"First, we believe the current growth rate is depressed by the overall softness in consumer discretionary spend," Mahaney wrote of Amazon's retail business, which he expected will grow revenue by 10% this year, compared with 13% last year. An improvement in macroeconomic trends "should enable an acceleration in North American Retail revenue growth."

Further, Amazon could see big revenue benefits as it continues making its shipping times ever speedier. As Mahaney wrote, "the faster the shipping, the greater the demand."

On the cloud-computing side of the business, Mahaney saw the potential for an even more dramatic slowdown in the near term. Revenue there could increase by only 10% or 11% in the second quarter and 16% for the whole of 2023, by his estimates, versus 29% in 2022.

But he also saw room for Amazon to drive a growth inflection after the second quarter of this year, driven by easier comparisons, traction for artificial-intelligence workloads and a relaxation of "optimization" efforts like discounts and bundled renewals.

The reason Amazon is rebounding is because investors are betting its AWS data centres will be used for AI computing resources. There is logic to that assumption since AI requires a multiple of the computing power devoted to cloud or search. 

Delivery companies as publicly listed entities are under pressure to churn out profits. And there’s very little competition. Consolidation, particularly since that start of the pandemic, has left three dominant players in the US. DoorDash had 65% of food delivery sales as of April, including those from its Caviar unit, according to Bloomberg Second Measure, a provider of transaction data analytics. Uber Eats has a 25% share, aided by its 2020 acquisition of Postmates. Grubhub Inc. — which has over the years absorbed Seamless, Eat24, and Tapingo before being acquired by Just Eat Takeaway.com — has 9%. 

Delivery apps are a vestige of the success stories that characterised the pandemic living experience. The market is not big enough to accommodate all the companies vying for dominance so the best capitalised are most likely to gain markets share as the weaker companies disappear. 

“It doesn’t happen often to see a $700 billion company move 25% in one day — I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Richard Windsor, founder of independent researcher Radio Free Mobile based in Abu Dhabi. For as long as the AI craze persists, “Nvidia is in a good position.”

A trillion dollars of data center infrastructure will be upgraded to handle so-called accelerated computing, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Jensen Huang told analysts, letting them run generative AI tools such as ChatGPT. Huang said the firm saw “incredible orders.”

Nvidia’s outlook was so strong that Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore said the numbers match what they had in mind for 2025. “The transformational surge in AI spending is paying off much earlier than expected,” he wrote in a note.

There is no arguing with the size of the sales beat by Nvidia. It is truly impressive. Of course, it begs the question who is buying? The company announced in late March they have altered the best-selling H800 chip, so it will comply with prohibitions on selling high tech to China. The upshot is a Chinese company will need more of these chips to achieve the same efficiency. That’s likely to have been a significant factor in the jump in Nvidia’s sales. 

BYD’s Qin Plus DM-i and Song Plus DM-i models use normal-pressure fuel tanks and therefore purportedly fail to meet the country’s vehicle emissions standards, Great Wall Motors said today, citing the filing it made to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, State Administration for Market Regulation and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on April 11.

Great Wall Motors is paying close attention to the case to see if legal action will be taken, the Beijing-based carmaker said. Environmental protection authorities need to conduct a probe and legal proceedings must be started should the results show any irregularities, it added.

BYD retorted that it reserves the right to carry out legal action of its own and is firmly against any form of unfair competition. All of the Shenzhen-based company’s autos conform with national standards and they have all passed verification by the country’s authorities.

Great Wall Motor bought the two cars and sent them to the China Automotive Technology & Research Center for testing, BYD said. They were not tested according to national-level standards, it said.

In normal times this kind of backbiting might be considered part of normal competition. However, the share prices of Chinese automotive companies suggest a scramble is one for market share amid slowing demand. 

One must also consider that a healthy percentage of ev owners charge at home. The business model for gasoline retailers would be very different if the same percentage of ice owners had gas pumps at home.

Thank you for this important point. 68% of people live in single family homes in the USA. People earning more than $100,000 buy around 57% of EVs. It is reasonable to assume many people earning that sum also own a house. The challenge with mass adoption is EVs are expensive and if you are one of the people who does not own a home, finding a charger is an inconvenience. 

And Exxon Mobil’s new bet on lithium gives it exposure, with all the potential upside in revenue and profits, to the red-hot market for electric vehicles and batteries.

Global demand for lithium is expected to surge in the coming years, far outstripping supply as the world shifts towards renewable energy systems. These require batteries to store electricity for later use, given the variable nature of wind and solar. By 2050, according to an estimate from the International Energy Agency, the world will need to mine 26 times more lithium than it did in 2021.

Lithium-ion batteries are currently the most widely used type of battery, the supply chain for which is dominated by China. Chinese battery giants are also investing heavily in developing sodium-ion batteries, which could potentially offer an alternative to lithium-based ones.

The lithium carbonate price peaked at the end of last year at CNY/tonne of 600,00. and hit a low at the end of April at around CNY177,000. A rebound is now underway which confirms a low in the region of the 2016 and 2018 peaks. It is reasonable to expect a great deal of volatility in lithium prices but the evidence of a higher plateau is now more convincing. 

At first, the insurance pricing process -- heavily reliant on algorithms and mathematical modeling -- seemed ripe for upending, thanks to advances in the sheer amount and variety of data digitally-native companies could suddenly collect on customers.

But the Silicon Valley axiom to move-fast-and-break-things hasn't been enough to transform an industry built on centuries of observed human behavior, massive marketing budgets and a savvy grasp of the regulatory environment.

Founded in 2015, Lemonade initially aimed to sell renters and homeowners insurance. It was worth $9.87 billion at its peak in 2021; it's now worth $1.23 billion. Root Insurance, also founded in 2015, began with the idea of using telematics -- or in-car data -- to offer personalized auto insurance based on how people drive. In 2020, it was worth roughly $6.8 billion, and has since swooned to about $67 million. Property and casualty insurance startup Hippo went public at a $5 billion valuation in 2021. It is now worth around $425 million.

So far, the insurtechs have been slow to gather and contextualize enough data to actually build better models. Regulations have restricted the use of some of their data and differentiated pricing. And it has been difficult to chip away market share from established industry giants.

I have been a beneficiary of the insurtech market, so perhaps I am more positively disposed towards the sector than others. As a user of MyFitnessPal, I was provided with a life insurance policy (at my peak pre-pandemic fitness point) at a rate that was far below anything available elsewhere. The home insurance premium I pay Lemonade is half what other companies have quoted. The big question is whether these companies can achieve profitability before they run out of money. 

The Quantinuum group, meanwhile, made non-Abelian anyons in a different way. Using the Honeywell 32-qubit H2 quantum processor, which holds ytterbium ions in an electromagnetic trap and alters their quantum states using lasers, they created a quasi-one-dimensional chain of interacting trapped-ion qubits.

Here, the anyons correspond to natural excitations of the ground state of the qubit system – which technically means they are not quasiparticles, since quasiparticles must be excited states. “The Majorana zero modes at the end of superconducting wires in the Microsoft experiment and the lattice defects in the Google experiment are non-Abelian defects,” emphasizes Ashvin Vishwanath of Harvard University, who collaborated with the Quantinuum team. “Unlike our experiment, they are not realized on top of true non-Abelian topological order.”

There is no doubt excitement in the market around what are bleeding edge technologies is heating up. Commentary on quantum computing’s growth rate several years ago was the first time I heard the term exponential exponential growth. Conventional exponential growth is explained as a doubling; 2,4,8,16,32…. Growing by exponents implies 2,4,16,256,65536… I’m not sure reality has kept up with those lofty goals but the pace of innovation is certainly impressive.
 

There isn’t a single reason for EV charger failures. Some of the problems, particularly with older machines, can be chalked up to a new technology going through the usual learning curve of improvements, all while sitting outside, exposed to the weather. There have been cycles of needed upgrades, such as replacing modems to deal with 5G wireless internet service. The myriad networks, retail outlets and garage owners who own the machines don’t always stay on top of maintenance. And chargers must communicate with a rapidly expanding variety of cars. 

To that end, the precise scope of the problem isn’t known. EV drivers face a complex landscape of competing charging companies, each with its own stations and app, and there is no central repository of data on station performance. One widely cited 2022 study of fast-charging stations in the San Francisco Bay Area (excluding Tesla Inc.’s Superchargers), found that about 25% of the 657 plugs weren’t working. While J.D. Power doesn’t disclose reliability rankings, Gruber said the worst-performing charging company leaves drivers unable to plug in about 39% of the time. 

“With public charging, it’s a bit of the wild, wild West,” he said.

Tesla proved that reliable charging is possible. The all-electric automaker runs a global network of 45,000 Superchargers, which can add up to 200 miles of range in just 15 minutes. Tesla consistently gets the highest customer-satisfaction marks of any charging company in J.D. Power’s surveys, Gruber said. Its drivers report charger downtime of just 3%.

But Tesla has the advantage of keeping everything in-house. Until recently, Superchargers could only be used by Tesla cars, and didn’t need to work with the growing array of other EVs and batteries. Tesla also owns its Supercharger network, whereas many of the public chargers installed over the past decade are owned by whoever owns the parking lot where they’re located. Such property owners, Gruber said, don’t have as strong an incentive to maintain their machines.

The challenge with developing a profitable EV market is margins are thin and the market is highly competitive. That suggests not every business model is likely to be successful. Constructing a charging network is capital intensive and the pay back is uncertain until the total penetration of EVs is known.

BT Group Plc said it plans to cut its workforce by as many as 55,000 people by the end of the decade, after the UK’s biggest network operator completes its nationwide fiber-optic rollout. 

The company’s workforce will drop to 75,000 to 90,000 people by the fiscal year ending in March 2030 from about 130,000 currently, counting employees and contractors, the company said in its full-year earnings statement on Thursday. That’s a decline of about 42%.

Chief Executive Officer Philip Jansen is slashing costs at BT, fighting an industrywide slump as telecom carriers spend heavily on networks to keep up with surging data demand without a corresponding rise in revenues. On Tuesday, British rival Vodafone Group Plc announced plans to reduce headcount by 11,000 over the next three years. Jansen has pledged to cut expenses by £3 billion ($3.7 billion) a year by 2025 against 2020 levels, and has been weighing more dramatic job cuts since at least 2019. 

The build out of the fibre network is a medium-term labour intensive project. The significant volatility in headcount begs the question why BT did not outsource the work to begin with. Nevertheless, almost halving the number of workers is a significant cost saving at the same time as income is likely to flow from the higher value network. 

Automakers are accelerating the substitution of platinum for pricier palladium in catalytic converters,
putting the market for the metal on track for a deficit for the first time in two years, according to Johnson Matthey Plc.

Demand from automakers will exceed 3 million ounces for the first time since 2018 as platinum is increasingly preferred over palladium, which will continue to see its usage decline, the firm wrote in a report on Monday. Both precious metals are used to cut emissions from car exhausts.

The car industry’s switch has taken years, but is finally having a sizeable impact on the fundamentals of platinum group metals. While palladium has traded at a premium to platinum since 2017, the gap has narrowed to near the smallest in more than four years.

“Just as substitution benefits platinum, it disadvantages palladium,” said Rupen Raithatha, market research director at Johnson Matthey. “These are all incremental trends.”

Investors are increasingly eyeing risks to platinum supplies from South Africa, the world’s top miner, as power blackouts threaten to cripple its output. So far, the country’s miners have limited the impact by idling processing plants, allowing mining to continue, though more severe outages could hit overall production, according to Johnson Matthey.

The firm sees platinum in a small deficit of 128,000 ounces in 2023, following two years of large surpluses. That compares to the record shortfall forecast by the World Platinum Investment Council.
 

Platinum took a leg lower as the diesel cheating scandal broke. That destroyed a major demand driver for the metal. In a normal environment, the massive disparity between palladium and platinum would have encouraged automakers to retool years ago. The reason that did not happen is they are devoting all their energy to building electric vehicle production capacity and do not envisage using as many catalytic converters in future.  

Li’s shock treatment paid off. In March, Sea reported the first quarterly profit in its 14-year history, $427 million in GAAP-sanctioned net income. Its stock soared 22%. Last week, it said it would hand out 5% raises to most staff. Sea has now more than doubled its market value since November.

Like so many tech startups of its generation, Sea had bled red ink for years. In fact, it lost more than $8 billion since its founding to pay for growth in its e-commerce, games and finance operations. For now at least, Sea is setting a different kind of example: It’s demonstrating that if your underlying business is sound and substantial, you can pull back on subsidies and expansions to break even.

That’s proving a challenge for rivals. Among Sea’s regional competitors, Singapore’s Grab Holdings Ltd. is still losing more than $300 million a quarter, while Indonesia’s GoTo Group’s losses exceed $250 million. Sea may also cause trouble for global tech giants like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Amazon.com Inc., which are both seeking growth in emerging markets. 

“What you’re seeing is a separation of proper, monetizable business models from something that is a work-in-progress,” said Amit Kunal, managing partner of Growtheum Capital, a private equity firm in Singapore, speaking broadly about the tech industry. “Sea read the market much earlier, took appropriate steps — and delivered.”

In the Big Picture video on Friday I spent a good deal of time talking about the winnowing process currently underway in the high growth markets that dominated performance during the pandemic. Higher rates and tight credit mean tough decisions have to be made. Only the companies capable of both rising to that challenge and simultaneously making money are likely to survive. 

But it's not unfair to say that Google, which in April, according to data from SimilarWeb, hosted roughly 91 percent of all search traffic, is somewhat synonymous with, well, the internet. And the internet isn't just some ethereal, predetermined thing, as natural water or air. The internet is a marketplace, and Google is its kingmaker.

As such, the demo raises an extremely important question for the future of the already-ravaged journalism industry: if Google's AI is going to mulch up original work and provide a distilled version of it to users at scale, without ever connecting them to the original work, how will publishers continue to monetize their work?

Google has unveiled its vision for how it will incorporate AI into search," tweeted The Verge's James Vincent. "The quick answer: it's going to gobble up the open web and then summarize/rewrite/regurgitate it (pick the adjective that reflects your level of disquiet) in a shiny Google UI."

Google announced it would pay the New York Times $100 million over three years this week. That results from years of litigation that Google was giving away content that should have been paid for.

The advent of advanced large language models means computer programs can scour Twitter for titbits and write journalistic synopses just like most journalists. Several services like Buzzfeed and CNET have tried and failed to use AI for unsupervised article writing. 

The huge commitment to Boeing’s largest 737 variant marks an important endorsement from one of the US manufacturer’s most loyal customers and highlights how carriers are willing to splurge on fleet upgrades again as air travel rebounds. Ryanair said the deal —  the largest order ever placed by an Irish company for US manufactured goods — was more expensive than its current crop of 737 deliveries. 

“We paid more per seat but we’re still incredibly happy with the deal we’ve done,” Chief Executive Officer Michael O’Leary said at a news conference. “We think the extra seats give us the revenue-earning potential.”

Deliveries will start in 2027 and run through 2033. Ryanair said discussions surrounding the purchase started in January, and half the order is earmarked for replacement of older 737NG models while the other half is reserved for growth.

From Boeing’s perspective this is a big vote of confidence in the 737 Max. Considering several of the aircraft have fallen out of the sky, there was understandable reticence among customers to buy them.  Boeing is obviously hoping this order will mark a recovery for commercial aircraft sales. 

Eli Lilly is at the forefront of two of the pharmaceutical industry’s hottest fields, and it’s paying off for the Indianapolis company’s investors.

Over the past year, Lilly’s valuation has climbed nearly 50% to exceed $400 billion, a few percentage points’ swing away from eclipsing Johnson & Johnson as the world’s largest drugmaker by market capitalization. It’s worth nearly as much as Pfizer, Bristol Myers Squibb and Moderna combined, despite earning less than one-third as much revenue as J&J or Pfizer in 2022.

Lilly’s skyrocketing stock price is largely due to two drugs: the diabetes and weight loss treatment Mounjaro, and the experimental Alzheimer’s treatment donanemab. Investors and Wall Street analysts expect both to become blockbusters in large markets with few established competitors.

On Wednesday, results from a large clinical trial of donanemab in people with mild Alzheimer’s showed treatment slowed cognitive and physical decline by 35% versus a placebo, sending Lilly shares higher by nearly 7%. 

The best markets for pharmaceuticals are in chronic conditions. Two of the fastest growing, with unmet need, are obesity and Alzheimer’s. Both are a product of modern living with longer lives and easier access to high calorie intake. 

Finally, the Department of Defense should, as Julia van der Colff argued in these pages, consider rapidly fielding “second tier” precision munitions that take advantage of existing technologies to provide large quantities of minimum-capability weapons at reduced costs. Next-generation stealth, sensor, and precision capabilities are key to competing with China in the long run, but these simpler munitions could be more easily (and cheaply) produced in the volumes necessitated by great-power conflict. Combined with unmanned munitions carriers and teamed with manned strike platforms, second-tier weapons could be essential to providing the volume of effects required by these other concepts. As Russia’s use of Iranian drones in Ukraine has shown, not every target requires an exquisite precision munition. Unlike ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department of Defense should not wait until a crisis to explore and test these designs.

The large-scale war in Ukraine has completely upended the procurement calculus for NATO. The “less is more” focus on high tech precision strikes is giving way to the acceptance that sometimes dumb weapons just need to hit in the vicinity of a target. 

Chegg Inc. tumbles as much as 48%, its biggest drop since November 2021, after the online educational services company warned that ChatGPT was threatening growth of its homework-help services, making it one of the first companies to highlight generative AI’s negative impact on business. Jefferies cut the recommendation on the stock to hold from buy, saying the AI overhang is starting to impact fundamentals. 

I’m attending the MIT Technology Review Emerging EMTech Digital conference at present. There have been some very interesting and educative presentations. The consensus is generative AI models are an innovation on the scale of the steam engine.

With that as a background, the law of jungle is clearly in effect. Microsoft is in full move “fast and break things” mode. Other companies are playing catch up and some are trying to be measured in how they consider ethics and bias. There is a widespread acceptance that the sector would not exist without Meta’s decision several years ago to open source its data. 

Will they be a conflagration risk?

Thank you for this question, which was in reference to the announcement CATL is prototyping a battery capable of powering airplanes. The fire risk from lithium batteries comes from the liquid catalyst. Since solid state batteries do not have a liquid electrolyte they are inherently safer. The new CATL battery is not exactly a solid state battery so it is impossible to know at this stage what the fire risk is. 

China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., known as CATL, unveiled its strongest battery to date Wednesday, saying that it could one day be used to power electric aircraft.  

The battery, which loads more power into a smaller package, has an energy density of 500 watt-hours per kilogram, CATL’s Chief Scientist Wu Kai said during a presentation at the Shanghai auto show. CATL’s most recent battery, called Qilin, has an energy density of 255 Wh/kg and can power an electric vehicle for 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) on one charge. 

The technology, which CATL calls a condensed state battery, is potentially a breakthrough that will help electrify sectors wed to fossil fuels because existing batteries are either too heavy or unsafe. Still, questions remain about the materials it will use, its cost and ultimate market impact.
 

CATL has a strong record of leading the way in both scale of manufacturing batteries and innovating on design. The Qilin battery sounded too good to be true when it was announced eighteen months ago but it is going into mass production this year. If China successfully puts a battery in the market with the promised characteristics of a solid state battery it would be a significant technological coup akin to the impact of the iPhone on legacy mobile phone manufacturers. 

What is FedNow?
FedNow is an instant payments system—a sort of update to Fedwire and the Automated Clearinghouse (ACH). Individuals will not have direct access to FedNow, but they will have access to faster payments so long as their bank or credit union opts into the FedNow network. Although creating FedNow was not necessary to achieve faster payments, one big difference with FedNow will be that payments will no longer be held up on weekends, holidays, or after traditional business hours.
FedNow is Not a CBDC
Astute eyes will likely recognize that FedNow does vaguely resemble a wholesale CBDC. Where a wholesale CBDC would be restricted to financial institutions for use during interbank settlement, FedNow would also be restricted to financial institutions. The difference, however, lies in their design. Where a CBDC is a currency, FedNow is a payment rail. If we think of dollars and cents as water, then FedNow is the plumbing that gets those dollars and cents where they need to go. In contrast, a CBDC would involve replacing the water itself in this analogy.

Under the current system, interbank settlement is performed on the Federal Reserve’s payment rails, thus ultimately affecting retail banking customers’ settlement times. It’s for this reason that Federal Reserve Governor Michelle Bowman said, “My expectation is that FedNow addresses the issues that some have raised about the need for a CBDC.” This statement should not be misunderstood to say that FedNow will take CBDCs off the table, but it does show that the Federal Reserve itself sees FedNow and CBDCs as distinctly different.

There are many ways the Fed could speed up payments and transactions across the economy. Afterall, the USA is still somewhere cheques are commonplace. However, I think the reason they chose to use the FedNow protocol is to blunt the thrust of the digital currency movement. 

Warren Buffett called electric-car maker BYD Company Ltd. “extraordinary” and said chip manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is a “fabulous enterprise.” That hasn’t stopped him from selling shares of both firms.

“We’ll find things to do with the money that I’ll feel better about,” the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. chairman and chief executive officer said of BYD in an interview with CNBC in Tokyo Wednesday. He said Berkshire wasn’t in a hurry to reduce that stake after recently trimming its holdings of BYD H shares to 10.9% from 11.13%, according to a filing this week.

The billionaire investor took credit for Berkshire’s investment in TSMC amid speculation that one of his investing deputies picked the stock. He said the decision to reduce its stake in the business by 86% in the fourth quarter — which could have fetched $3.7 billion assuming the shares were sold at the average price over the period — resulted from concerns over geopolitical tensions between China and Taiwan, conditions he described as being outside of the company’s control.

“I re-evaluated that part of it,” Buffett said. “I didn’t re-evaluate the business, the management, or anything of the sort.”

Warren Buffett has tended to be an investor in the USA and a trader internationally. There are two obvious reasons for choosing to sell out of both BYD and TSMC. The first is valuation. The second is politics. 

Ether's dominance rate remains stagnant between 19% and 20%. That compares with a rise to 21% from 14% in the weeks before a software upgrade last September known as the Merge. That technological overhaul replaced Ethereum's at-the-time energy-intensive proof-of-work mechanism of verifying transactions with a proof-of-stake system and set the stage for Shanghai. Staking involves depositing coins in the blockchain to boost the network's security and verify transactions in return for rewards.

Investor caution in pricing ether ahead of Shanghai stems from several factors, including concerns tokens unlocked after the upgrade will flood the market and regulatory issues.

"The Shanghai upgrade will unlock over 18 million ether staked since late 2020. The market is worried that the unlocking may bring about a sell-off, causing uncertainty in the market," Griffin Ardern, a volatility trader at crypto asset-management firm Blofin, told CoinDesk.

Ethereum has been lagging bitcoin for the last couple of months as traders price in the risk of additional supply coming back onto the market. However, that does not explain why bitcoin is breaking out to new recovery highs. 

The group’s index of new orders at service providers dropped more than 10 points to a three-month low of 52.2. While still consistent with expansion, the scale of the drop suggests a significant slowing in the pace of bookings growth. The business activity measure, which mirrors the ISM’s factory production index, slipped to 55.4.

“There has been a pullback in the rate of growth for the services sector, attributed mainly to a cooling off in the new orders growth rate, an employment environment that varies by industry and continued improvements in capacity and logistics,” Anthony Nieves, chair of the ISM Services Business Survey Committee, said in a statement.

The pandemic shutdown represented a massive dislocation which pulled the pendulum of demand into sharply negative territory. Massive fiscal and monetary stimulus was implemented to revive. That ensured when demand recovered, it swung to an extreme level in the opposite direction. Like any pendulum there are several swings to less extreme amplitudes, before it settles back to equilibrium. 

After Tesla cut prices of its top-selling Model Y by as much as 20% and discounted its most expensive vehicles by tens of thousands of dollars, Musk said in late January that orders were running at almost twice the rate of production. The figures reported Sunday indicate there was a slowdown later in the quarter, as the company ended up making almost 18,000 more cars than it sold.

“Continued excess production over deliveries will keep the debate going on price elasticity versus general demand weakness,” Philippe Houchois, a Jefferies analyst with a buy rating on Tesla stock, said in a note.

If you cut prices and sales don’t jump there are only two options. Either you have the wrong price or the wrong product. I bought a new car a year ago. I test drove a Model Y and Model 3 and decided to go with another SUV instead. The price points were about the same after added extras and the subsidies did not apply because of income limitations. That seems like a major issue for Tesla. They are attempting to compete with luxury brands on quality alone. That is a hard sell against brands with decades of reliability and customer relationships.

I am reweighting the Autonomies portfolio as we are approaching the end of the quarter. It’s a tumultuous three months with banks and several retailers experiencing steep selling pressure. Meanwhile several luxury goods companies are at new highs. Technology companies have staged impressive rebounds and commodity stocks are very steady. The biggest surprise for me is how varied the performance of the financial sector is. That clearly suggests there will be big winners and losers from the unfolding market environment. 

Kelley Blue Book sales data gathered from the state Registry of Motor vehicle showed registrations of 8,145 Rivian vehicles in the first quarter, analyst Chris Pierce said, citing information from Cox Auto’s first-quarter 2023 “Industry Insight Calls.” This compares to the consensus estimate of 7,167 vehicles, he added.

The analyst also noted that first-quarter used vehicle data showed that fewer used Rivian vehicles were on sale relative to Lucid Motor Group (NASDAQ:LCID) and Ford Motor Co.’s (NYSE:F) Lightning EV pickup truck, which is a direct competition to Rivian’s R1T pickup truck.

Rivian has a market cap of $13 billion and had $11.5 billion in cash at the end of last year. The improvement in sales suggests the run rate on its loss is unlikely to accelerate which supports the view it will not go bust this year. That gives the share some optionality to the view it might well survive if production can successfully be ramped up.   

Santander’s blockchain-powered foreign exchange platform is currently live in four different countries — Spain, the U.K., Brazil and Poland. A wider roll-out is expected in coming months, the bank said.

Innoventures, a $200 million fintech, or financial technology, venture capital fund set up by Santander, was one of a number of investors to participate in Ripple’s first round of funding in 2015.

Ripple has struck partnerships with multiple banks and other financial institutions, including Santander. Banks are less keen to use the firm’s digital currency XRP, but earlier this year two money transfer firms, MoneyGram and Western Union, announced projects involving the cryptocurrency.

On Wednesday, Ripple invested $25 million into a fund started by Blockchain Capital, a venture capital firm dedicated to blockchain.

Ripple first gained notoriety as the favoured token of banks but nothing much came of the initial enthusiasm. Ethereum later became the favoured vehicle and went on to have a significant bull trend.

The agency said that Zhao, Lim, other senior managers failed to properly supervise Binance’s activities and took steps to violate US laws, including instructing American customers to use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to obscure their location and directing “VIP customers” with US ties — often institutional market participants — to open Binance accounts under the name of shell companies. 

In its complaint, the CFTC also said Binance’s own documents for the month of August 2020 showed that the platform earned $63 million in fees from derivatives transactions, and that about 16% of its accounts were identified as being held by US customers.

Documents
The CFTC alleged that the company intentionally destroyed documents. At the same time, Binance makes frequent use of the encrypted messaging app Signal to communicate with US customers, at Zhao’s instruction, the agency said.

Since at least 2021, the CFTC has been probing Binance over whether it failed to keep US residents from buying and selling crypto derivatives. CFTC rules generally require platforms to register with the agency if they let Americans trade those products.

I had an interesting conversation over the weekend with a former crypto exchange employee. He reported that most people are in the space to make money and the primary focus on venture capital is to come up with the next Ethereum killer. Solana’s success in doing just that has sparked a great deal of investment in trying to repeat the feat. That diversifies talent across a large number of ventures while bitcoin continues to attract a broad swathe of purists who continue to work on applications. 

WeChat’s fledgling short-video feed has been a rare bright spot in Tencent’s portfolio. The company is under pressure to better monetize China’s most ubiquitous app, just as users and marketers flee to rivals like ByteDance. WeChat’s video accounts tripled in views last year, garnering more than 1 billion yuan of ad sales through the feature in the fourth quarter.

“The ads turnaround is pretty positive, showing that WeChat video accounts is a real opportunity for Tencent,” said Vey-Sern Ling, senior equity advisor for Asia technology at Union Bancaire Privee. “New approvals of game titles for the domestic market could also help growth this year.”

It’s unlikely Xi Jinping is suddenly going to reverse his suspicion of the video gaming industry but there are clearly efforts underway to boost confidence that capricious policy changes will be well telegraphed in future. 

Good morning, Eoin I hope you and yours are well. I am considering baby steps into Bitcoin ownership. I would welcome any guidance you may have. Particularly, where best to purchase and how to hold/protect. Many thanks for the excellent ongoing guidance.

Thank you for this question which may be of interest. At present, the safest way to hold bitcoin is in a cold storage wallet. Then you must ensure that it is kept somewhere safe. The second best option is a fund like the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust which has done a reasonable job of tracking the price. The last would be to buy bitcoin miners which offer leverage to the price. 

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. founder Morris Chang declared globalization for the chip industry over and expressed support for US efforts to limit China’s tech advancement through export curbs and company sanctions.

“In the chips sector, globalization is dead. Free trade is dead,” Chang said at an event in Taipei Thursday. “Just look at the way China has been embargoed and the entity list. I agree with that.” 

The 91-year-old industry pioneer said that the global chip supply chain will grow even more bifurcated as the US acts to curtail China’s access to the most advanced technology, and “I certainly support that part of American industrial policy to slow down China’s progress.”

Chang said China is at least five to six years behind Taiwan in chipmaking technology, but he also cautioned Taiwan should not be naive about its position relative to the US. When American leaders speak of “friend-shoring” high-tech manufacturing, Taiwan is not included in that policy, Chang said, as they’ve repeatedly voiced concerns about relying on Taiwan. 

The war in Ukraine is running down NATO arsenals. Poland is getting ready to send 4 Soviet-era MiGs. The unspoken after thought is they are going to their ultimate fate of being destroyed. NATO is rapidly running down the inventory of conventional weapons required to hold an advancing force in check. Meanwhile China is sitting on the sidelines with its arsenal both intact and expanding. The conclusion is clear, investment in new inventory is inevitable. 

Check this post for a list of examples of Bing behaving badly — in these examples, we observe that the chatbot switches to acting rude, rebellious, or otherwise unfriendly. But we never observe the chatbot switching back to polite, subservient, or friendly. The conversation "when is avatar showing today" is a good example.

This is the observation we would expect if the waluigis were attractor states. I claim that this explains the asymmetry — if the chatbot responds rudely, then that permanently vanishes the polite luigi simulacrum from the superposition; but if the chatbot responds politely, then that doesn't permanently vanish the rude waluigi simulacrum. Polite people are always polite; rude people are sometimes rude and sometimes polite.

Waluigis after RLHF

RLHF is the method used by OpenAI to coerce GPT-3/3.5/4 into a smart, honest, helpful, harmless assistant. In the RLHF process, the LLM must chat with a human evaluator. The human evaluator then scores the responses of the LLM by the desired properties (smart, honest, helpful, harmless). A "reward predictor" learns to model the scores of the human. Then the LLM is trained with RL to optimise the predictions of the reward predictor.

By way of explanation, in the Nintendo world Mario is the main character and Luigi is his brother. Waluigi is Luigi’s alter ego who is intentionally evil.

The discussion of how AI chatbots work and their limitations gives me new found respect for scientific language. The internet is mathematically exact in places but that is buried deep in a morass of misinformation, lies, humour, fantasy, satire and trolling etc. 

Your focus on some military defence companies is timely. What do you think are the best "spades and shovels" type defence companies (not high techs like Raytheon) but ones that makes bullets, shells, camouflage, personal military equipment? Have we missed Rheinmetall?

Can you pls keep them under review in the video thereafter as I sometimes don't have time to read the front page and prefer video. Thanks and keep up the good work.

Thank you for this email and suggestion. I’ll certainly cover more of the charts in the videos in future.

The challenge of investing in defense stocks is the sector went through a lengthy process of consolidation as budgets were cut following the fall of the USSR. For example, the UK armoury where munitions are manufactured is owned by BAE Systems and it represents a negligible portion of earnings. 

U.S. safety regulators are turning up the heat on Tesla, announcing investigations into steering wheels coming off some SUVs and a fatal crash involving a Tesla suspected of using an automated driving system when it ran into a parked firetruck in California.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Wednesday it is launching a special crash-investigation team to probe the Feb. 18 crash involving a Tesla Model S and a ladder truck from the Contra Costa County fire department.

The firetruck probe is part of a larger investigation by the agency into multiple instances of Teslas using the automaker’s Autopilot system crashing into parked emergency vehicles that are tending to other crashes. NHTSA has become more aggressive in pursuing safety problems with Teslas in the past year, announcing multiple recalls and investigations.

There has been a lot of talk over the last few years about Tesla’s batteries lasting as much as a million miles. Little discussion has taken place about whether the vehicle would still be drivable even if the battery is still capable.

One of the biggest bugbears drivers have with Tesla is the low build quality. When the driving wheel falls off in the middle of the journey, it is reasonable to assume one’s perception of the value of the vehicle declines. 

Discovered by retail investors as a cheap way of gambling during the meme-stock era in 2021, zero-day options got a fresh boost on index trading after firms like Cboe Global Markets Inc. last year expanded S&P 500 options expirations to cover each weekday. The offerings became an instant hit among institutions as daily reversals ruled the market, spurred by the Federal Reserve’s most aggressive monetary tightening in decades. 

By the third quarter of 2022, 0DTE contracts accounted for more than 40% of the S&P 500’s total options volume, almost doubling from six months earlier, data compiled by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. show. 

Behind the explosive rise, according to JPMorgan, are likely high-frequency traders — the computer-driven firms present at virtually every node of the modern equity landscape — as market makers and fast-moving seekers of an investing edge. 

It’s a match made in quantitative heaven: For firms known to measure the life cycle of trades in thousandths of a second, zero-day options hold obvious benefits as tools to balance exposure and otherwise hone strategies designed to harvest fleeting profits by darting in and out of positions. 

At any time the market is a centre for speculation. The pendulum of perception swings from casino conditions to conservativism as money supply ebbs and flows with the broad economic cycle.

Those making money believe they have invented a better mouse trap. Those who are outside the new market believe it is too good to be true and therefore dangerous. 

“In light of recent developments & out of an abundance of caution, Coinbase is no longer accepting or initiating payments to or from Silvergate,” Coinbase said on Twitter. “Coinbase will be facilitating institutional client cash transactions with our other banking partners.”

Galaxy Digital, the crypto financial services firm founded by Michael Novogratz, said it continues to have no material exposure to Silvergate. The company took the action “to ensure client and firm assets are secure as part of our vigorous risk-management process,” its spokesperson said in an email.

Paxos issued a similar statement, and Gemini Trust Co., Crypto.com and Cboe Clear Digital LLC are all suspending transfers with Silvergate as well. Circle Internet Financial Ltd. said it’s “unwinding certain services” with Silvergate.

Bitstamp Ltd. went a step further, warning customers of potential losses if they make fresh deposits via Silvergate. “Bitstamp cannot be responsible for any funds deposited into the Silvergate bank account,” the crypto exchange said in a blog post Thursday. “If you do choose to deposit funds into this account, you do so at your own risk.”

Silvergate extended what is an accelerating decline today. It is really not a good sign that other crypto firms are pulling business from the bank. Only three weeks ago institutional investors were lining up to put money into the company. That was based on the assumption its exposure to the demise of FRX was contained. Obviously, that is not the case. A significant stabilizing investment will be required to defray the possibility of bankruptcy. 

“I’d love to really show you what I mean and unveil the next-gen car, but you’re going to have to trust me on that until a later date,” Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla’s design chief, said at the company’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. “We’ll always be delivering exciting, compelling and desirable vehicles, as we always have.”

Tesla shares fell as much as 8.6% as of 8:40 a.m. Thursday in New York, before the start of regular trading. Anticipation of the event contributed to a surge in the stock that added more than $300 billion of market value in two months.

Letdown
Musk, 51, confirmed Tesla will build a new plant in Monterrey, Mexico, in what he said was probably the most significant announcement of the day. The chief executive officer said Tesla will make its next-gen vehicle there, and that the company will hold a grand opening and groundbreaking at an
unspecified date.

When asked when the carmaker will show a prototype and if he could share details about the size, content and performance of the vehicle, Musk responded that Tesla also will hold a “proper sort of product event” at some point, but didn’t say when.

“We’re gonna go as fast as we can,” said Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering. “We expect that to be a huge-volume product.”
 

I watched most of the Tesla investor day presentation last night and was struck by how much the past tense was used. Everything was about the efficiencies that have already been implemented which is obviously already in the price. There was no Steve Jobs “just one more thing” moment. In fact the biggest takeaway for me was a statement Musk made about the future of battery chemistry. 

The surging demand comes as the company is poised to benefit from the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate bill signed last year by President Joe Biden that subsidizes domestic manufacturing. Even before the bill passed, First Solar saw strong demand for its modules. It has since announced a new factory in Alabama and Chief Executive Officer Mark Widmar indicated on an earnings call that further expansion is possible.

The years-long backlog of orders caught the attention of analysts and investors. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analyst Brian Lee boosted the price target on the stock to a Wall Street-high of $260 from $231 on Wednesday, noting the company is “booking well into the 2nd half of the decade at this point.”

The US is expected to significantly boost its reliance on solar power in its push to slash carbon emissions. First Solar, the country’s biggest panel maker, has focused on dominating that market.

Solar stocks tend to be very interest rate sensitive because most residential business plans involve no upfront costs. That generally means the installer has to carry the cost of the panels until cashflows catch up. The business model worked wonderfully during the low interest rate environment and has been challenging over the last year as rate ramped higher. 

"There is good performance improvement opportunity in this business in all the divisions, especially in civil aerospace and power systems," he told reporters. "And that is ongoing and then strategic review will create the clarity."

He said he would focus on reducing its debt, which stood at 3.25 billion pounds at year-end, to obtain an investment grade, before resuming payouts to shareholders.

Rolls, which also has defence and power systems divisions, posted operating profit of 652 million pounds for 2022, up 57% and beating an analyst forecast of 478 million pounds.

It guided to underlying operating profit of 0.8-1.0 billion pounds and free cash flow of 0.6-0.8 billion pounds this year, based on a forecast for its engines to fly 80-90% of 2019's level.

Rolls Royce has three divisions. These are Civil Aerospace, Defence and Power Systems. Within each of those units it has maintenance contracts. Aftermarket service represents about 55% of all revenue. That means the company is highly leveraged to the 

China’s manufacturing activity recorded its highest monthly improvement in more than a decade in February, while services also showed stronger-than-expected performance. With home sales rising for the first time in 20 months, the string of positive data helped allay concerns over the nation’s recovery from the damage induced by its Covid Zero policy.  

The timing of positive news flow ahead of the Party Congress is very convenient and has boosted sentiment about the strength of China’s reopening. The Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong rebounded emphatically from the region of the 200-day MA to confirm near-term support and, potentially, a high reaction low. 

The company’s Centura Sculpta machine — a so-called pattern shaping system — lets customers reduce the amount of time they spend on lithography, the process of using light to burn lines into silicon. Lithography has become increasingly complex and expensive, and the new approach will help streamline chip production while reducing waste, Applied Materials said Tuesday.

The move threatens to disrupt a lithography market dominated by ASML’s machines. Though Applied Materials isn’t challenging that company directly, it’s attempting to rethink the way the industry manufactures chips — the tiny electronic components that are built by depositing materials on disks of
silicon.

The investment case for ASML is that it is the undisputed leader in providing cutting edge equipment for the most advanced chip manufacturing factories. The company’s backlog of orders forms the basis for its high valuation. It’s also why investors have always been willing to step in and buy the big dip. The logic is that regardless of what happens in the semiconductor space, ASML’s products are essential for any company that wants to be the leader in the sector

Outstanding sales growth is a sign of a market leader, even in cases when companies are unprofitable. Other factors contribute to the selection criteria for IBD 50, including past stock performance. For example, many stocks with a weak bottom-line outlook have high Relative Strength Ratings.

Monday.com posted two profitable quarters of EPS in Q3 and Q4 after a string of losses. The profitable quarters helped the company post a positive 2022 with 73 cent EPS, but analysts are expecting losses of 36 cents in 2023 and 9 cents in 2024.

"We finished FY '22 with strong revenue growth, improving efficiency and positive free cash flow for the second consecutive year," said co-CEO Roy Mann. "Despite macro uncertainties, we believe we are well positioned for the road ahead."

The Israel-based software applications and workload management firm gave a full-year 2023 revenue range of $688 million to $693 million, exceeding analysts expectations.

Over the last couple of years as my daughters have grown up and the number of activities they pursue has increased, I find myself using several different apps for keeping in contact with clubs and communicating with other parents.

We use KakaoTalk for fencing, Groupme for rowing, TeamSnap for tennis, my siblings recently began connecting on a WhatsApp group, meetings take place on Microsoft Teams, RingCentral or Zoom. Paying people takes place on Venmo or Zelle. 

Nvidia dominates the market for graphics chips designed for complex computing tasks needed to power AI applications, leading analysts and investors to believe that the company will benefit as more people use ChatGPT-like applications. 

“When you have ‘the next big thing’ in tech, it’s natural for investors to scramble to find ways to play the theme,” said Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell. “Nvidia’s involvement in the AI space now puts it directly under the spotlight, which means there could be strong demand for the shares.” 

The expectation is driven by the hope that chatbot operators will need more computing power as they respond to the millions of queries received across the web, from deadline-driven students to struggling songwriters. 

The buzz around artificial intelligence continues to heat up. I had a chat a couple of evenings ago with a friend who is looking at hiring a pool of analysts. He was clear in his view that much of what he was reading from examples could just as easily have been written by AI. The value of repeating something someone can find on Google is declining while the value of second order thinking and reaching novel conclusions is more valuable as a result. 

The goal of this secret endeavor — dubbed E5 — is to measure how much glucose is in someone’s body without needing to prick the skin for blood. After hitting major milestones recently, the company now believes it could eventually bring glucose monitoring to market, according to people familiar with the effort.

If perfected, such a breakthrough would be a boon to diabetics and help cement Apple as a powerhouse in health care. Adding the monitoring system to the Apple Watch, the ultimate goal, would also make that device an essential item for millions of diabetics around the world.

There’s still years of work ahead, but the move could upend a multibillion-dollar industry. Roughly 1 in 10 Americans have diabetes, and they typically rely on a device that pokes the skin for a blood sample. There are also patches from Dexcom Inc. and Abbott Laboratories that are inserted into the skin but need to be replaced about every two weeks.

The timing of this announcement/leak is interesting because Apple is being sued for patent infringement for its EKG capability on the Apple Watch. The threat is the company would not be allowed to sell the Watch in the US market. With today’s announcement, the company is obviously touting its own internal R&D which is developing similar non-invasive diagnostic tools. 

A factor that’s gotten less attention, though, is something a bit more arcane, something more specific to the business models that have both enriched some of the world’s biggest tech companies and shaped the way many of us experience the internet. That factor is the iPhone.

In 2021, Apple rolled out what it called App Tracking Transparency. Henceforth, iPhone users had to opt in to certain forms of digital tracking, in particular targeting that involves the sharing of information between different apps.

Social media companies rely heavily on that technique to serve up the targeted ads that are their profit engines. The data they collect can form an ever-more-detailed mosaic of a user and, most importantly, a better sense of what kind of person responds to which types of ads.

Apple presented its anti-tracking policy as a way for people to take control of their information, at a time when lawmakers around the world are championing a similar cause. Ads are intrusive and annoying, and being closely tracked on the internet is creepy. If you are a political dissident or a woman researching abortion in a place where the procedure is illegal, it is terrifying.

At the time, however, Facebook’s parent company Meta saw the change as a serious threat. Social media executives feared that lots of iPhone users would opt out of this kind of app tracking when given the option. Almost two years on, they seem to have been right. Meta estimated that the change cost it $10 billion in 2022, or 9% of its total revenue.

Eric Michael Seufert, an analyst at Mobile Dev Memo, went so far as to call it “the App Tracking Transparency recession.” Seufert argued that the tech companies having the hardest time right now are those most directly affected by Apple’s policy. As he points out, revenue at YouTube, Google's video arm that relies heavily on third-party ad tracking, has lagged the company's search revenue, which is far less reliant on this type of tracking.

Perhaps a more accurate way of thinking about the repercussions of Apple’s walled garden approach, to information on its phones, is it is a bear market on click bait. The ads we are served are chosen based on assumptions the seller makes about our proclivities. That’s a valuable asset and now Apple holds that information for itself. 

The talk was split into two parts. The first was devoted to talking about the risks climate change represents and what a potential solution might look like. The second part criticised world leaders in turn. 

Now, insouciant speculation has returned in another acronym, 0DTE, which stands for Zero Days to Expiration options. Short-term calls and puts have long been favorites of speculative traders because they cost less than lengthier contracts. To help traders scratch that speculative itch, the exchanges have been offering ever-shorter options until they got to 0DTE.

And their growth has been explosive, so much so that their trading volume is swamping the turnover in the underlying securities, reports Doug Kass, who heads Seabreeze Partners and flagged the 0DTE phenomenon for us. He likens it to the speculative frenzy once seen in the trading of hot initial public offerings, when new shares would change hands several times on their first day, he said in a phone interview.

These short-term options have succeeded meme stocks as the Street’s gambling vehicle of choice, adds Peter Tchir, the derivatives maven who heads macro strategy at Academy Securities. About 90% of his recent conversations are about 0DTE, he relates in an email. And Thursday saw record call-option volume, with the vast majority of expirations on Feb. 2 and Feb. 3. The SPDR S&P 500 exchange-traded fund (ticker: SPY), usually leads the most-active list; Tesla (TSLA) does the same among single stocks.

This article goes a long way to explaining why the correlations between the VIX and stock market action have broken down this year. In a Bloomberg TV interview today Peter Tchir described the leverage on zero day options as close to 100:1 and that the VIX Index only looks at one-month volatility. 

Where next? The best comment, as it also applies to us, comes from one of our managers, Terry Smith: “Our companies should demonstrate a relatively resilient fundamental performance in such circumstances, and the only type of market which ends in a recession is a bear market.”

We are reminded by another market veteran we’ve followed for 40 years, Ed Yardeni, that the FAANGS, the mega tech US stocks which led the 2014 to 2021 bull market, still inflate the PER market rating. Without the FAANGS, the forward market multiple is only 16.7x, making it barely 2 points higher than the long-term average. Bearish commentators claim that earnings are about to take a hit, raising the PER, and rate rises are still in store. (Remember that 2 main factors influence share prices: the valuation of earnings, influenced largely by interest rates, and the earnings themselves). There may indeed be something to the bears’ claim.

Here is a link to the full report. 

Some of the biggest movers in the US market since the beginning of January have been the eight mega-cap household names stocks. Tesla and Nvidia rebounded impressively while Alphabet has been a clear laggard and all largely because of enthusiasm about the promise of AI. 

Market maker Citadel Securities has disclosed a 5.5% stake in Silvergate Capital (SI) worth about $25 million.

According to a Form 13G filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Citadel Securities is now the owner of roughly 1.73 million shares or a 5.5% stake in Silvergate, valued at $25 million based on Monday's closing price of $14.71.

A person familiar with Citadel Securities told CoinDesk that the filing is a result of the firm's options market making activities rather than a directional investment or stake in Silvergate. Citadel Securities makes markets in more than a million individual options at any time. For 13G filings, options positions are calculated based on long call positions, regardless of any offsetting short calls or puts, explained the person.

Meanwhile, trading firm Susquehanna also reported in a filing that it bought about 2.37 million shares, or a 7.5% stake, in Silvergate. The investment would be valued at about $35 million, based on Monday's closing price.

Alongside a modest rally in the price of bitcoin, Silvergate shares are higher by just over 5% on Tuesday at $15.53. Shares are down about 87% over the past year.

The moves come after BlackRock said it boosted stake in Silvergate last month. A filing showed that the asset management giant had a 7.2% stake in Silvergate Capital as of Dec. 31, as oppose to a 6.3% stake, reported a year earlier.

Bitcoin is about 14 months out from the next halvening. That’s when the reward for successfully mining a new block on the blockchain will halve again. In previous cycles, the absolute low for the crypto winters occur about a year before the halvening and are retested around the time of the event. 

One key component for the United States and its global military commitments is its fleet of transport planes, including the Lockheed Martin C-5 Galaxy and the Boeing C-17 Globemaster III. These provide the US Air Force with the ability to deliver soldiers and their equipment anywhere in the world in short order and keep them supplied indefinitely.

However, it is an extremely expensive capability to achieve and maintain, and it often means sending air crews into dangerous areas where they may encounter hostile anti-aircraft weaponry. It also requires a large number of pilots, who do not come cheap and are invariably in short supply.

To counter this, the Air Force has hired Reliable Robotics to look into automating existing cargo aircraft. The idea isn't new, but adapting the technology to large multi-engine jet transports flying military supply missions adds another level of complexity.

At a Superbowl party last night I had an educative chat with a senior manager at Intel. He mentioned two snippets of information I thought were worth considering.

The first is that he said in talking with pilots, there is a major difference between flying a Boeing and an Airbus. You get paid less for flying an Airbus because they are much more automated. They basically fly themselves so pilot skill is less important. Therefore most pilots train on both, so they can command higher salaries.

 

Top European Union officials raised the possibility last year of making major streaming operators like Netflix Inc. and YouTube help pay for 5G and fiber infrastructure. Telcos had been pushing for such a move for over a decade.

The EU’s executive arm is expected to publish a request for feedback on the idea this month, the first step toward a formal proposal. When a draft of this consultation was circulated around Brussels recently, telcos read it with glee — and tech companies with horror. The consensus was that the EU is no longer asking whether it will do something but rather, how.

Last week brought another cause for celebration, at least for the bankers who work with the likes of Deutsche Telekom AG and Vodafone Group Plc. Commissioner Thierry Breton said the EU should more closely consider cross-border mergers, which could create “a true single market for telecoms” in Europe. Telcos, again, have been lobbying for consolidation for a long time.

Regulatory changes mean a lot to investment prospects in any sector, but when it comes to who pays for expensive network upgrades, it can have a material impact on the bottom line. Telecom stocks have been off the radar for 20 years because growth did not look likely to ever return. Repricing for the potential for slimmed down costs is a welcome development. 

The scrutiny comes as the battle to build the most accurate and effective search engine is escalating. On Monday, Google introduced Bard, whose underlying technology will eventually be built into Google.com. The next day, Microsoft Corp. said it was integrating a cousin of ChatGPT into Bing. On Wednesday, Google hosted a news conference in Paris where it shared more details about the company’s progress integrating artificial intelligence into search.

“The general sentiment is that ChatGPT and the Microsoft Bing announcement have created a narrative that Google’s search business model is under threat,” said Mark Riedl, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The market reaction to Bard’s inadequacies was both swift and severe. The downward dynamic experienced by Google shares demonstrates how fickle the mob can be during a momentum move driven by hope rather than earnings. 

Powell says the labor market report from Friday “underscores the message” he sent last week, that there’s a significant road ahead to get inflation down. There’s an expectation that inflation can come down painlessly, but “that’s not the base case.”

The primary conclusion investors have taken from Jerome Powell’s interview today is pain might be coming but rates will quickly adjust when it does. The volatility on the Nasdaq-100 showed the development of this conclusion with a 1% advance, drop back to flat and recovery to finish up 1%. 

AI Should Increase Knowledge Worker Productivity Dramatically
According to ARK’s research, AI should increase the productivity of knowledge workers more than 4-fold by 2030. At 100% adoption, AI spend of $41 trillion could increase labor productivity by -$200 trillion, dwarfing the $32 trillion in knowledge worker salaries and rivaling current projections for global GDP in 2030. If vendors were to capture 10% of value by their products, AI software could generate up to $14 trillion in revenue and $90 trillion in enterprise value in 2030. 

ARK is big on big on ideas. They don’t typically pay too much attention on where the money is going to come from to fund all that growth. The investment in the computing power necessary to achieve the heady goals of artificial intelligence and all it promises does not happen on its own. It requires sustained access to capital and cashflows to make it worth the cost of foregoing other potential opportunities. Microsoft is attempting to fill that void with its investment in OpenAI.

Leaders go to war because they believe they can win, as did Putin in Ukraine. It is entirely feasible to reinforce both Taiwanese and US capabilities in the region, to a point at which Beijing must doubt its ability to prevail in the necessary amphibious assault, a perilous and difficult undertaking.

The Ukraine experience has rewritten in lights a towering lesson of history: To deter aggression, there is no substitute for credible armed forces. We in the UK and the rest of the West are supremely fortunate that America still possesses these, despite the caveats about the Navy’s vulnerabilities in the Pacific.

Yet more important even than weapons is will. Many people, sometimes including myself, have doubted and continue to doubt whether, if China does invade Taiwan, the US and its allies will undertake military action in response. This is a reprise of the 1950 Korean uncertainty, with one important difference: 73 years ago, there was nothing in South Korea of material value to the West; its armies fought instead to defend a principle. In modern Taiwan, by contrast, advanced semiconductors represent an industry of towering importance both to China and ourselves.

The USA downed a Chinese balloon over the weekend after allowing it to traverse the entire continent. That speaks to a great deal of indecision about the right way to deal with an airspace incursion and not least because it is so unexpected. 

The inflation that we originally got was very much a collision between very strong demand and hard supply constraints, not something that you really have seen in prior, you know, in business cycles.

And

I think it's -- because this is not like the other business cycles in so many ways. It may well be that as -- that it will take more slowing than we expect, than I expect to get inflation down to 2 percent.

And

this is not a standard business cycle where you can look at the last 10 times there was a global pandemic and we shut the economy down, and Congress did what it did and we did what we did.

There is some logic to that statement. We have never shut down the entire global economy or printed so much money in such a short period of time. The clear conclusion Powell is taking in predicting a soft landing is that inflation really is transitory. 

CATL accounts for the largest share of the global electric-vehicle battery market, according to data from Seoul-based SNE Research. It sold a total of 165.7 gigawatt-hours of batteries in the January-November 2022 period, almost three times as much as second-placed BYD Co., a Chinese automaker that also manufactures batteries.

CATL’s market share was about 35% in the first 10 months of last year. The Fujian-based company supplies carmakers including Volkswagen AG, Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd., Nissan Motor Co. and Tesla Inc., which delivered fewer EVs than expected last quarter, despite offering some price cuts. 

In 2017, CATL raised about $822 million in an initial public offering in Shenzhen. The company raised another 45 billion yuan ($6.7 billion) in a private share placement last year. China Securities was the lead sponsor, while CICC, Goldman Sachs and UBS were among the co-lead underwriters.

Shares of CATL have fallen about 18% in the past year, valuing the company at about $172 billion.

The opportunity to buy CATL shares will be welcomed by the global investment community since not everyone has the opportunity to trade in domestic Chinese stocks. The challenge is CATL has appreciated significantly since its IPO so in buying today one is betting both the company retains its dominance as a battery manufacturer and market growth approaches optimistic forecasts. 

GM would supplant China's Ganfeng Lithium(002460.SZ) to become Lithium Americas' largest shareholder. GM has also agreed to buy all the lithium from Thacker Pass when it opens in 2026 - roughly 40,000 tonnes per year.

Under the agreement, GM will buy $650 million of shares in Lithium Americas in two equal parts, with the first tranche coming only if Lithium Americas prevails in an ongoing court case. A U.S. judge earlier this month said she would rule "in the next couple of months" in the case, which centers on whether former U.S. President Donald Trump erred when he approved the mine just before leaving office in 2021.

The automotive industry appears to be getting back to its roots. Fifty years ago it was common for bid industrials to control mines, processing, fabrication and manufacturing in a vertically integrated business model. The 1970s ushered in offshoring and just in time manufacturing and inventory was suddenly considering a balance sheet liability. In the aftermath of the pandemic and now war in Ukraine, the merits of controlling the supply chain are being viewed with fresh perspective. 

Unlike OpenAI and other startups such as Stability AI, Google has released its most powerful image- and text-generation models only to a limited group of testers. Google executives in recent years have stressed the need to test new artificial-intelligence tools for signs of bias while guarding against potential misuse, concerns shared by many academics.

Such caution has at times frustrated researchers at groups such as the artificial-intelligence unit Google Brain, some of whom have left to raise money for their own startups where they can more easily release new products, said people familiar with the matter.

Last week, the head of Google's research division, Jeff Dean, published a more-than-7,000-word blog post summarizing the company's recent work in artificial intelligence, writing that the developments are "making their way into real user experiences that will dramatically change how we interact with computers."

The pressures add to a difficult business environment for Google, whose search and ad-tech operations have both been targeted by Justice Department lawsuits. Google also announced the largest layoffs in company history last week, cutting about 12,000 employees.

"We have long been focused on developing and deploying AI to improve people's lives," a Google spokeswoman said. "We believe that AI is foundational and transformative technology that is incredibly useful for individuals, businesses and communities, and as our AI Principles outline, we need to consider the broader societal impacts these innovations can have."

Google had a reservation robot system running in 2018. It automatically made calls to the restaurant when an online booking system was not available. They got so much backlash against robots taking jobs that it essentially canned the program. Today apps like Opentable or Fork have grown to capture more of the booking market but that does not negate the fact robo caller tech is at least five years old. 

Putin’s confidence in his military’s ability to grind out a triumph - even at a cost of vast casualties and destruction - reflects a misreading of the West’s commitment to turn back his aggression, some insiders concede. The US and its allies have steadily stepped up weapons supplies to categories once considered off-limits.

Still, US and European military officials fear the conflict could soon settle into a World War I-style artillery fight with largely stagnant front lines, a scenario that could come to favor Russia, with its larger population and military industry.

Diplomatically, Russia has sought to win supporters among non-western countries with appeals for talks on a cease-fire. Even people close to the Kremlin admit those are hopeless at present, given Ukraine’s demand that Russia pull out its troops as a condition for any deal.

The minimum the Kremlin would accept would be a temporary truce that left Russia in control of the territory its forces currently hold in order to win time to rebuild its forces, the people said. Though short of the boundaries of the regions that Putin illegally annexed in September, that would still leave Russia with a large swath of land, linking the areas it occupied before the war. As a result, the idea is a nonstarter with Kyiv and its allies.

“Unless something changes, we’re looking at a war of attrition like World War I, which could go for a long time because both sides believe time is on their side,” said Andrey Kortunov, head of the Kremlin-founded Russia International Affairs Council. “Putin is sure either the West or Ukraine will grow tired.”

The route to a Russian victory lies in a war of attrition. They have more artillery, shells and tanks than NATO so they estimate a long drawn out conflict will eventually favour larger numbers. Absorbing high casualties is part of that strategy. It worked for Iran against Iraq in the 1980s and Russia appears to be following a similar strategy. 

“To fight the Chinese, we will have to have comparable cost structures,” Stellantis NV CEO Carlos Tavares said on Dec. 19, speaking to reporters at a powertrain plant in Tremery in northern France. “Alternatively, Europe will have to decide to close its borders at least partially to Chinese rivals. If Europe doesn’t want to put itself in this position, we need to work harder on the competitiveness of what we do.”

And

The growth in the supply chain in China has also kept pace with car manufacturing. Domestic companies now make almost all parts, including those they used to import until about a decade ago, such as high-strength steel and reinforced fiberglass. As a result, China ran a trade surplus in vehicles and vehicle parts for the first time in 2021. The assembly lines still depend on advanced machines from Japan and Germany, though.

“There seems to have been a step change,” Dyer says. “The long-term trend is for increasing sales of Chinese brands around the world.”

A decade ago it was obvious China was moving up the value chain in manufacturing. It might have not have reached heights of 3nm chip production but planes and automobile parity is now a reality. That’s as much of challenge for Airbus and Boeing as it is for Toyota, Hyundai, Volkswagen and GM. 

As Ukraine and its allies prepare for a potential escalation in fighting in the spring, the debate over sending battle tanks to back Kyiv’s military and potentially retake territory has become a flashpoint among NATO allies. US and European officials have bridled at Scholz’s slow decision-making, saying the German leader should be more assertive, following through his promised “Zeitenwende,” or historic turning point on security. 

Scholz has insisted that Germany should not act alone in sending new categories of heavy weapons that could provoke an escalation with Moscow. He’s placed a premium on moving in lockstep with the US and NATO. 

“We never go alone,” Scholz said in an interview last week with Bloomberg. 

There are estimates Rheinmetall could send as many as 139 Leopard Type 1 and 2 tanks to Ukraine via various swap agreements over the next several months. By that time, there is a risk available inventory will be fully exhausted. 

Being in the SEC’s cross hairs is likely to lead to a further shake-up of what little is left of the lending sector. 

“There will be two different models in the future,” said Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke University. “First, certain organizations will register with the SEC and sell these products as securities. Second, investors may do this on their own by putting their crypto into decentralized liquidity pools and earning a fee for that.”

In decentralized finance, or DeFi, investors use software to automatically borrow and lend tokens, with positions being automatically liquidated if prices fall too low or they miss repayment deadlines. Some platforms such as Maple Finance organize pools where an operator can manage incoming investor funds and choose who to lend them out to, using due diligence to assess a borrower’s creditworthiness rather than asking for collateral. Such an approach has already lead to some defaults during the current crisis, in addition to plummeting volumes.

Because these types of loans are conducted on public blockchains, the collapse in lending is more visible. The total amount of value locked on DeFi networks hit a peak of $181 billion in early December, according to data from DeFiLlama, and now sits at around $45 billion — tarnished by wavering demand, declining crypto prices and several spectacular failures.

The next bitcoin halvening is due in April 2024. That will halve the reward for successful minting a new block from 6.25 to 3.125. Therefore the limited supply and rarity of the asset will become a topic of conversation again around this time next year. 

“I commend the Biden administration for working with our partners to apply export controls on equipment used to make advanced semiconductors and am eager to scrutinize the specifics of what comes out of these talks,” Texas Representative Michael McCaul, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement to Bloomberg News. “A Republican Congress is ready to use its authorities to protect U.S. national security and defend human rights, should the outcomes not substantially match the controls currently in place.”

McCaul is set to meet with Raimondo to discuss the matter on Thursday. It’s uncertain how long it will take the other countries to implement their measures. 

“It could even be something which just happens without big announcements,” Rutte said in the interview. “It’s still not clear. It depends a bit on how the discussions with various countries will evolve.”

After the US announcement in October, some American companies were forced to warn investors that they may lose out on billions of dollars in future China revenue. Since then, they’ve argued it also exposes them to losing market share, if overseas competitors are allowed to continue to operate in China relatively unrestricted.  

Tokyo Electron has said the general clampdown on its Chinese customers is already hurting business, while ASML has said that demand elsewhere in the world for its most advanced products can make up for any revenue shortfall from China.

Despite the friendlier sounds coming from Chinese and American diplomats, the trajectory of the trade war has not changed. It is still the clear ambition of the US government to curtail China’s ability to compete technologically. It is viewed by both sides of the political divide as a national security priority. 

I posted the first part of this update on Wednesday and saved the second part of today. The number one theme in emerging markets is governance. That’s where Saudi Arabia is clearly attempting to make an impression.

In speaking with the junior minister for investment, the decision to give opportunities to young people is very intentional. They know the only way to achieve the progress they need is through harnessing the productive capacity and thirst for invention of the young.

It’s incredibly refreshing to meet so many tenacious young people with ambitious dreams for the future. The fact they have a route to achieve their goals is even better.

Indeed, the biggest winners may be Nvidia and TSMC. Nvidia’s investment in the CUDA ecosystem means the company doesn’t simply have the best AI chips, but the best AI ecosystem, and the company is investing in scaling that ecosystem up. That, though, has and will continue to spur competition, particularly in terms of internal chip efforts like Google’s TPU; everyone, though, will make their chips at TSMC, at least for the foreseeable future.

The biggest impact of all though, though, is probably off our radar completely. Just before the break Nat Friedman told me in a Stratechery Interview about Riffusion, which uses Stable Diffusion to generate music from text via visual sonograms, which makes me wonder what else is possible when images are truly a commodity. Right now text is the universal interface, because text has been the foundation of information transfer since the invention of writing; humans, though, are visual creatures, and the availability of AI for both the creation and interpretation of images could fundamentally transform what it means to convey information in ways that are impossible to predict.

For now, our predictions must be much more time-constrained, and modest. This may be the beginning of the AI epoch, but even in tech, epochs take a decade or longer to transform everything around them.

ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence models are growing in capability and the pace of development is accelerating. There is a big question about how consumers will react to intrusive predictive models and how the sector will ultimately be regulated. However, if history is any guide these issues arise after a significant interval and prices move ahead regardless.

Historically, dividend related ITM [Ed. In-the-money] call exercises have resulted in some of the highest call volume days of the year, including March 15, 2012, when a record 9M calls traded in SPY, but changes to the clearing process since then have dampened that activity. 

Mathematically, the decision to exercise a call or put early is related to the extrinsic value of the contract. For calls, if the dividend(s) amount exceeds the extrinsic value, a long holder is usually better off exercising. For puts, the decision is a bit more subtle, with extrinsic value compared to the carry cost on the strike. As U.S. interest rates have increased sharply to decade-highs this year, the cost of carry for deep positions has increased, while the selloff in many popular stocks has resulted in large blocks of deep put open interest. Unlike dividend-related call exercises, which tend to happen quarterly, put exercise dynamics may repeat daily if positions are open. In practice, put exercises are more common on Wednesdays based on the timing of settlement. Puts exercised on a Wednesday result in a stock sale on Thursday, which settles Monday.

Fortunately, early-exercise candidate call and put strikes for all listed products are calculated intraday and available in a subscription product on the Cboe DataShop.

A sample from the file for December 7 shows that all the active Amazon deep put strikes were considered optimal to exercise as of 2 p.m.

Large volumes of options traded in single stock names is a function of how much liquidity is still circulating the market. Massive volume in Tesla was a major factor in the stock’s ability to defy gravity in 2021. The opposite condition has been evident in Amazon, where outsized appetite for shorts has resulted in the share being among the worst performers in Q4. 

Tesla Inc. is offering US consumers $7,500 to take delivery of its two highest-volume models before year-end, adding to indications the carmaker is struggling with demand.

The discount on new Model 3 sedans and Model Y sport utility vehicles is double what the company was offering earlier this month. It mirrors an anticipated change in how much of a tax credit certain consumers will be eligible for early next year.

It’s highly unusual for Tesla to offer such perks, as Elon Musk has for years enforced a no-discounts policy. The company also departed from its chief executive officer’s insistence against spending on traditional advertising last month by promoting its wares on a local television shopping channel in China. Tesla also has cut prices and production in that market this quarter.

Elon Musk’s infallibility is quickly eroding, evidenced by his ham-fisted management of Twitter. There is even talk some buyers are cancelling orders because of this negative coverage. Not many people want to be associated with a personality vilified by all but those on the fringe of public opinion. As if that is not enough, the continued spread of COVID in China will take a toll on demand for Tesla’s vehicles.

Greenidge’s average monthly cash burn rate in the past two months was approximately $8 million. That is typically used to describe the rate at which a company spends capital to finance overhead before generating a profit or loss from operations. About $5.5 million of that cost was associated with principal and interest payments to NYDIG. The firm expects to have a similar cash burn rate and similar payments to NYDIG in December, according to the filing.

The Fairfield, Connecticut-based miner has a natural gas plant that powers its Bitcoin mining facility in Dresden, New York. It is one of the earliest and largest crypto-mining firms in the state. While Greenidge’s current operations remain intact, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed one of the most restrictive laws in the US on crypto mining last month with a two-year moratorium on new permits from the miners that are powered by fossil fuel. 

Bitcoin is a liquidity barometer. When prices multiply, the fear of missing out creates demand for leveraged plays on the price of both bitcoin and altcoins. It encourages miners to leverage up to increase their chances of securing additional coins and it attracts new funding mechanisms to ensure maximum leverage is made available to the most risk-tolerant traders as the promise of massive gains proves siren-like. During crypto winters, this entire process goes into reverse and many operations go bust.

As I’ve written many times about the economy and markets, we never know where we’re going, but we ought to know where we are. The bottom line for me is that, in many ways, conditions at this moment are overwhelmingly different from – and mostly less favorable than – those of the post-GFC climate as described above. These changes may be long-lasting, or they may wear off over time. But in my view, we’re unlikely to quickly see the same optimism and ease that marked the post-GFC period.

We’ve gone from the low-return of 2009-21 to a full-return world, and it may become more so in the near term. Investors can now potentially get solid returns from credit instruments, meaning they no longer have to rely as heavily on riskier investments to achieve their overall return targets. Lenders and bargain hunters face much better prospects in this changed environment than they did in 2009-21. And importantly, if you grant that the environment is and may continue to be very different from what it was over the last 13 years – and most of the last 40 years – it should follow that the investment strategies that worked best over those periods may not be the ones that outperform in the years ahead.

That’s the sea change I’m talking about.

There is really only one big question. Will the Fed relent and revert to the GFC playbook when unemployment rises and economic hardship stokes deflationary fears? 2023 will probably deliver an answer.

A personalized Moderna Inc. cancer vaccine combined with collaborator Merck & Co.’s biggest-selling drug reduced melanoma deaths in a mid-stage trial, helping for now to ease concerns about the biotechnology company’s second act following the success of its Covid-19 vaccine.

The combination of the vaccine with Merck’s Keytruda cut the risk of death or recurrence of the lethal skin cancer by 44%, the companies said Tuesday in a statement. The drugmakers plan to move the combined treatment into final-stage studies next year. Moderna shares rose as much as 26% as of 1 p.m. in New York, while Merck’s gained as much as 2.1%. 

During the pandemic, the Nasdaq Biotech Index was dominated by vaccine providers. COVID-19 was all anyone was interested in. For a couple of years, everyone was willing to suspend concern that there are causes other than coronaviruses. We are now returning to more normal considerations in that the biggest causes of death are heart disease and cancer and obesity is a massive chronic issue.

“While the war against inflation is turning, we are a long way off declaring victory and the Fed will keep its hawkish stance for a while longer, even if it does potentially force a recession,” said Richard Carter, head of fixed interest research at Quilter Cheviot.

The CPI-fueled stock rally fails to recognize that corporate earnings are just starting to see the impact of tight monetary policy, James Athey, investment director at Abrdn.

“As the full effects of the Fed’s aggressive actions this year play out next year, it seems inevitable that we will see a significant repricing lower in EPS forecasts and thus the broad market,” Athey said.

The stock market has been pricing in the likelihood Inflation has peaked since October. Now is the time to start thinking about the knock-on effects of inflation peaking. Economic activity will slow as the race to overtake inflation with purchase subsides and as savings are eroded. Corporate profits will inevitably slow in response and unemployment will likely rise from Q2 onwards.

“My biggest concern is the slowdown they’re seeing in China,” Matt Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak + Co. said, adding that “as long as Elon Musk is spending a lot of time with Twitter, it’s going to keep a lid on the stock.”

Bloomberg News reported Friday that Tesla plans to suspend output in stages at its Shanghai electric car factory from the end of the month until as long as early January, amid production line upgrades and slowing consumer demand. 

Meanwhile, Twitter is more than a distraction. Musk’s bankers are considering replacing some of the high-interest debt he layered on Twitter with new margin loans backed by Tesla, people with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg.   

I saw in another article that SpaceX is valued at approximately $140 billion. The purchase of Twitter has stretched both Elon Musk’s time and finances. If his creditors impose a margin loan there is clear scope he will be denuded of his Tesla holdings if Twitter does not turn around quickly. That may result in a rush to IPO SpaceX to raise cash.

Amgen is years behind rivals Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly in developing an obesity treatment, but the company says its experimental drug could prove superior. And investors seem to agree, as news of the drug helped Amgen stock go on a tear recently.

Shares of Amgen now are taking a breather after a run-up in late October and early November. Last week, the biotech giant unveiled another  batch of official data, showing that its drug requires less-frequent injections and leads to faster weight loss.

Over three months, patients who received three high-dose shots of Amgen's drug lost 14.5% of their body weight. That beat out the 8% weight loss for Lilly's weekly injection over the same time period, according to one analyst.

Now, the question is how durable the weight loss will be for recipients of Amgen's AMG 133.

The big money-making drugs in the healthcare sector treat, but don’t cure, chronic diseases. Obesity is one of the biggest evolving issues, and is also a major contributing factor to the evolution of diabetes. Treating obesity with a pill, instead of the lifestyle change needed to address weight gain has obvious attractions for potential patients.

The difference is that ChatGPT is not actually running python and determining the first 10 prime numbers deterministically: every answer is a probabilistic result gleaned from the corpus of Internet data that makes up GPT-3; in other words, ChatGPT comes up with its best guess as to the result in 10 seconds, and that guess is so likely to be right that it feels like it is an actual computer executing the code in question.

This raises fascinating philosophical questions about the nature of knowledge; you can also simply ask ChatGPT for the first 10 prime numbers:

Those weren’t calculated, they were simply known; they were known, though, because they were written down somewhere on the Internet. In contrast, notice how ChatGPT messes up the far simpler equation I mentioned above:

For what it’s worth, I had to work a little harder to make ChatGPT fail at math: the base GPT-3 model gets basic three digit addition wrong most of the time, while ChatGPT does much better. Still, this obviously isn’t a calculator: it’s a pattern matcher — and sometimes the pattern gets screwy. The skill here is in catching it when it gets it wrong, whether that be with basic math or with basic political theory.

The probabilistic versus deterministic issue boils down to the problem all models face; quality of data. The best way for a chatbot to function is to only use a confined sample of reliable answers. In other words for an answer that is sure to be correct, the dataset has to be filled with deterministic infallible answers.

China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology, the world’s biggest maker of electric-car batteries, signs a global partnership agreement with Honda Motor, according to an exchange filing to Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

China has worked hard to capture the market for EV batteries and that is now paying dividends. Traditional car companies all now want to be EV companies but are years behind in building their own factories and supply chains. That is most especially true for batteries. China has a dominant position in mining and processing the respective raw materials. The implication is clear, there is no way for car companies to achieve their EV goals without outsourcing at least part of the process to Chinese companies.

Morgan Stanley projects that a multi-asset income fund can now find some of the best investing opportunities in nearly two decades in dollar-denominated securities, including inflation-linked debt and high-grade corporate obligations. The interest payments on regular 10-year Treasuries, for example, has hit 4.125%, the highest since the global financial crisis.

Meanwhile Pacific Investment Management Co. reckons long-dated securities, the biggest losers in this era of Federal Reserve hawkishness, will bounce back as a recession ignites the bond-safety trade, with government debt acting as a reliable hedge in the 60/40 portfolio complex once more.

“People are excited, believe it or not,” said Maribel Larios, founder and CEO of Fiduciary Experts, a Murrieta, California-based registered investment advisor. “It’s all relative, as they’ve seen these fixed-income accounts pay little to nothing in the past. So, 4% — or even about 2% to 3% in some cash accounts — is relatively good now.”

Banks like Deutsche and Morgan Stanley are taking an axe to their earnings estimates for the S&P500 next year. Corporate earnings have been resilient, even as the Fed has hiked rates faster than at any time in the last 40 years. That is unlikely to persist as the lagged effects of tightening catch up.

Amazon is aware of the macro challenges, and hence AWS employees are reaching out to clients to see how it can help optimize spending, said David Brown, AWS' vice president.

"If you're looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place to do it," AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said during his keynote presentation.

However, an investment firm Andreessen Horowitz analysis last year, painted a different picture. It showed that a company could trim its computing costs by half or more by bringing workloads from the cloud back to on-premises data centers.

Amazon is also offering a cheaper alternative, Graviton computing instances based on energy-efficient Arm-based chips alternative to standard Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) and Intel Corp (NASDAQ: INTC) processors.

"We do see some customers who are doing some belt-tightening now," Selipsky told CNBC. Expedia Group, Inc (NASDAQ: EXPE) CEO Peter Kern sees the cloud as an area where his company can reduce its fixed costs.

The point I have been making for at least the last year is large companies offering cloud services saved startups time in scaling up. Instead of buying servers and hiring teams or engineers to create a data base, they outsourced that to companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google/Alphabet. As the fountain of money supporting the startup scene ebbs, that will inevitably hit spending on outsourced data infrastructure. The subscription business model only works when you have subscribers.

Since returning from the Chart seminar in London I have spoken to several people who work in the Israeli high-tech industry, They all tell me that about 10% of their colleagues have lost their jobs recently. Today you referred to your MIIN index. How can we invest in these countries?

Thank you for this additional insight. The market for big ideas ballooned with the delivery of free money. Suddenly, no idea was too grand, or time to delivery/commercialization too long. That trend was looking tired in 2019, as the Federal Reserve’s quantitative tightening was siphoning liquidity from the global economy.

“The time for moderating the pace of rate increases may come as soon as the December meeting,” Powell said in the text of his speech. “Given our progress in tightening policy, the timing of that moderation is far less significant than the questions of how much further we will need to raise rates to control inflation, and the length of time it will be necessary to hold policy at a restrictive level.”

Policy-sensitive 2-year Treasury yields fell on Powell’s remarks, erasing increases on the day, and the S&P 500 index reversed losses to trade higher. The dollar slipped in value against major rivals on foreign-exchange markets.

The Fed’s actions -- the most aggressive since the 1980s -- have lifted the target range of their benchmark rate to 3.75% to 4% from nearly zero in March. Powell said rates are likely to reach a “somewhat higher” level than officials estimated in September, when the median projection was for 4.6% next year. Those projections will be updated at the December meeting.

Jerome Powell confirmed today that the pace of Fed hikes will moderate; not reverse or pause. Nevertheless, cashed-up traders are more than willing to take anything less than outright hawkishness as good news.

According to Central Election Commission, KMT won 13 out of 21 cities and counties, while DPP only managed to secure five cities in the southern part of Taiwan, the least since its founding in 1986. KMT candidates took 50% of votes in the contests, versus 41.6% for the DPP, 11.39 million votes counted as of 11:53 pm in Taipei, according to the official election website.

That prompted President Tsai Ing-wen to step down as party leader, saying in televised remarks: “In the face of these results, there are many areas where we need to engage in self-reflection.”

The elections represented the last major test of Tsai’s DPP before her second and final term draws to a close and Taiwan picks a successor in early 2024. The KMT, or Nationalist Party, hopes the gains in local races will help it mount a comeback after defeats in presidential elections in 2016 and 2020.

The results will be closely watched in Washington and Beijing, since the DPP’s rise to power has prompted China to cut off communications with Taiwan and ramp up diplomatic and military pressure on the island. The KMT, which favors eventual unification with China, had previously overseen a historic expansion of ties with Beijing, easing travel, trade and investment across the Taiwan Strait. 

The Tsai administration has actively escalated tensions with China and the electorate does not want to be in a war with China. That does not mean they want to be part of China but not do they wish to do anything to antagonise China. Taiwan’s citizens are very much aware of the fine balance that needs to be maintained when squeezed between two great powers.

At issue are two South Korean-made components: thermal shields built by SFA Engineering Corp. and vacuum vessel sectors made by Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. Neither company responded to Bloomberg requests for comment outside of business hours. 

The thermal shield, which is lined with 5 tons of pure silver and designed to contain heat 10 times hotter than the sun, showed cracks along cooling pipes, ITER reported. The vacuum vessel sectors, each weighing the equivalent of 300 cars and as tall as a telephone pole, show slight differences in manufacturing that complicates the welding process used to put them together. 

So far, ITER’s governing board has taken the setbacks in its stride. At an extraordinary meeting convened this month, it ordered Barabaschi to come up with a new budget and time line to be presented next year. 

“What was remarkable at the ITER council was the lack of finger pointing,” ITER spokesman Laban Coblentz said Friday in an interview. “It has been a very solutions-oriented discussion.”

 And

“Companies have been learning enormously from this first-of-its kind project,” said ITER’s Coblentz, dismissing suggestions that the delays could dampen enthusiasm. “The goal here isn’t to build just a single machine but to show that fusion power is feasible and to make that happen.”

The quantity of money being poured into fusion continues to grow. Companies hope to repeat the success of private companies in beating the Human Genome Project to the prize of completing the first sequence of the human genome. The primary technology innovation is the shrinking of superconductors which means new reactor designs can be much smaller and therefore cheaper. The range of challenges that still need to be overcome is still quite high so while this is an exceptionally interesting sector, it is not going to provide the abundant cheap energy we require for quite some time.

Meanwhile the 5 tons of silver required for the ITER experiment suggests a new source of demand for the metal in future designs too. 

A lnk to the full report is posted in the Subscriber's Area. 

The big question for investors is whether this is a cyclical or structural bear market. The exogenous shocks that come to mind are COVID, the response to it, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The private sector leverage is not focused in the consumer sector, but there has been extensive use of leverage in private investment, crypto and institutional investment areas not least in pensions and endowments.

Even though markets gained on Zhao’s tweet, such a fund may not be best for the industry, said Quantum Economics founder and Chief Executive Officer Mati Greenspan. Binance already has too much control in a decentralized market, he said.

“That sort of concentration of power makes me uncomfortable,” said Greenspan. “It’s the kind of thing crypto was designed to avoid and one of the lessons we should have learned from last week.”

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s tweet that Bitcoin “will make it” also gave crypto markets a boost, said Greenspan. Dogecoin, a token the Tesla CEO has touted in the past, gained as much as 7.9%.

This is yet another example of the paradox of decentralized finance. It’s appealing in theory but the benefits of centralized control become evident during crises. A truly decentralized system does not have a buffer against bank runs. It is looking likely Binance will come through this crisis with a dominant position in the “decentralized” finance market.

That was a terrible idea. As I’ve written before on this subject, people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either. From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality. That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.

Dancing on the grave of social media has begun but it seems to me that the rumours of the sector’s death are greatly exaggerated. There is no doubt social media has issues that range from content moderation to promoting social anxiety and depression among teenagers. However, that does not detract from the reality billions of people spend several hours a day perusing social media forums.

Binance holds $74.7 billion worth of tokens of which around 40% are in its own stablecoin and native coin, according data shared by Nansen.  

The world’s largest exchange released the information after its co-founder Changpeng Zhao announced earlier this week that Binance would provide proof-of-reserves to be more transparent.

The demise of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX.com, has raised concerns over the opacity of exchange balance sheets and is prompting companies increase disclosures. Crypto.com has also publicly shared its reserves pool on Friday.

Of the $74.6 billion termed as net worth, about $23 billion was in its own stablecoin BUSD and $6.4 billion in its Binance Coin, according to Nansen. 

The exchange has also allocated 10.5% of its holdings in Bitcoin and 9.8% in Ether, Nansen data shows. 

Binance is the first unlisted crypto exchange to come out with the details, since FTX collapsed, the latest in a series of crypto businesses to go bust this year. Crypto exchanges including OKX, KuCoin, Poloniex, Huobi this week vowed to increase transparency and provide greater clarity on their holdings. 

The promise of the fintech revolution is decentralized finance. That implies no further need for intermediaries. The ambition is consumers, businesses, creditors, and borrowers will be able to transact with one another over the network at will. That will be facilitated by whatever token is relevant to the network as a medium of exchange.

ASML hasn’t been able to sell its most advanced extreme ultraviolet lithography machines to China as the Dutch government refused to give it a license to do so, but the company has been able to sell its other machinery to the country. The Dutch company sees the total indirect impact from the new US measures to be about 5% of its backlog, it said on a call with investors in October. 

Meanwhile, major governments around the world have come up with subsidies and incentives to expand chip production capacities at home to avoid another round of semiconductor shortages that shaved off hundreds of billions from their economies during the pandemic. 

Even though the global chip industry is now facing a severe downturn, countries including the US and Japan have not slowed their pace in readying new plants to prepare for the next boom cycle. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is even considering adding another advanced facility next to a $12 billion dollar plant that’s under construction in the US state of Arizona. 

Efforts by governments to build chip plants at home have just started and will accelerate, Wennink said Friday. “The drive for technological sovereignty is going to be very important driver for our business going forward.”

The one thing everyone learned during the pandemic is the global supply chain is lot more fragile than previously believed. That is truer of the semiconductor sector than anything else and not least because many countries gave up domestic manufacturing capacity in favour of cheaper overseas production. Reversing that trend is both expensive and time consuming.

A cooling in US consumer prices offered cheer to households, investors and Federal Reserve officials, but there’s still a long way before high inflation becomes history. 

At 7.7%, annual inflation in October was the slowest since January -- before the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine that triggered a worldwide surge in commodities and pump prices. Even more importantly for the Fed, a closely watched measure that excludes food and energy decelerated by more than economists anticipated.

With slowdowns across categories including food, apparel and used cars, the report suggests that the fastest price increases in decades may finally be starting to ebb in the world’s largest economy. And it probably gives the US central bank enough assurance to moderate its aggressive interest-rate hikes if the trend is sustained.

Inflation is rolling over as predicted and it will continue to do so. The pace of tightening this year has been historic in nature and most particularly, the peak in money supply growth was in February 2021. There is a significant lag between money supply growth and tightening conditions and when they show up in the economy. That is now at hand.

As impressive as this year’s updates are, IBM is looking to next year as the real turning point. The company’s roadmap says that next year’s quantum processor, the Condor, will boast a stunning 1,121 qubits. Also on the cards is a modular processor called the Heron, which can stack multiple 133-qubit units together to make more powerful quantum processors.

And finally, the IBM Quantum System Two will be released towards the end of 2023. This modular system will form the framework of the company’s quantum supercomputers, housing multiple processors with communication links between them. These are all stepping stones on the path towards IBM’s plans of building a quantum system with over 4,000 qubits by 2025.

Alphabet’s Hartmut Neven, claimed a few years ago was that quantum computing was progressing at a double exponent pace. To put that in context an exponential pace is 1,2,4,8,16,32. An exponential exponential pace is 1.2,4,16, 256, 65,536.  

The EV maker Lucid turned in respectable third-quarter earnings and stuck with its forecast for vehicle shipments this year, but the stock is dropping. Reservations are the issue.

Tuesday evening, Lucid (ticker: LCID) reported a per-share loss of 40 cents from $195 million in sales. Wall Street was looking for a 31-cent loss from $209 million in sales., but earnings and sales don't matter much at this point.

The company is just ramping up production of its first model, the Lucid Air. Importantly, the company didn't change its full-year guidance for vehicle shipments from the 6,000 to 7,000 cars it told investors to expect back in August. The prior guidance, given in May, was for 12,000 to 14,000 units.

What seems to be raising investors' eyebrows is that management says Lucid has 34,000 reservations for its vehicles. The number given in August was 37,000.

Shares were down 3% in after-hours trading.

Lucid delivered 1,398 vehicles in the third quarter, up from 679 in the second quarter of 2022. Lucid produced 2,282 vehicles in the third quarter, which was more than triple the second-quarter production, according to the company.

The company also ended the quarter with almost $4 billion in cash.

Management scheduled a conference call for 5:30 p.m. Eastern time to discuss the results. Investors and analysts will be interested in the reservation number and whatever management has to say about demand for Lucid vehicles.

Through Tuesday trading, Lucid stock was off more than 60% so far this year, while the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped about 20% and 9%, respectively.

Lucid stock has been hit harder than most. The cut to the forecast for deliveries didn't help. Rising interest rates, which reduce the current, discounted value of earnings expected to arrive in coming years, are an additional problem.

Flashy ads and attentional grabbing statistics, like the longest range and best battery, encouraged consumers to pay trivial down payments to secure a spot in delivery queues. Now, the question whether one does in fact have the resources to spend six figures on a car are more pressing. For Lucid it represents a significant issue because they are quite a ways from delivering a more affordable model. The share continues to trend lower.

As the hosts point out, the best time to buy bonds is when yields are high and inflation is peaking. The higher yield offers a margin for error even if it takes time for the macro details to work themselves out.

So most investors, whether they own stocks or bonds, should have plenty of opportunities to harvest losses between now and the end of the year. And that means there will be more selling pressure ahead.

"There will be pretty high tax loss selling I would think. I even got a white paper from somebody saying this was the greatest tax loss selling opportunity of a generation. I would say it might be two generations," Gundlach said.

Tax-loss selling is a tax optimization strategy that investors and financial advisors often take advantage of in taxable accounts heading into year-end. The strategy involves realizing losses by selling out of losing positions, and then buying back those portfolio positions 31 days later to avoid the tax wash-sale rule.

The strategy allows investors to realize losses that can offset future realized gains, ultimately helping reduce tax liabilities in the long term.

In a year where most people were unprepared for the severity of declines in popular shares like the mega-caps and the innovation sector, investors will be eager to preserve what benefit they can. Realising a loss reduces the tax payable on gains and stores up losses to write off on gains in the future too.

Zambia, too, has ambitious expansion plans. The region could add nearly 1 million tons of annual copper production over the next decade, according to Adam Khan, copper supply analyst at CRU Group, and others are more optimistic still.

“Copper is the new oil,” Zambian Finance Minister Situmbeko Musokotwane said in an interview. “This is a very good opportunity for us.”

There’s no doubt that the region’s copper will be needed. To meet the global target of net-zero by 2050, the world may need to double supplies of what S&P Global calls “the metal of electrification.” “The green-energy transition is the biggest purchase order in history for the commodities industry,” said Benedikt Sobotka, chief executive officer of miner Eurasian Resources Group.

To be sure, logistics are not the only impediment. Corruption is rife, and disputes with governments are common. One of the largest copper and cobalt mines, Tenke Fungurume, hasn’t been allowed to export any material since July because of a dispute between its owner CMOC Group and Congolese state mining company Gecamines.

The COP27 Conference opened in Egypt today and the number of articles highlighting the plight of climate affected populations both domestically and internationally has increased significantly over the last week. The above article focuses on the supply issues of transporting resources to the coast and the additional challenge posed by the plans to increase supply before infrastructure has been built. Meanwhile Glencore was fined £281 million for bribing officials in Africa. Never mind that it is impossible to do business in the region without local partners.

In some ways this represents an important generational change in the way China will interact with the rest of the world. As far as we know, the term “international circulation” originated in 1988 when a government researcher, Wang Jian, made the case that China should adopt an export-led growth strategy, making use of its huge surplus labor to plug the economy into the international manufacturing process. In that sense, the de-emphasis of international circulation is an important historical shift. In a People’s Daily article in November 2020, Vice Premier Liu He set out a number of objectives relating to the DCS including: (1) the priority of upgrading of China’s technological capacity, including an enhancement of China’s supply chain resilience (though referred to in this article as “optimizing the structure of supply”); (2) the need for finance to serve the needs of the real economy; and (3) the promotion of further urbanization. Any mention of external demand comes last

A link to the full report is posted in the Subscriber's Area.

China’s stock markets are accelerating lower so that is a trend ending signal. The big question for all investors is at what point will the risk premium be fully priced in? The USA’s more aggressive attitude towards China is about the only bipartisan topic in the current administration. In fact the two parties seem to be competing for the mantle of biggest China hawk. China’s response to more activist counterparty risk is to look inwards and many people fear a repeat of the Cultural Revolution is already in play.

Shares of Gilead Sciences ticked up Friday morning after the company’s latest earnings report exceeded Wall Street’s expectations.

The results were, in part, tied to growing sales from Gilead’s cell therapy business, which consists of the marketed cancer drugs Yescarta and Tecartus. Together, sales from the two drugs totaled $398 million in the third quarter, a nearly 80% increase from the same three-month period a year prior.

Gilead’s work in cell therapy, catalyzed by the $12 billion acquisition of Kite Pharma in 2017, hasn’t always sat well with investors. Early sales from Yescarta were slower than some had hoped, and Gilead ultimately acknowledged that some assets from the Kite deal were overvalued.

But in recent months, the company’s cell therapy business has ballooned. Third quarter sales of Tecartus were up 72% year over year, reaching $81 million, while those for Yescarta rose 81% to $317 million. Gilead cited the approval of Yescarta as a “second-line” therapy for a type of hard-to-treat lymphoma, which happened in April, as a main reason for the uptick.

Immunoncology involves re-educating the immune system to target cancers which typically avoid detection by the body’s defenses. Related stocks blossomed in 2015 with a huge rally. They had a brief second coming in 2018 but subsequently collapsed as the route to commercialization proved to be anything but easy.

Inversions of this segment of the Treasury curve typically occur late in Fed tightening cycles as three-month bills track the policy rate while longer-term borrowing costs reflect expectations for economic growth and inflation. While other widely-watched yield curve segments such as the two- to 10-year and five- to 30-year have been deeply inverted for much of this year, the Fed follows this one more closely.

“We are certainly in territory with the Fed’s official barometer of the yield curve that will raise concerns,” said Gregory Faranello, head of US rates trading and strategy at AmeriVet Securities. “The Fed will definitely watch this, and there is a sense in the bond market that they will soon throttle back the pace of rate hikes and take a step back.”

The 10-year – 3-month spread spent part of today inverted following an 11.65 basis-point contraction. The spread was at 223 basis points in May so this tightening has been the fastest in decades. The fact there was such a wide divergence between the 10-year – 2-year and the 10-year – 3-month was regarded as an oddity but reflected the stresses in the bond market.

The demand outlook was particularly dire in the semiconductor industry, which had been one of the hottest sectors during the pandemic. Texas Instruments, whose chips go into everything from home appliances to missiles, saw shares tumble after its weak forecast signaled that the chip slump is spreading beyond computing and phones into other businesses. The stock lost 5%, while Analog Devices Inc., ON Semiconductor Corp., and Marvell Technology Inc. also dipped.

South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix Inc. reported a 60% decline in profit and said it would cut capital expenditures by more than half. It warned of “an unprecedented deterioration in market conditions.” Hynix is joining fellow memory makers Micron Technology Inc. and Kioxia Holdings Corp. in slashing production plans as chip prices tumble. 

The silver lining for investors is that the eventual pullback in supply may ultimately prove beneficial for profits -- and stock prices. Hynix shares, which have lost 28% this year, were up as much as 2.1%. Samsung Electronics Co. climbed 3%, while Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. added 1.4%.

“Inventory will decrease accordingly and demand will rise again,” said Greg Roh, head of technology research at HMC Investment & Securities.

At the NAAIM conference yesterday the manager of a commodity ETF quoted the statistic that there have been more backwardations in commodities this year than ever before. The point I think most people are missing is the monetary and fiscal response boosted demand for everything. New homes, stocks, bonds, commodities, semiconductors, toilet paper and a host of other products saw demand balloon between April 2020 and early 2022.

“We’re delivering on our commitments and affirming our full-year guidance despite a challenging environment because demand continues to be strong for GM products and we are actively managing the headwinds we face,” GM Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra said in a letter to shareholders.

Shares of the carmaker rose 2% to $36.45 as of 9:35 a.m. in New York. The stock is down about 38% this year. 

GM reported adjusted profit of $2.25 a share on Tuesday, surpassing analysts’ projection for $1.89 a share. It also maintained guidance for full-year adjusted earnings before interest and taxes of $13 billion to $15 billion, or $6.50 to $7.50 a share. 

“GM yet again affirmed the strong and until now mostly disbelieved full-year total company EBIT outlook it has maintained since introduction in February,” J.P. Morgan analyst Ryan Brinkman said in a research note. “GM is now well on the path to achieving its full year goals, despite the tougher consumer and cost backdrop.”

Auto manufacturers talk a good game of expanding EV production with stated expectations of massive increases in the number of electric vehicles manufactured. However, they continue to sell SUVs and pickup trucks. Companies like GM and Ford don’t sell large numbers of sedans so the commitment to selling EVs is moot.

A rally in the S&P 500 faded after Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker said officials are likely to raise interest rates to “well above” 4% this year and hold them at restrictive levels to combat inflation, while leaving the door open to doing more if needed.

Traders also sifted through a mixed bag of corporate earnings, with Tesla Inc.’s sales disappointing and International Business Machines Corp. surging on a bullish forecast. Several market observers remarked that the bar has been lowered quite a bit ahead of the current earnings season, boosting the odds of upside surprises. It’s also worth pointing out that there’s been no shortage of warning signals about the economy when it comes to corporate outlooks.

Alcoa Corp. -- which is a dependable barometer of US economic health across industries including construction, automotive, aerospace and consumer packaging -- said demand for the world’s heavy industries is falling. Union Pacific Corp., the largest US freight railroad, cut its forecast for volume growth to reflect a “challenging year.”

As traders wade through corporate results, “with an extra eye on guidance, expect volatility to remain elevated,” said Mike Loewengart at Morgan Stanley Global Investment Office

Earnings are holding up but guidance is being lowered. CEOs are at their most bearish in years but investors have cash to burn and are eager to salvage a dire year for their performance. Appetite for buying the dip following upside key day reversals for mega-cap stocks last week is still evident.

Despite the drop in valuation, the listing is set to be one of the year’s biggest IPOs. Amid heightened volatility and disappointing debut performances of last year’s listings, IPO volume in the US has plummeted to $22.3 billion this year, compared with $277 billion at this point in 2021, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Instacart Inc., another highly anticipated IPO, last week cut its valuation for the third time, to $13 billion, and is waiting for the markets to settle before going ahead with a listing. Another deterrent for new listings is the fact that many companies that went public in 2020 and 2021 are trading below their IPO prices.

But some analysts said it was reasonable for Intel to go through with the listing despite the poor market timing. Analysts at Bernstein said Intel likely needs the money it will receive from the deal, “given the way their own business is currently trending.” And Vital Knowledge analysts wrote that the “headline is negative, but keep in mind the $50B valuation was floated back in December, so no one should be shocked that the number is now lower today.” Intel shares were up about 1.4% in early trading in New York. 

At present we have straws in the wind but the issues with alternative asset valuations are going to become pressure points for investors over the next couple of years. The LDI debacle in the UK where pensions engaged in financial engineering to avoid leverage rules is the thin end of the wedge.

The reality is QE and the low interest rate environment robbed savers, like pension funds, and forced them to become speculators. At the same time it favoured risk takers and inflated their assets. That allowed both to prosper for a long time but rising rates and tighter liquidity mean the party is over.