The purchasing managers reported Monday on factory orders in October. China disappointed markets as the Caixin PM index again showed slowing order levels, at 49.5 for the month. Anything under 50 shows contraction.

However, Britain's PMI came roaring in at 55.5. The Eurozone PMI also showed good gains, at 52.3. The US PMI published later by the Institute for Supply Management was less uplifting, at 50.1, barely positive.

The Chinese data squeezed down the Shanghai stock market index by 1.7% and the contagion spread to other Asian markets. However, markets were buoyant across the pond after the sharp rise in orders.

I am mourning the Mets and unhappy that no US New Yo​r​k marathoner came in higher up than 7^th in the men's and women's races yesterday, beaten mostly by Kenyans and a few Ethiopians. The ladies were more varied. If Barrack Obama really was a Kenyan he would be cheering, but despite Donald Trump's charges, he isn't Kenyan except by half his ancestry.

Moreover Barrack Obama Sr was a Luo from the lakes, not likely to have benefited from a lifetime buildup of lung capacity because of living in the Highlands.

More from Israel, Germany, Britain, Canada, Hong Kong, India, The Netherlands, South Korea, and Bermuda today. Today's blog will be late as I am going to a conference on R&D by a non-US pharmaceutical firm.

*The stars went into alignment yesterday for Delek Group, DGRLY, the developer of offshore gas fields in Israeli and Cypriot waters. Aryeh Deri, the Shas Party Minister of the Economy, resigned after his backing for an antitrust attack on Delek was voted down by the cabinet and the Knesset, or parliament. PM Benjamin Netanyahu is taking his place and wants to fast-track natural gas production.

Over the weekend too, Energy Minister

Yuval Steinitz got into a confab with ENI, to set up a deal whereby the Italian oil company would take over two fields which Delek has to spin off under the cabinet deal: Karish and Tanim. ENI discovered a huge new gas deposit offshore Egypt, and the Israelis want to create synergies for example by reversing the trans-Sinai pipeline to deliver Israeli gas to the Nile Delta for export to Europe along with Egypt's future output. ENI was supposed to become the intermediary for shipping Israeli gas to European markets.

Delek's spinoff of half its US Gulf Coast concessions held by two Israeli subs to their CEO, Gideon Tadmor, may lead to the creation of a new Israeli oil company by an ipo, with Mr Tadmor heading Navitas Petroleum and leaving the Delek C-suite. Delek's largest shareholder, Yitzchak Tshuva, an Arab-speaking Israeli of Libyan heritage, (Mizrahi) has long sought to create a cross-border Israeli-Arab conglomerate. The currently producing Tamar field delivers gas not just to Israel, but also to Jordan and the West Bank.

The Leviathan field, as big as its name implies, extends to Cypriot waters and Delek is a participant in the development of the Aphrodite field there.

The only problem with Tshuva's visionary plans has been Israel's poisonous politics. But things appear to be getting better.

Energetic Energy

*BP plc has decided not to seek refunds from Deepwater Horizon victims who may have filed fraudulent claims. This helps it cap its exposure to federal and state claims it will be settling over the next decade, and ends the lawyer piñata since the Gulf of Mexico disaster, probably good for BP. However, it is likely to be among the losers as Alaska cuts the subsidies it had paid for decades to drillers. Until this year the state's tax breaks to oil companies were more than offset by taxes received and royalties paid to every state resident. But now oil prices have fallen and Alaska says it cannot afford to continue to encourage drilling.

Morgan Stanley today upped BP to equal weight from underweight with no target price.

*As I keep writing, Posco besides being a South Korea national champion is also a highly innovative steelmaker. Today it signed up to buy an extra 8.4 megawatts of hydrogen fuel cell modules for making steel from US FuelCell Energy in addition to its standard monthly order for 122 megawatts. This is a sign that PKX is running into new demand. Its patented technology uses fuel cells to run electric arc furnaces and also clean out pollutants. An electric arc furnace magnetizes and orients iron ore feeds to march the direction of the rollers flattening pellets to produce steel. This means it can use normal coal rather than polluting coking coal for making steel. PKX's process also efficiently uses alternative energy without depending on sprawling solar fuel installations which don't work well in the winter. It saves money because Posco doesn't need sinter and coke plants.

*Cameco reported after the market closed Friday, logical if you operate out of Saskatoon in western Canada and particularly if the quarter was bad. Adjusted earnings came in at minus 1 cents (US)/sh vs minus 37¢ a year earlier. The consensus forecast was plus 13 cents, a real miss. However Q3 sales were well ahead of last year's $587 mn and also beat forecasts at $649 mn. Gross profits before capex and despite lower fuel prices were down only 7% to $133 mn. With various accounting tools the adjusted net was converted into $78 mn (down a mere 16% y/y) and that produced a profit/share of 20 cents vs prior year 23 cents, down only 13% y/y. These are not IFRS numbers of course.

CEO Tim Gitzel said that apart from YTD results being “as expected” in a period of low prices, CCJ continues to hold a “positive long-term view” and is preparing for the demand-driven market we see coming” as nuclear power startups resume. This explains why CCJ tapped into its cash from operations this year to the tune of $121 mn for capex, whereas last year it did not. We had vainly hoped that the restart of Cigar Lake would end the demand for capex but we were wrong. One bad element was lower tax recovery and another the big $184 mn impairment charge on its GE-Hitachi laser Enrichment facility.

As a certified nuclear nut I am sticking with CCJ.

*Ecopetrol is up 2.6% today in London perhaps because The Economist ran a supplement on Colombia this week and EC is how you invest to gain from a settlement with the guerrillas in the 3^rd largest Latin American country, after Brazil and Mexico which get far more attention.

Minor Drug Deals

*Tomorrow's R&D conference is being held at the Marriott Central Park South by GlaxoSmithKline. After I was banned from the gathering by a Philadelphia IR after the British said I could go, he capitulated.

*Teva (TEVA) of Israel is up on news that it has given Alexza back rights to the Adasuve drug for treating acute agitation from schizophrenia or bipolar disorders. There are many issues which as Alexza admitted. Teva signed the deal in May 2013 under a different CEO.

*Fellow Israeli Compugen reports before the opening tomorrow. We own it for its future not the last quarter. And I will be at GSK when the market opens.

CGEN researches databases to find genetic sequences of interest to pharma researchers because they block disease pathways and inhibit cancer and autoimmune diseases. Moreover CGEN is a female-headed company.

Finance and Tech

*Allianz in 2014 fell to 4^th from 3rd among world investment funds ranked today in a supplement by The Financial Times, now beaten by State Street Advisors, whose shares I also own. The FT says STT runs passive funds like exchange traded funds. As a shareholder, I know it also runs actively managed ones. So I blame the drop in AZSEY funds under management on the Bill Gross Grexit last year from Allianz's US Pimco funds rather than a taste for indexation. The 2 leading fund managers, BlackRock and Vanguard, do run indexed funds although Vanguard's are not ETFs and it is not a listed fund management company being owned by its fund shareholders.

*Vodafone has been hit by hackers in Britain, after Talktalk last month, but on a smaller scale. VOD told the market today that 1,827 UK cellphone accounts were penetrated by baddies last month who gained access not just to the telephone numbers but also to some banking details. Given the modest scale of the break-in, VOD sent alerts to the customers before revealing the bad news. In the end the stock recovered and started to rise again in London.

*Our reporter on reinsurer Validus Holdgs and banking-security firm Gemalto will not be updating our VR and GTOMY Q3 results summaries because he has jury duty. GTOMY is Dutch and might be useful to VOD across the Channel. VR is Bermudan. And Harry is American.

*CEO Bill McDermott of SAP last summer lost an eye in a freak accident in the US. Now he has pushed Germany's SAP into developing technology not just for accounting applications, but also to develop digitization of healthcare information. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, to quote the French saying (dans le pays des aveugles, le borgne est roi.) During his treatment McDermott learned that his doctors could not ship MRI data from his surgeon to the trauma unit, and the cornea doctor had to use a telephone to coordinate with the retina doctor. So SAP's chief thinks the time has come to work out a cloud system for the medicos.

*Barron's today held an emerging markets roundtable with 4 fund managers. Among their most accessible picks were Tencent Holdings (TCEHY) of Hong Kong and HDFC Bank of India, which we sold (William Blair Emerging Markets); and Hong Kong's AIA (Van Eck Emerging Markets). We exited global player HFDC fearing the need to refinance its state-sector rivals in India. There are plenty of emerging market risks but some of the fear of bond defaults is overdone.

Fund Fundamentals

*After his pal Warren Buffett was quoted frequently Friday by Bill Ackman in support of Pershing Square Holdings buying into Valeant, Charlie Munger, who volunteers to help manage Good Samaritan Hospital in LA, weighted in to the contrary.

On Sat., Munger warned that VRX price hikes are “deeply immoral” if not illegal. As Bloomberg noted, his purpose was to beat down the activists who claim VRX is a version of Berkshire Hathaway (which is a stretch).

Another Valeant enthusiast is Sequoia Fund which also claims to be following the Oracle of Omaha. Munger said that price-gouging on drugs is not all naughty; it also is not sustainable. He said it reminds him of cheating in for-profit education and of ITT in the 1960s which also “grew in an evil way” by creating “a phony growth record.”

VRX was downrated today to neutral from buy by Goldman Sachs. However, Mizuho's US brokerage sub upped VRX to buy from hold over the weekend with a $155 target price.

While I am not as old as Munger and Buffett (to say nothing of Goldman Sachs) I too remember ITT because my friend Roberta Merserve worked for ITT in Brussels when I worked there as a journalist. Last week also a British writer on Seekingalpha.com recommended shorting Herbalife, another notorious Ackman position validated.

Your editor is not selling here PSH at these levels; I bought into the share partly as an educational experience, to learn how to be more of an activist investor. So far my takeaway is: don't.

Trades

*I bought more Cameco today at $13.72.

*My Stonegate Bank Cuba play is working out well; the fast-growing FL bank doubled its dividend to 8 cents/quarter. ¿Venceremos?