David Fuller and Eoin Treacy's Comment of the Day
Category - Technology

    Trend Compendium 2050: Six MegaTrends that will shape the world

    Thanks to a subscriber for this report from Roland Berger which may be of interest. Here is a section:

    Manmade global temperature increases can only be limited to 2°C if significant additional efforts are undertaken to become carbon-free in 2100

    Is the limit of 2°C enough? To keep the global warming below 2°C had long been regarded as the right target measure to limit the most dangerous risks. More recently, 1.5°C has been considered safer, which requires rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented changes across all aspects of society.

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    Email of the day on crackpot epidemiology versus crackpot epistemology:

    Email of the day - on investing for the long term.

    Would be very interested in your thoughts for positioning an investment portfolio (retirement monies) at this point in time. It is increasingly difficult for me to envision what could spark a leg up in the US equity markets in the near term. A leg down at some point feels more probable, yet I am not one for market timing. Nevertheless, increased uncertainty and volatility look to be on the menu for an extended period of time as the markets and Fed wrestle with the curtailing of the liquidity which has fueled the market's run. Is simply pruning equity positions and building cash the most reasonable course of action?

    The FullerTreacy service is outstanding and all the more valuable at times like these. Thank you for your thoughts.

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    Gaming? China's Big Crackdown Is on Big Capital

    This insightful article by Shuli Ren for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    China may have questioned the ethics of for-profit tutoring companies in the past. But it did not really act until the enterprises were flooded with speculative venture capital money.

    The government saw that as investors hijacking its state-dominant education sector with huge amounts of capital. And so it put a stop to that liquidity train. 

    The market-oriented Chicago school of economics acknowledges that a benevolent dictatorship — with the assistance of cumbersome bureaucracy — can be as efficient for social and economic development as a well-ordered competitive marketplace. China — which sees itself as a benevolent authoritarian regime — has tried to maintain efficient capital markets. Now, it’s having second thoughts. In Beijing’s view, hot money is not heading where officials want it to go. Indeed, it was on the point of creating competing power centers that could rival the central government. 

    So what can be read from these tea leaves? Stay away from where the hot money is going. Sooner or later, China will curb that enthusiasm and send the sectors into a crash landing. 

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    Crypto Game Axie Infinity Has Generated $84.9M in One Month

    This article from Decrypt.co may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Axie Infinity is tapping into the growing play-to-earn trend, which essentially means making money to play games. But instead of high-fidelity esports tournaments and multi-million-dollar Twitch live streams, the economics of Axie is built into the game. 

    Each Axie, for example, is worth real money. Same for the AXS token and the Smooth Love Potion (SLP) token, which you also need to breed more Axies. Essentially, every in-game earnable can be resold for cash, and all you need to do to pick up said earnables is simply play the game. 

    The money earned is sometimes enough to pay the bills too, with many players in the Philippines effectively able to make a living wage from playing the game. And as the protocol’s mounting treasury shows, these same players are also keeping Axie Infinity afloat during this summer’s bearish crypto slump. 

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    Lucid Motors kicks off market debut with EV factory expansion plans

    This article from Techcrunch.com may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    The company is also planning on bringing more of the component production in-house, including major pieces such as the body panel stampings, the spokesman added. These parts were being handled by an external supplier.

    The Casa Grande City Council approved the plans to expand the nearly 1 million-square-foot space in March. The first phase of the factory, which cost around $700 million to construct, went up in a record 12 months after breaking ground. Lucid has said that it wants to expand production capacity from around 30,000 vehicles per year to up to 400,000.

    Lucid has had a long, sometimes tenuous road to the public market. The company first set its sights on bringing an electric sedan to production as early as 2018, but it quickly hit funding challenges that pushed this timeline further and further back. Lucid received major funding in 2018 with a $1 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which continued to be its largest shareholder throughout Lucid’s merger with special purpose acquisition company Churchill Capital IV Corp.

    That merger hit a bit of a hiccup last week when the company failed to garner a sufficient number of votes on a key proposal — likely due to the rise of retail traders and malfunctioning spam filters, executives said in an investor call.

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    Why COVID cases are now falling in the UK - and what could happen next

    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.

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    Pfizer Boosts Forecast for Vaccine Sales to $33.5 Billion

    This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

     

    A resurgence of virus infections thanks to the delta variant is likely to mean sustained demand for vaccines around the world. Further, it is widely expected that many people could require booster shoots to bolster the immunity gained in the initial round of immunizations.

    Pfizer said in a presentation accompanying its earnings release that emerging real-world data “suggests immunity against infection and symptomatic disease may wane,” underscoring the need for boosters.

    The company said regulators will determine “whether, and which, populations to recommend booster,” and that they will likely first focus on those with compromised immune systems and older adults.

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    Bitcoin Rises Above $40,000 as Shorts, Amazon Job Ad Fuel Rally

    This article by Joanna Ossinger and Vildana Hajric for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Bitcoin rose above $40,000 for the first time since June as a flurry of short-covering intensified a rally apparently sparked by speculation over Amazon.com Inc.’s involvement in the crypto industry.

    A job posting from the retail giant seeking an executive to develop the company’s “digital currency and blockchain strategy” stirred questions among analysts over whether the move could eventually lead to Amazon accepting Bitcoin as a method of payment.

    As the largest digital token gained on the speculation, investors rushing to cover bearish bets fueled the rally, with the coin at one point up more than 17% on Monday to $40,545, its highest since June 15. More than $950 million of crypto shorts were liquidated on Monday, the most since May 19, according to data from Bybt.com.

    “The extent of the jump was probably driven by over-leveraged shorts,” said Vijay Ayyar, head of Asia Pacific at crypto exchange Luno in Singapore, while adding the rumors over Amazon likely had a role to play, too.

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    Nike, Adidas Output Snarled as Covid Wave Shuts Asian Factories

    This article by Michelle Jamrisko for Bloomberg may be of interest. Here is a section:

    “It’s going to be worse before it gets better,” with shutdowns and staff disruptions increasing in Asia, said Deborah Elms, executive director of the Singapore-based Asian Trade Centre. “Places like Vietnam that largely avoided locking down cannot maintain an open posture. With vaccinations painfully slow, I assume more shutdowns in factories, with the ripple effects felt elsewhere.”

    Trade in goods has been a rare buffer for the Covid-ravaged global economy -- especially for export-heavy Asian countries -- but the latest reports show cracks in this growth pillar. The delta variant-driven surge has hit Southeast Asia especially hard, underscoring the delicate choices for policy makers who are balancing vaccination drives and mobility restrictions while trying to keep their economies afloat.

    The manufacturing pain is especially acute in Vietnam, where officials have taken drastic steps to ensure factories can continue operating. In some instances, electronics and tech companies have had workers sleep overnight on-site.

    The garment industry, with lower profits and more workers, hasn’t been able to replicate that effort. Feng Tay Enterprise Co., Pou Chen Corp. and Sports Gear Co. are among manufacturers that have suspended some operations in Vietnam.

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