at the fastest year-to-date
pace on record. The funds lost $129.11 billion of investor
dollars from January to July, up from $99.88 billion a year
earlier, data compiled by the Investment Company Institute and
cited by Moody’s show.

The flight of money away from managers who meticulously pick
stocks and to exchange-traded funds is happening a bit faster
than Moody’s had forecast. The market share of passive
investments last year was nearly 35%, more than the credit-rating
agency’s estimate of 34%.

Elon Musk reportedly met with Japan’s SoftBank last year
about taking Tesla private

Tesla’s chief executive
Elon Musk met with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son in April 2017 about
the Japanese investment firm assisting in taking Tesla
private, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

The report came the day after Musk said he was considering taking
Tesla private and that funding had been secured, but did not
offer any specifics about the unprecedented move.

Bloomberg reported that Musk and Son failed to reach an agreement
over the structure of the company, citing sources. Tesla was
trading around $300 per share in April 2017 when the talks
reportedly fell through. The talks are no longer underway,
Bloomberg said.

One in 2 ICOs failed in the 2nd quarter — and those that
succeeded suffered huge losses

Money continues to flood into the booming market for digital
tokens issued by startups despite declines both in the quality of
the projects seeking funding and in the investment
returns, according
to a new report.

Fifty-five percent of so-called initial coin offerings failed to
complete in the second quarter, according to a report from the
agency ICORating. That was 5% more than failed in the first
quarter.

ICOs are a fundraising method in which companies and projects
issue digital tokens structured like bitcoin or Ethereum. These
tokens are sold in return for cash used to fund the development
of the seller’s businesses. ICOs exploded from almost nothing to
be a multibillion-dollar market in 2017, surging in popularity
alongside the rise in the price of bitcoin.

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