Finimize - 🤝 Russia has friends in high places

Hi Reader, here's what you need to know for May 31st in 3:08 minutes.

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Today's big stories

Russian oil giant Rosneft announced plans to pay a record dividend
Blockchain gaming is growing fast, and our analyst has laid out the companies and ETFs that are set to benefit – Read Now
The UK housing market is starting to slow down

Oils Of War

What’s Going On Here?

Russian oil titan Rosneft said on Monday that it’s planning to pay a record-high dividend.

What Does This Mean?

The oil price has been surging this year, hitting $120 a barrel for the second time in a couple of months on Monday. That’s mostly because the European Union is reportedly edging closer to banning Russian oil imports altogether, while Iran just went ahead and seized two Greek oil tankers – a move that could jeopardize relations with (and the oil supply from) the Middle East.

This has all played right into Rosneft’s hands: the company – which is responsible for about 40% of Russia’s total production – already posted its best-ever profit last year, and this booming oil price suggests it could top that record this year. And seeing as it now has so much cash burning a hole in its pocket, it just announced that it’d pay a record dividend to its investors too.

Why Should I Care?

The bigger picture: Russians are used to a chill.
You’d think Rosneft would be struggling more than it has been, given that many of the world’s biggest economies are giving Russia the cold shoulder. But India and China aren’t quite so at odds with the country, to the extent that their combined purchases hit an all-time high in April. In fact, Asian countries as a whole have been happy to hold up their empty bowl of gruel: new data has shown that Asia overtook Europe as the biggest buyer of Russian oil for the first time last month.

Zooming out: Russia’s got a friend in OPEC.
The sky-high oil price continues to be a serious concern for major economies, which is why the G7 has just urged OPEC – a group of oil-producing countries – to boost production significantly. But that’s a long shot: OPEC is benefiting from the current environment, meaning it has no real incentive to ramp up production faster than it was planning to anyway.

You might also like: No one’s ignoring energy prices, so why is everyone ignoring utilities stocks?

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Analyst Take

The Crypto Gaming Projects Changing The Game

By Jonathan Hobbs, Analyst

The world of blockchain gaming has been amassing a steady stream of early-stage investors in the last few years.

And it’s easy to see why: it boasts more users than any other crypto sector right now, and it’s seeing 15 times as many transactions as DeFi.

That might be why venture capital firms plowed around $4.5 billion into the industry in the first quarter of this year alone. That’s already overtaken the $4 billion of the whole of last year.

And now that the price of gaming tokens has plummeted along with the rest of the crypto market, now might be the moment to look into how to buy into this fast-growing sector.

So that’s today’s Insight: how the blockchain gaming sector works, and the projects at the vanguard of the revolution.

Read or listen to the Insight here

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