Month: June 2022

While we don't have a strong view on crypto here at Equity Mates, we are fascinated to watch the story unfold. Read on for some of the most interesting Tweets, articles and memes from the past week below.

There are four possible ways for the economic aircraft to hit the runway in the months ahead. They will all have different impacts on financial markets and one of investors’ most important tasks today is to assign sensible probabilities to them and to position their portfolios accordingly. In this article Tom Stevenson an investment director at Fidelity International breaks down these potential scenarios and what the market is telling us about the probability of each scenario.

It may feel like you’ve heard this story before, and you have. Well at least something similar. But that only underlines their importance. New data has found that the North Barents Sea in the Arctic is one of the fastest warming places on earth, heating up seven times faster than the global average. What is perhaps most concerning is that the rate of warming surprised researchers, suggesting that warming in parts of the world is happening faster than climate models have predicted.

One of the biggest stories in the tech world last week focused on Google placing an employee on leave after he came out and said Google’s AI had become sentient. The employee, Blake Lemoine, went public with these concerns and shared text conversations he had with one of Google’s AI language models, LaMDA (Language Models for Dialogue Applications).

For the first time since the 2020 Covid plunge, more company bosses were buying shares in their own companies in May than were selling them. These insider buyers can be a powerful leading indicator of a change in direction for the market. So what can we learn from this apparent change of mood?

This article takes a look at the evolution of the food delivery space to ask this very question. Uber, Delivery Hero, Doordash, Deliveroo, Just Eat - they’re all down more than 60% from their all time highs. But has the market overreacted on the downside? Are there real profitable businesses underneath the hype or are these businesses where the unit economics just don’t work? This article goes deep on one of the hottest industries of the 2010's to answer these questions.

Spotify has spent more than $1 billion over the past four years to solidify their position at the top of the podcasting heap. This Bloomberg piece covers an internal report commissioned by Spotify that looked at the return on this investment. It can be hard to measure whether such investments have been worth it. How many new listeners did these shows attract to the platform, and how many are just listening to the shows because they’re already on the platform? But according to this reporting from Bloomberg, Spotify’s conclusion was that these investments haven’t yielded the returns expected. Or at least, not yet.

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.

This was a fascinating study to come out of the West African nation of Liberia. 999 men who were at risk of committing violent crimes were identified and split into four groups. The first were given eight weeks of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), the second were given $200 in cash, the third were given both CBT and the cash, and then finally, the fourth were given neither as a control.

June saw the US stock market enter bear market territory, marking a 22% decline from its January peak. However, where and when will the current dip end – if that is indeed what it is? And what should investors do now?

It is estimated that expert witnesses are used in 8 out of every 10 trials in the US and they are used in almost every judicial system throughout the world. They are called to provide their expert, professional opinion on a certain subject - economists, doctors, psychologists, lawyers, accountants - there are people within all of these professions that ply their trade in the courtroom rather than the office.

There’s some behind the scenes drama going on at Disney. Maybe a month ago, we featured an article in Thought Starters about the frosty relationship between CEO Bob Chapek and former CEO Bob Iger. Now it seems the Disney has fired their most senior television executive, Peter Rice, while the board has come out to support CEO Chapek.

Calix is a business focused on creating new materials and processes to solve global challenges. It is on the more speculative end of the investment spectrum. Calix has been on Marcus Today's radar for a while now, find out why with Tom Wegner's Buy. Hold. Sell.

Agricultural tech is such an exciting area of innovation. Many of the first wave of developments took existing farm practices and modernised them - new sensors, internet-of-things enabled devices, advanced robots, drones, self-driving tractors and SaaS farm management systems to coordinate it all. But now there are those that are looking at changing how farming itself is done. And as a result, the indoor farming business is booming. Built in shipping containers and industrial estates, these farms allow companies to control the inputs - water, light, CO2, soil - a lot more tightly than outdoor farming, and often also can be situated closer to consumers.

There are a number of factors pushing birthrates down. Changing views of marriage, couples having children later in life, growing financial pressures, growing concern about the future, increased access to contraceptives and a growing social acceptance of child-free lifestyles. These factors have resulted in a massive decline over the past 15 years - America’s fertility rate was last above replace in 2007. But this decline is part of an even longer trend - America’s fertility rate was 3.65 in 1960, 2.48 in 1970, 1.84 in 1980, 2.08 in 1990 and 2.06 in 2000 and 1.93 in 2010.

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.

This article takes a look at America’s railroads today and why investor interest over the past decade has been growing. Not even the most bullish railroad investor would suggest that rail’s best days are ahead of it. But even the most bearish railroad watcher would suggest rail won’t have a place in our future transport mix. And within that range of outcomes, there may be some opportunity for the right price.

In this short article our friends at Munro Partners share what they like about the company and it's future prospects.

Bill Gurley is a venture capital legend. He is known as one of the world’s foremost experts on internet marketplaces - backing eBay in the first dot com boom and Uber in the second. Amongst a seriously impressive CV, he has also backed Snapchat, Twitter, Discord, Dropbox, Instagram, Zillow and Yelp.

Here’s the thing, when a company signs a stadium deal it generally underperforms the market and it’s competitors from there. And its not just unprofitable tech companies. Ford, FedEx, AT&T, and MetLife are giant blue-chip companies and all of them underperformed after signing a stadium deal. So if you see any of your portfolio companies get into the stadium naming rights game - be warned.

Is it safe to invest? If you are a long-term investor there could be some bargains around. So, what could be a good bargain when it comes to stocks? Henry Jennings walks us through one of his picks.

This article covers the first clinical trial of a new technology - 3D printing an ear made from human cells. The new ear was successfully transplanted on to a patient born with a rare ear deformity.

One of the things we love most about investing in the stock market is that it allows you to be curious (and make money from that curiosity). This article was a classic example of that. Bakkafrost is the world’s third-largest fish farming company and the largest private employer in the Faroe Islands (the Faroe Islands is a group of islands north of the UK, between Norway and Iceland).

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.

This article profiles the work of two American researchers, Jillian Peterson and James Densley, and their efforts to construct a database of every mass shooter since 1966 and every shooting incident since 1999.