Noble

Noble: Counter cracked prior to the listing of its new rights shares on 4 Aug.

Company is seeking to:
1) Unwind its European power and natural gas trading business by end-2016, to ease its liquidity crunch;
2) Sell its prized energy business, Noble Americas Energy Solutions. This triggered questions on the group's future given that this cash-generative unit was previously touted by ex CEO Yusuf Alireza as a core asset to help turn around its flagging commodity trading business.

Noble intends to keep its LNG and physical pipeline natural gas trading desks and continue trading US power and gas.

However, the trading trading business ties up large amounts of capital and the liquidity available to the division was cut after Noble lost its investment-grade credit rating last year.

With funding the lifeblood of commodity traders, the credit downgrade is expected to see funding costs rising, and further erode its razor thin margins.