Earnings season. Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Honeywell, Caterpillar, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, SSE Plc, and CaixaBank are among companies reporting today.

A nice bonus. Amazon.com surpassed expectations at the end of 2019, causing a surge of more than 10% in the post-trade price. The Amazon Prime bet has worked, since the company has never recruited so many subscribers: there are now 150 million worldwide. The market had doubted this costly initiative, which seems to have taken root. In the fourth quarter of 2019 alone, revenues soared 21% to $87.4 billion and earnings reached $6.47 per share, well above the consensus. The share price rose by nearly 10% outside the session.

Other results:  Caterpillar published a lower-than-expected annual profit forecast, Visa lost 3% after posting a quarterly turnover below expectations and warning that the benefits it offers its customers would weigh on its turnover this year. Electronic Arts' forecasts are disappointing. SK Hynix in losses in the 4th quarter with the drop in semiconductor prices. Amgen forecasts disappoint.

New head at IBM. IBM announced that its CEO, Ginni Rometty, would hand over his position in April to the current head of the cloud department, Arvind Krishna.

Friday. It is today that the American, British and French courts are due to ratify the €3.6 billion agreement negotiated with Airbus to end prosecutions for corruption cases. Despite the sum to be paid, the compromise has been welcomed by the markets, as it removes what investors hate, a major element of uncertainty.

Orange remains European. The French operator has chosen Nokia and Ericsson, rather than Huawei, for the deployment of 5G in France. The Finnish operator will cover the West and South-East zones and the Swedish operator will cover the Ile-de-France, North-East and South-West zones, Orange specifies.

The shadow of a doubt. European competition authorities are reportedly ready to open an in-depth investigation into EssilorLuxottica's €7.2 billion bid for Dutch optics group GrandVision, Reuters has learned.

Navistar at VW? Volkswagen, via Traton, offered $2.9bn to buy Navistar, which is considering this unsolicited offer at $35 per share. The German group already holds 16.8% of the capital, acquired in 2016. The bidder hopes to convince the board of directors of its target of the merits of its proposal. The Navistar share has been in arrears since the beginning of the year, at around 24 USD. In addition, Volkswagen is selling 76% of Renk to Triton International for €530 million.

In other news. There were finally no cases of coronavirus on the liner Costa (Carnival) stuck in the port of Rome with thousands of people on board. Altria has taken a new depreciation of $4.1 billion on its Juul shares, whose valuation has fallen to $12 billion against $38 billion when it entered the capital at the end of 2018. An American syndicate of American Airlines pilots is attacking the company to force it to suspend its flights to China. Nintendo will not release a new Switch model this year, according to its CEO. Marathon Petroleum is considering selling its Speedway branch. Johnson & Johnson has been ordered to pay $344 million for misleading and deceptive advertising in the marketing of pelvic implants in the United States. Sandoz (Novartis) completes takeover of Aspen Pharmacare's Japanese business. Aston Martin Lagonda booms with new investors.