Month: May 2022

In this article Loftus Peak provide a snapshot of 7 companies latest earnings releases, highlighting how they are benefiting from key disruptive trends.

Profitability is the name of the game for tech stocks in 2022. The market, once incredibly patient with unprofitable companies investing for growth, has taken a sharp, inpatient turn. Uber’s share price has been cut in half over the past 12 months, down 54%. If they can’t generate a profit in coming quarters, this may just be the start.

Throughout history, every bear market has seen moments of good news, only to resume its trend downwards. So whether we’ve seen the bottom of the 2022 bear market or the worst is yet to come, this is an important reminder of how we should approach bear markets. Because we can be confident that there will be another one in our investing futures.

With so much content released across the Equity Mates network every week, it can be easy to miss something. Catch up on anything you missed with our weekly round up.

The past two decades have been marked by flows out of public markets and into private markets. The biggest winners of this have been the biggest private equity players - Blackstone, KKR, Carlyle, Brookfield and Apollo amongst them. This article takes a deep dive into Apollo to better understand the private equity business model.

Another year, another burst of extreme crypto volatility. But the blockchain technology behind bitcoin, stablecoins and other digital assets continues to grow in importance. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have existed for over a decade, but their extreme volatility has obscured the real revolution: the blockchain technology which underpins them. If nothing else, Bitcoin has proven that blockchain works.

This article points to other cases on the Supreme Court’s docket that may allow the Court's conservatives to overturn longstanding legal principles. In particular, cases on affirmative action (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard) and federal government powers to protect the environment (West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency).

This article takes a look at the strategy behind Tiger’s VC arm and the game theory problem behind it all. Everyone’s incentives is for valuations to go up. Founders, early investors, traditional VC’s, Tiger and the hedge fund VC’s. And as long as they all cooperate they’ll be okay. That may explain why private payment company Stripe was only marked down 9% recently by Fidelity, while public payment companies PayPal and Square are down 60% and 54% respectively.

Today at Equity Mates Media, Australia’s number one finance and investing podcast network, we have released the results of our 2022 Listener Survey. This survey, with 1,537 responses, gives a snapshot of young Australian attitudes towards investing and financial markets.

A Buy Hold Sell from Marcus Today’s Tom Wegner, who gives you the rundown on a stock that has caught his attention. In a volatile market Challenger (ASX: CGF) has managed to weather those headwinds with relative grace. Tom analyses this investment management company’s vision to help its customers achieve financial security for their retirement.

This article takes a deep dive on the state of the SaaS business. It looks at what has happened and how we can analyse these businesses going forward, and also features case studies of Salesforce and NetSuite during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

The latest efforts by these two companies is laying undersea cables to better connect the continent of Africa. With 1.4 billion people, Africa is the least connected continent and these undersea cables are expected to change this. Research commissioned by Google suggest that in Nigeria, median downloads speeds will improve 6x, data prices will fall 21%, add $10 billion to GDP and create 1.6 million new jobs. After Nigeria, Google’s cable will have two more landing spots - Namibia and South Africa - before connecting back to Europe in Portugal.

With so much content released across the Equity Mates network every week, it can be easy to miss something. Catch up on anything you missed with our weekly round up.

Antarctica’s temperature is changing, and with it the animal life that is able to survive in the world’s largest desert. In March, scientists recorded temperatures that were 70 degrees Fahrenheit (~21 degrees celsius) higher than average for that time of year. The continent's average temperature is expected to rise a few degrees by 2050, but on the western peninsula the temperature is warming at 10 times the rate of the rest of the world. Warming temperatures and waters have the potential to expose Antarctica’s ecosystems that have been isolated for 25 million years. A group of Australian scientists, using a machine learning algorithm, were able to identify four marine species that could threaten the Antarctic marine ecosystem today and an additional five under future climate change scenarios. One example, the Northern Pacific Seastar, has already invaded Tasmanian waterways after being transported by a shipping vessel from its native northern hemisphere.

At times of crisis, it can feel like it doesn't matter what you own because investors sell what they can, rather than what they particularly want to. So how can diversification ease the panic?

Can artificial intelligence help you find a romantic partner? No. At least according to Samantha Joel, a Canadian researcher, and her 85 co-authors, who combined data from 43 studies, mined hundreds of variables collected from more than 10,000 people and plugged this data into state-of-the-art machine learning models. They found that machines were no better at picking romantic partners than humans. Surprisingly they found that the demographics, preferences and values of two people had little power in predicting whether those two people were happy in a romantic relationship. Which is interesting, because those are the things that we are all screening for when we swipe left or right.

Tiger Global has been making a splash the past few years. The hedge fund spun out a venture capital arm that has been making deals bigger, faster and more founder friendly than the traditional VC world. This recent tech sell off has been tough for Tiger. The Financial Times have reported that the hedge fund has lost $17 billion, one of the biggest dollar declines for a hedge fund in history. According to the FT, Tiger’s hedge fund has been hit so hard that in four months they lost two-thirds of the gains they produced since founding in 2001.

Emerging markets (EM) have been growing rapidly in recent years. In fact, they now contribute over 50% of global growth and are expected to contribute over 60% in 2022. Once dominated by agriculture and cheap manufacturing, EM countries are today home to some of the world’s fastest-growing economies and most innovative companies.

Many of the expert investors we have spoken to have discussed the opportunities in the wind power supply chain. Unlike the solar panel industry, which is fragmented across many players, wind power turbines are only built by a few big players - Vestas being the market leader and one we often hear discussed. This article outlines some of the problems being faced by Vestas and their big competitors. Higher input costs, supply chain bottlenecks, changes in key clean-power subsidies and pressure on turbine prices is challenging profitability across the whole industry. This is slowing down the rate of production, just as the world needs it to ramp up.

If you’re reading this, chances are you are all too aware that the past few months have been tough for stocks. Especially over in the US. This year, the S&P 500 is down 18%, and tech stocks are down 30%. In the unprofitable side of of the market, it’s even worse. Roundhill’s meme stock index is down 50% year to date, and Ark’s Innovation ETF is down 55%. This feels catastrophic, but it is still a fair way off the 2000-01 tech wreck when tech stocks eventually dropped 80%.

With so much content released across the Equity Mates network every week, it can be easy to miss something. Catch up on anything you missed with our weekly round up.

Netflix has been one of the biggest business stories to start 2022. The streaming giant is down 70% from the start of the year, mainly due to the company reporting that in the first quarter of 2022 they lost more subscribers than they added for the first time ever. This article thinks the market has overreacted to the news and makes the case for Netflix.

In this article, Bridgewater’s three Chief Investment Officers share their view on the current inflation story and what it could mean going forward. They may be some of the world’s best investors, but they certainly are not the clearest communicators. So we’ve tried to distil a few key points in the following paragraphs.

In the last two decades, Asia has become a powerhouse of global growth. Demographics and digitalisation are fuelling a boom economy that’s expected to continue for decades to come. Find out why you should be looking at this region more closely.

When people suggest that short sellers don’t have a role in the stock market, point them to this story or any of the other stories that Hindenburg, Muddy Waters or any of the other short sellers have uncovered over the years. The fact is with so many companies around the world, incredibly bad behaviour or bad actors can be missed for a long time. It often takes a short seller to uncover it.