MANILA, Philippines — Filipinos impressed Irish singer-songwriter Niall Horan so much that he repeatedly praised them during his return to the Philippines after six years.
The former One Direction member was back in Manila for the third time — his first being with the group in 2015, then his solo concert three years later — to bring his “The Show” tour to the Mall of Asia Arena, presented by Live Nation Philippines.
Horan promptly began his concert with “Nice To Meet Ya,” a mix of “Small Talk” and Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen,” “On a Night Like Tonight,” and “On The Loose.”
“Welcome to ‘The Show: Live on Tour’ baby! It’s so good to be back in the Philippines, in Manila,” Niall greeted. “Thank you so much for filling this place up for me, we were here six years ago nearly to the day… I’ve missed you guys!”
The artist then dared the crowd to sing as loud as they could for the rest of the night, continuing his set with “The Show,” “Since We’re Alone,” “If You Leave Me,” and “Black and White.”
Things slowed down during an acoustic set when Horan positioned himself on a small catwalk for tearjerkers “Flicker,” “This Town,” and “You Could Start a Cult.”
Making the segment much more intimate was the accompaniment of a violin played by Emily Kohavi.
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In the middle of the night, Horan took some time to read banners and reiterated how amazed he was with the crowd, noting he was over 30 shows into the tour but the Manila audience was already among the loudest he’s been to this year.
Horan continued with songs like “Heaven,” “Everywhere,” “Night Changes,” — the only One Direction song he performed — “Meltdown,” and “Still” to end the main concert.
While the stage was empty there was a chorus of “Stockholm Syndrome” as the audience clamored for the crowd favorite One Direction song to be included in the encore, but instead Horan came back with “Save My Life.”
Before closing out the night, Hora n praised the crowd yet again as incredible and amazing, even calling the Manila leg one of his favorite nights on the tour yet.
“I don’t think we should make [the wait] six years again, we have to make a deal. Not six years… seven! Alright, eight!” Horan quipped. “I want to thank every single one of you for spending the night here.”
After shouting out again the Manila Lovers — his Filipino fanbase — and everyone else in the Mall of Asia Arena, Horan closed his concert with “Slow Hands,” waving around a Philippine flag to end the evening.
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FMETF [FMETF 105.20, up 0.9%; 5% avgVol] [link], the PSE’s only exchange-traded fund, was halted by the PSE at 1 p.m. yesterday after it was discovered that its iNav had failed to update since 11:30 a.m. FMETF said that it would “coordinate” with its “service provider” to implement a fix, but as of this writing, FMETF has not advised that a fix has been implemented nor has the PSE lifted the halt.
MB bottom-line: This problem happened six times last year, and while it’s great that we made it into May before we had our first FMETF outage of this year, it’s still discouraging to see “iNav not calculating” as a problem that we need to contend with in 2024. For those who are unfamiliar, FMETF is an exchange-traded fund, so FMEFT’s per-share price is derivative of the per-share prices of all the shares that FMETF owns/represents. The “iNav” that keeps breaking is the number that represents the current value of FMETF’s holdings, expressed as a “NAV per unit” or “NAV per share”. So, if the iNav isn’t updating, then traders are not getting the kind of information they need to place FMETF stock trades. “We need more ETFs” is something that I’ve heard traders say for years now, and while I still count myself as part of that group, I wish we could see some forward progress in the maintenance of FMETF before we introduce anything more exotic to the market.
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