Content Style: Thought Starters

Coinbase is a phenomenal story of the past decade. Started in 2012 to enable people to store, send and receive Bitcoin (remember, Bitcoin was only created in 2009), it has grown to be the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US (note, not in the world. Binance holds that distinction).

Lithium. It is on the forefront of every Australian investors mind. It brings together the oldest love of Australian retail investors - mining speccies - with the latest trend in the retail investor community - ESG and sustainability. The promise and potential of lithium-ion batteries is huge.

The international space station has been orbiting the earth for over 20 years. A symbol of US-Russian cooperation post-Cold War, the space station is starting to look a little worse for wear after decades in the harsh environment of space. A general consensus is that the ISS will be able to keep flying until 2028 or 2030. The question becomes - what next?

In September 2020, the FBI arrived at the house of a New York City police officer. They were arresting the officer, a Tibetan asylum-seeker who had arrived in the US at 17 years old, on charges of spying for the Chinese community party. He may have been spying, but he wasn’t a great spy

Last week was a big one for Tesla. It became just the 6th American company to reach the $1 trillion market cap and did it with far less revenue than any of the 5 that have come before it. The market expects big things from Tesla. In this research report released last week, Morgan Stanley upped their price target from $900 to $1,200 per share (when released shares were around ~$1,000) and made the case that this price is based on a conservative case (in particular, half the company’s growth target, constrained growth in China and no improvements in autonomous driving).

The promise of artificial intelligence is vast and ambitious, but this recent project even caught us by surprise. A multidisciplinary team of scientists from around the world are attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks and talk back to them.

There is plenty to talk about with Facebook (or should we say Meta) recently. Whistleblowers, court cases, a rebrand and a push into exciting frontiers of technology. Yet, the most important story about Facebook may not be getting much attention.

Jim Chanos is a famous market short-seller who built a reputation on predicting the collapse of Enron early and shorting the stock. For the past decade, Chanos has been a skeptic of China’s economy and in particular, of their real estate boom.

Legend has it, a few years ago, Jeff Bezos demanded that his team at Amazon Studios create a fantasy epic that would put Game of Thrones to shame. What resulted was Wheel of Time - an incredibly expensive attempt to create the next global fantasy phenomenon.

At first there were the two big names, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. Soon there will be hundreds, maybe even thousands, of players in the ‘meat mimicking’ business. There are those, like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, that are working on plant-based substitutes.

Semiconductors have been a major topic of conversation this year, as shortages of these crucial components have affected every industry across every country. That is how important they are. Yet, surprisingly for such a critical component, the number of companies able to manufacture them has fallen.

Great businesses like search engines rarely go on sale. We’ve all watched Google and seen how special search can be. Only four countries in the world have developed their own search businesses: US, China, Korea and Russia.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a massive increase in online scams. We’ve all been frustrated lately by the amount of scam text messages and phone calls. In the UK, a consumer group found that phone and text fraud was up 83% during the pandemic.

One of our favourite mental models here at Equity Mates is Carlota Perez’s ‘lifecycle of a technology revolution’. From her book ‘Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital’ it argued that new technology emerged in two periods - an installation period and a deployment period.

A growing number of cancer patients, especially those with breast and lung cancers, are being spared chemotherapy and are able to explore other options. For decades, chemotherapy has been the best option when treating cancer.

We’ve heard it over and over again, global supply chains are a mess. Truck driver shortages in the UK have caused a petrol shortage. Backlogs of container ships are leading to product shortages on the shelves of US grocery stores.

One of the most interesting industries to watch over the past few years is the global payments industry. Writing from Australia, we’ve been on the forefront of this global disruption.

Stock exchanges have been a great source of returns for investors over the years. The ASX in Australia, ICE (owner of the NYSE) in America or the London Stock Exchange Group in the UK all enjoy near-monopolies in facilitating the trading of stocks, derivatives and commodities in their respective countries.

Yemen is in the middle of a civil war - the Saudi-backed, Yemeni government have been fighting with Iranian-backed, Houthi rebels since 2014. Throw in the presence of unaligned tribal groups and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and this has become one of the most intractable conflicts of the past decade.

Aikya is a UK-based fund manager that looks for long-term opportunities in emerging markets. In this investor letter they’ve written about the risk of investing in China - using the analogy of foie gras, as the Chinese state fattens up companies and mints billionaires only to decide to consume them when they get too large.

Credit Suisse have put together this research report covering the growing list of South-East Asian unicorns (unicorns is the term used for private startups valued at $1 billion or more). The list of companies is impressive (and growing).

Facebook has been jumping from one scandal to the next for the past five years. Political interference, fake news, vaccine misinformation, antitrust concerns. In this context, the latest scandal - a whistleblower revealing the company knew its products could cause meaningful harm - does not seem to be that different. Especially as this is not the first whistleblower in Facebook’s history.

Long-time Apple watchers have noticed a change at the $2 trillion company. Employees are organising and pushing back on an executive team that has traditionally held a very tight grip on the decision-making at the company. One thing is being blamed for this power shift - Slack.

Every quarter, J.P. Morgan publish a guide to the markets - a deck filled with charts and data that offer plenty of inside on where the market is and where it may go. After an incredible 18 months of stock market growth, a number of indicators suggest that the market could be quite expensive

Over the past few weeks, the world has been watching the Chinese real estate market and wondering if the debt problems there will spread to the rest of the economy, or even the rest of the world. In this explainer, the authors try to unpack what could happen next and why the possibility of an Evergrande collapse may not be the catastrophic event some market watchers predict.