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Markets closed, but still plenty to think about!

Aug 07, 2023

Good morning! 👋

The exchanges are closed today, but there’s still plenty going on to think about.

Here’s my playbook.

Apple opens first store in India

Great news for Apple: It’s opening its first retail store in India. (Read)

While the iPhone maker has been present in the Indian smartphone market since 2020, Team Cook has just a 3% market share.

No doubt that will change with the opening of its first physical Apple store.

We’ve all seen the lines around the block at Apple stores here in America whenever a new iPhone is launched. Now imagine the same in a country with 1.4 billion people. Hoooo-ey, those lines could wind around thousands of city blocks!

On top of the retail opportunity, Apple is now also starting to assemble products directly in India as it continues to back away from manufacturing in China.

The company remains on track to hit $1 trillion in revenue by 2030, which is why my colleague and friend Nancy Tengler and I both share the opinion that there’s still a long way to go when it comes to tech.

Here’s our CNBC interview. (Watch)

Finland becoming 31st NATO member; Vlad’s livid

Last Tuesday, Finland joined NATO, and Vladimir Putin, as you can imagine, is outraged. (Read)

Finland borders on Russia, and the Kremlin has made it abundantly clear what they think of an adjacent country becoming a direct threat to them (via joining NATO).

I’m glad we’re firmly positioned in two preeminent defense companies. I doubt they’ll run out of projects and things to manufacture in the next few years. Upgrade to Paid

Layoffs by any other name... are still layoffs

Having to admit that you’re firing loads of employees sure doesn’t look very good on your rap sheet. So General Motors is trying to tip-toe around the issue by offering “buyouts” to employees who are willing to resign. 5,000 of them, to be precise. (Read)

They call it a “voluntary separation program.” I wonder what would happen if someone developed separation anxiety and refused the deal? Probable answer: They’d be canned anyway, just without the sweetener.

Buzzword bingo is not a proxy for excellent management, no matter how they spin it.

I’ll own Tesla any day of the week under the circumstances.

Cashless society on the move

Reverse ATMs are now a thing. They take your cash and spit out a handy-dandy plastic card that you can pay with in one of NYC’s restaurants who now refuse to accept dollar bills. (Read)

While technically illegal, this might be a stealth way to push the cashless society that seems all but inevitable. Case in point: Many central banks, including the ECB and the Fed, are now gearing up to introduce CBDCs (central bank digital currencies). (Read)

Though CBDCs are being talked up big time, some of the implications are quite worrisome. But that’s a story for another time.

Meanwhile, from an investment POV, it may be a good time to take another look at Visa and Mastercard, both of whom are already arguably digital currency providers.

Bloomberg claims first dibs on financial AI

Last Friday, the company announced its brand-new BloombergGPT™, a large-scale generative AI model specifically trained on a wide range of financial data. (Read)

In its press release, Bloomberg stated...

This model will assist Bloomberg in improving existing financial NLP tasks, such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, news classification, and question answering, among others. Furthermore, BloombergGPT will unlock new opportunities for marshalling the vast quantities of data available on the Bloomberg Terminal to better help the firm’s customers...

Will guys like me be obsolete soon?

Perhaps, just not today.

Computers are programmed by humans, which means there’s an element of predictability in everything they do. More often than not, zooming out is how you get around that. And as always, it’s an opportunity.

Meanwhile, I’m loving my NVDA and trust you are too if you own it.