British American Tobacco today issued its Interim Management statement for the period covering the first nine months of 2014 and it wasn’t pretty reading as it reported lower revenue caused by adverse foreign exchange movements and weak volumes in western Europe.

Apple keeps on delivering with another strong set of earnings for its fiscal fourth quarter ended September 27th with revenues rising by 12%, helped by strong sales of iPhone. Earnings per share growth of 20% and a record $13.3 billion in cash flow were delivered in the quarter.

Investors in Google were feeling a little underwhelmed by the company’s third quarter earnings with the shares down about 1% to $524 in pre market trading.

Those looking for a non-conventional investment opportunity or to use a non-traceable, anonymous currency were pretty excited by the bitcoin phenomenon, the digital cryptocurrency which came into existence in 2009.

Oil and gas explorer, Cairn Energy, hasn’t been having much luck of late. With a tax dispute relating to its remaining interest in Rajasthan focused Cairn India hanging over the company preventing it from selling down its stake any further…

Gold is currently trading at $1,194 an ounce after falling as low as $1,183 in Asian trading as Friday’s strong non-farm payroll number from the US made the metal even less appealing in the face of potential Federal Reserve interest rate hikes.

Tesco is down 3.5% to 179p, Morrison is down 5% to 159p and Sainsbury’s is down 5% to 238p after the latter reported sales which were less bad than expected but called into question its dividend policy and caused profit estimates to be cut by nearly a fifth to £650 million

The Bloomberg Commodity index which tracks twenty key global commodities and the related Goldman Sachs Commodity index (GSCI) are both looking pretty poorly right now, with the former down at 5 year lows as worries about Chinese growth continue to way on investors minds.

Just when shareholders in Tesco thought it couldn’t get any worse after a series of profit warnings, there was another dramatic announcement this morning that trading profits for the first half of the year had been overstated by £250 million due to “to the accelerated recognition of commercial income and delayed accrual of costs”.

After strong investor demand, Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd will have their IPO at $68 on the NYSE and will start trading later today, in one of the world’s largest ever initial public offerings, valuing the company at $168 billion.