TOP 5 STOCKS TO WATCHOUT:-


1.#Volkswagen - Volkswagen said bad planning on the part of its suppliers has compounded a computer chip shortage blighting the global auto industry, claiming it gave ample notice that the coronavirus' hit to car production would be limited.
VW was in December the first carmaker to warn of a chip supply crunch that has hit global automakers, forcing them to cut or halt production as the semiconductor industry struggles to keep up with a recovery in the car sector.
The German company told its suppliers in April last year - when much of global car production was idled due to the coronavirus pandemic - that it expected a strong recovery in the second half of 2020, a VW executive, who declined to be named, told Reuters.
Volkswagen, the world's second-largest carmaker, says it was made aware of the chip shortage by one of its suppliers at the end of November, but that that warning came too late.
"We have communicated our demand early on. We have passed on our forecasts which have confirmed that demand," said the executive.
"If suppliers do not trust our numbers and consult their own forecasts, we should have been informed straight away. This has not happened."
As well as identifying potential weaknesses in the automotive supply chain, the question over who is responsible for the shortages could play a decisive role in any legal disputes down the line.
The current shortages are seen as stemming from a combination of factors, as auto manufacturers compete against the sprawling consumer electronics industry for chip supplies.
The executive said differing demand forecasts could explain the current problem, which has led VW to warn that chip supply will remain strained during the first half of 2021.
"This has caused a lot of trouble. If the supplier didn't have a chip problem in its own supply chain, we would get our control units," the executive said.

2. #TWITTER :The Bank of Italy said on Monday a set of experimental indicators it created from the content of millions of tweets accurately tracked consumer mood on price, offering scope for a powerful new monetary policy tool.
The effort comes as economists and policy-makers around the world increasingly turn to social media and other unconventional sources to measure consumer behaviour and as inflation continues to defy targets set by many leading central banks.
Researchers found their indicators, based on millions of tweets, not only tallied with final inflation read-outs and existing measures of price expectations by Italy's national statistics office, financial markets and other forecasters but were also in real-time and provided more granular detail.
"The results suggest that Twitter can be a new timely source for devising a method to elicit beliefs," the authors of the 107-page study said, adding they believed the Italy-focused research could be replicated elsewhere.
Twitter has roughly 200 million monthly active users worldwide and had around 10 million active users in Italy in 2019, the authors said.
The analysis started by collecting 11.1 million tweets posted in Italian between June 2013 and December 2019 containing at least one of a set of previously selected words related to inflation, prices and price dynamics.
"The rationale for focusing on pure raw tweets count is the intuitive notion that the more people talk about something, the larger is the probability it reflects their opinion and that their view can influence other people's expectations," it said.
Then the dataset was "cleaned" to remove advertisements or tweets that use the word inflation in an unrelated context.


3. #GOOGLE :- Google Ireland and Google France have agreed to pay a 1.1 million euros ($1.34 million) fine after a probe found that Google's hotel rankings could be misleading for consumers, France's finance ministry and fraud watchdog said on Monday.
The ministry and watchdog also said in a statement that Google has amended its hotel rankings practices since September 2019.