Month: March 2021

You're probably noticing a huge amount of blockchain and cryptocurrency news flying around social media and news outlets. You're also probably thinking 'wtf does all this mean, and where do I even start?'. Fair enough. It's very confusing. There is one part of the blockchain universe that's very amusing at the moment, and that is NFTs, or non-fungible tokens.

We have addressed some of the major myths that we hear about investing. These myths are often stop you from starting your investing journey, but in reality, these myths need to be busted.

Maddy and Sophie are the hosts of new money and investing podcast, ‘You’re In Good Company’, the fifth show from Equity Mates Media. The premise of the show stemmed from the girls’ own frustrations when they were searching for simple and informative investing resources.

"The stock market is too risky - it always crashes!" This is a common excuse we hear from beginner investors, as an excuse not to get started. And fair enough. Yes, there are famous stories of market crashes, BUT over time the stock market continues grinding upwards.

Forget the idea that you don’t have enough money to invest. Gone are our parents days when you needed $2,000 to get started. Thanks to technology, you can get started with as little as a few dollars and cents.

Every year, history’s greatest investor Warren Buffett writes an annual letter to accompany the Berkshire Hathaway annual report. Last week, Buffett released his 2020 letter. Last year was a tough year for Berkshire, returning 2.4% compared to 18.4% for the S&P 500 index (the risk of not owning tech stocks in 2020…). In this year’s letter, Buffett discusses a number of points about Berkshire specifically and investing generally.

Ghost kitchens are restaurants that have no dine-in and no customer pick-up. They are built exclusively for the food delivery apps - UberEATS, Deliveroo, DoorDash - and are able to achieve lower costs by occupying non-desirable locations and able to create multiple restaurants in one location (i.e. list a Mexican, Chinese and Burger restaurant on the apps, but cook it all out of the same kitchen).

At this point, most people have heard of Shopify. The $140 billion eCommerce platform offers retailers a plug-and-play option to set up their online store. Some of the biggest companies in the world - Google, Hasbro, The Economist, Heinz, Red Bull, Tesla - use Shopify’s platform to enable eCommerce on their website. This article takes a look at Shopify’s strategy to build an ecosystem around their core product and the incentive structure they build for retailers to achieve it.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has been a revolutionary company in a critical industry. Yet, what it has achieved is largely under appreciated (despite the fact that if you’re reading this, you’ve likely benefited from their work). Founded in 1987, TSMC pioneered the ‘foundry’ model of semiconductor production, where TSMC create chips for other customers. This is the model that has allowed companies like AMD and NVIDIA to challenge the semiconductor giants like Samsung and IBM.

COVID has accelerated a number of changes in our society - the rise of online retail, working remotely, adoption of cloud computing. One other change it may have accelerated is universal basic income. Government’s around the world have shielded people from economic shutdowns with direct cash transfers (think Job Keeper and Job Seeker in Australia). For advocates of universal basic income, this gives them a powerful data set to study as they advocate for the benefits of direct cash transfers beyond COVID.

If you’re looking to bump up your investment amounts from a few cents to a few hundred or thousand dollars, then you need your money in order. Sometimes finding that extra bit of cash can be difficult, so here are a few tips and tricks we’ve learnt along the way.

You may not have heard it, but we’re living through a global semiconductor shortage. Perhaps the hardest hit industry is automotive. Demand from the auto industry spiked, just as semiconductor companies like TSMC and Texas Instruments had reallocated their capacity to other, more resilient (they thought) industries.

According to Bill Gates, there are two numbers that matter when it comes to climate change - 51 billion and zero. The first is the tonnes of greenhouse gas added to the atmosphere every year. The second is what it needs to be.

For the past 20 year Technology Review have been publishing a list of the year’s most important technologies. This week they published their list for 2021.

Amazon, like all big companies these days, is collecting so much data. Three current and former employees are blowing the whistle and have reported to Politico that Amazon’s customer data may be at risk. Amazon has pushed back on the claims, calling them inaccurate and unsubstantiated.

The recent power outage in Texas was devastating, with over 4.5 million customers losing power amidst a historic cold snap. The freezing temperatures incapacitated about 40% of the state’s power generation and much of the state was left in the cold and dark.