Hong Kong-listed consumer goods stocks dropped on Wednesday as investors braced for a lacklustre earnings season.

Shares in Chow Tai Fook fell more than 6 per cent after the jewellery chain reported a 20 per cent year-on-year decline in sales during the April-June quarter.

Anne Ling, analyst at Jefferies, said Chow Tai Fook faced a sales decline of 14 per cent for the first half of its fiscal year to the end of September. “[The] price of gold needs to stabilise further to re-attract consumers,” she said in a note to clients.

In other moves, luxury brand Prada dropped 5.7 per cent, and bottled water company Nongfu Spring declined 7 per cent.

“Continued weakness in China activity [is] likely to result in companies having mixed guidance,” JPMorgan analyst Mislav Matejka wrote in an advisory.

Hong Kong’s overall Hang Seng index fell 0.6 per cent in afternoon trading.

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US consumers’ embrace of low-cost ecommerce sites brought a “quite explosive” volume of shipments for UPS in the second quarter but failed to prevent the delivery company’s profits from falling by almost a third.

UPS chief executive Carol Tomé told analysts on Tuesday that the company had seen “customers trade down between services” in the quarter to its “more economical products”, with new ecommerce entrants “highly leveraging” SurePost, one of its cheaper services.

Shares in the company suffered a record drop, closing down 12 per cent at $127.68, their lowest level in four years.

Tomé did not identify the two new ecommerce groups that had started using its network, which have a similar profile to Chinese online retailers Shein and Temu, but told its earnings call “you can imagine who they are”. Chief financial officer Brian Newman said UPS had “invited” the ecommerce groups into its network.

UPS had seen a “shift towards value products with shippers choosing ground over air and SurePost over ground”, Tomé said, adding that it had also witnessed “a surge in lightweight, short zone volume moving into our network”.

The Atlanta-based parcel and shipping group, which is seen as an economic bellwether, reported a 30.1 per cent drop in its operating profits for the second quarter compared with the same period a year earlier.

It reported a smaller 1.1 per cent year on year decline in revenues, as it lowered its forecast for full-year adjusted operating margins to about 9.4 per cent, compared with the range of 10 per cent to 10.6 per cent it had given three months ago.

UPS earlier this year announced that it was cutting 12,000 jobs in an attempt to save $1bn following an expensive pay agreement with its Teamsters union. Executives said that its latest earnings reflected the “front loading of costs associated with our new labour contract”.

The company also had to pay a one-off $94mn international regulatory fee in its second quarter.

President Joe Biden’s decision to bow out of the 2024 election followed weeks of pressure from Democrats concerned about his age and ability to win and serve another four years. But conspiracy theorists, right-wing influencers and even some Republican politicians immediately cast Biden’s resignation from the campaign as evidence of something more sinister.

The flurry of unverified rumors, speculation, and conspiracy theories comes as people are reeling from an onslaught of high-stakes political upheaval, from the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump on July 13 to Biden’s withdrawal from the race eight days later.

On the most extreme end, Charlie Kirk of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA and far-right activist Laura Loomer suggested, without evidence, that Biden may be dying or already dead.

Others, including billionaire hedge fund boss Bill Ackman, raised doubts over the president’s letter announcing his decision, baselessly suggesting his signature wasn’t really his.

Republican politicians including U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado speculated about why Biden had not been seen in public since the announcement. On Tuesday, the president emerged from his beach house in Delaware where he had been isolating while recovering from Covid. He plans to address the nation on Wednesday.

“If this were a hostage situation, that letter would not qualify as proof of life,” Ackman posted on X on Sunday. (On Tuesday, Ackman shared a post with a video of Biden boarding Air Force One that read in part, “President Joe Biden seen in public for the first time in nearly a week, debunking conspiracy theories online.”)

Still others on the right framed Biden’s move as not his at all, but an anti-democratic coup orchestrated by shadowy forces including George Soros, a frequent target of conspiracy theories. In doing so, they cast doubt on the legitimacy of Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy — and, ultimately, on the election as a whole.

“The idea of selecting the Democrat[ic] Party’s nominee because George Soros and Barack Obama and a couple of elite Democrats got in a smoke-filled room and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard, that is not how it works,” Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance told the crowd at a rally in Ohio on Monday.

Harris is also being targeted with baseless claims and conspiracy theories, including the long-running falsehood that she’s not really an American citizen, despite the fact she was born in Oakland, Calif. These “birther” smears came up when she ran for president in 2020 and were amplified by Trump, who previously promoted similar false claims about former president Barack Obama.

After any breaking news event, people search for answers that may not be available right away. That information void is a ripe environment for the spread of incorrect and incomplete information, as well as for exploitation by those seeking to gain clout or financial reward by amplifying the wildest theories, said Melissa Ryan, CEO of consulting firm CARD Strategies, which tracks disinformation and extremism.

“The thing to understand is for folks who live in this cinematic universe, things are never what they seem. It’s always a false flag,” said Ryan.

When Biden called in to an event with Harris and campaign staff on Monday, some online commentators immediately began to speculate that it was not in fact Biden’s voice, but a deepfake created with artificial intelligence.

Some figures on the right had been pressing the narrative, without evidence, that Biden would be replaced on the Democratic ticket at the last minute since at least last fall. Much of that speculation claimed former first lady Michelle Obama or California Gov. Gavin Newsom would be the replacement nominee. Despite the discrepancy in the details, the reality of Biden stepping out has many of them feeling validated.

“It’s shocking how precisely right you can be, right down to the exact timing,” former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who was among those who had long suggested Biden would drop out, posted on X on Sunday.

There is little downside to this kind of speculation, which can boost an influencer’s profile whether or not their claims pan out.

“The truth is, you know, sometimes things change. It doesn’t mean that, oh, the conspiracy theorists were right all along. It means everyone was working with the information they knew to be true,” Ryan said.

When speculation does line up with reality — even imperfectly — that creates opportunity to build trust and expand their audience.

“We’ve been seeing that in a lot of different contexts, whether it’s in politics or astrology even on the internet, of people trying to say like, ‘Oh, we knew that this was going to happen,’ and that assigns some sort of authority to your voice,” said Danielle Lee Tomson, research manager at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

“Like, ‘I had inside information or some sort of analytic ability to understand that this was going on. So, you know, you can trust me on this future information that I might help you process or make sense of’,” she said.