would be interested in your views of Microsoft's price chart at present. I know you have been cautious over the past few years, and have even questioned the presence of a catalyst as a reason to expect limited upside going forward. Yet, a reasonably consistent upward pattern continues to play out. As always, your insights and perspectives are genuinely appreciated.
This article from AQR may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
Over a horizon of 40 to 50 years, the value generated by hypothetical tax-efficient investments can be more than twice as high as that generated by hypothetical tax-inefficient investments, and—again—that is after the higher liquidation taxes are fully accounted for. Due to compounding, paying liquidation tax once can be much less punitive than foregoing part of capital appreciation to taxes each year, especially at long investment horizons
This article by Ben Thompson for his Stratechery service may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
This isn’t the only duopoly: Google and Facebook jointly dominate digital advertising, Microsoft and Google jointly dominate productivity applications, Microsoft and Amazon jointly dominate the public cloud, and Amazon and Google jointly dominate shopping searches. And, while all of these companies compete, those competitive forces have set nearly all of these duopolies into fairly stable positions that justify cooperation of the sort documented between Apple and Google, even as any one company alone is able to use its rival as justification for avoiding antitrust scrutiny.
Judge Gonzales Rogers does note that it is unclear whether Google “could increase output in the short run in order to erode Apple’s market share”, but the real problem is that Google is content to simply share the market with Apple and earn their own supracompetitive commission rate.
An interesting way to look at the Bitcoin price.
This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
Still, it’s probably too soon to declare an end to the shortage. Outbreaks of the delta variant of Covid-19 and the long-term efficacy of vaccines make predictions even harder than usual. Some chip analysts have said that reports of weakness are primarily seasonal and that sales will pick up through next year.
Shortages also vary by part. So even if you can walk into a store and find plenty of laptops, you’ll still struggle to get a new car or a video game console. In some cases, chip delivery times are longer than 20 weeks, the longest wait in at least four years.
But as I wrote last month, the pandemic rush to computers and printers won’t repeat itself. Once a worker or student buys a laptop, they don’t need another one for several years. Retailers are offering extensive discounts on nearly every PC-related category, with the exception of graphics cards. (It’s still a good time to be in the games business.)
This article from the Conversation.com may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
This lack of long-term protection against infection means that herd immunity is probably impossible and that the virus will become endemic and continue to circulate in human populations. If this happens and the disease then stabilises, such that case numbers are constant across the population, neither increasing nor decreasing, it will have reached what’s called an “endemic equilibrium”.
So is this what we’re now witnessing? Possibly. One of the basic models of how infectious disease cases change over time is called an SIR model, which looks at how many people are susceptible to a disease, infectious with it or have recovered from it (and so are immune) at any one time.
With this model, cases increase rapidly at the start of an epidemic as lots of people are susceptible, become infected, and go on to infect other susceptible people. But as infections mount, over time fewer people are susceptible and more have recovered. The rate of growth therefore decelerates, the epidemic reaches its peak, and then case numbers decline to an endemic equilibrium point, where they remain roughly stable.
This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
Apple Inc. slipped as much as 2.9% in late trading after warning that sales growth may be slowing and supplies are getting tight, putting a damper on investor excitement following a record-setting third quarter.
The company said on a conference call Tuesday that supply constraints will affect the iPhone and iPad in the current quarter. Decelerating demand for services also will drive the slowdown. Apple declined to provide specific revenue forecasts, a practice it adopted during the pandemic.
The cautious remarks followed a sales gain of 36% in the third quarter, with revenue of $81.4 billion shattering Wall Street’s $73.8 billion estimate. But investors are sticking to a wait-and-see attitude. The parts shortages and a patchwork of Covid restrictions will continue to weigh on Apple’s business this year.
This week the British company Deep Minds, owned by Google, announced an important breakthrough on the knowledge of proteins. The company's CEO said that they are working on various projects including nuclear fusion. If they are successful in this venture, it will transform the demand for uranium and lithium.
