I found your comments on autonomous vehicles today very well written and enlightening, thanks a lot. On a different note, do you think cyber security has a big potential for the next decade. And if so, do you have any suggestions for how to invest in this theme. Any potential companies and/or ETFs would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again for a very nice service.
This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
Thanks to e-commerce, the world has gotten used to buying all sorts of daily necessities online. Automakers in China will soon be afforded the same convenience, with the ability to purchase must-have autonomous driving data from a central repository.
For that, credit must go the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, which has been working on a Vehicle Data Platform with industry players for the past three years. Its launch is expected any day.
China, a pioneer in the promotion of electric cars, is exploring a credible and efficient way of storing, sharing and utilizing data to help automakers speed up their efforts in making autonomous driving a reality. In the intelligent and connected car space, data is as important to vehicles as crude oil is to internal combustion engine cars.
The issue is scale. Thousands upon thousands of terabytes of sensory data must be collected, analyzed and interpreted to produce the technology that ultimately allows cars to navigate roads, highways and obstacles themselves.Currently, this valuable information is in the hands of individual companies, which are trying their best to use it to “train” the brains of intelligent vehicles as humankind races to that point where we can take our hands off the steering wheel altogether.
Should I prefer longs in the European chip companies including machine manufacturing companies like ASML (almost a monopolist), ASML and Besi and chip producing companies like INFINEON or STM or the US companies like NVDIA, INTEL, AMD, QUALCOMM?
Should we consider the expected weakening usd while comparing? Especially chip machine producing companies should have a very bright future when both the US and Europe want to produce more chips themselves with a shortage of machines and chips for the foreseeable future it is unlikely any price discounts will be given interesting isn't it? kind regards
Looking forward as always to your long-term video have a nice weekend
Thanks to a subscriber for this report from Morgan Stanley which may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
This article from the Hollywood Reporter may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
While European broadcasters are still profitable, “and some very much so,” Godard highlighted, “savvy investors believe this is looking suspiciously like the high earnings of printed newspapers circa 2007, or a Wile E. Coyote run over the edge of the cliff. Broadcasters are capturing a declining share of total video audiences and their capacity to finance attractive content is shrinking as talent is bid up by SVOD operators.”
The analyst then outlined two consolidation options that have emerged in Europe.
“The first path — heralded by Bertelsmann RTL Group — would aim at creating national broadcasters with the content scale to operate compelling online platforms” via domestic acquisitions, Godard said, calling this the “possibly more defensive but also more realistic” option.
The second path is “more ambitious but lacking a credible backer,” he argued. It targets “the never achieved idea of pan-European synergies, leveraging increased international appetite for non-English language content” by merging assets across borders, something that the likes of Italy’s Mediaset and Vivendi have talked about. “But its champion, Italy’s Mediaset, lacks capacity to deliver,” Godard concluded.
“The group is already the biggest broadcaster in Italy and Spain and has built a 24 percent stake in Germany’s ProSieben, with the remaining shareholding fragmented,” he explained. “The problem is, if the cross-border strategy is sound, Mediaset may be its worst possible proponent. Besides bringing in strong leadership to its Spanish division, Mediaset never extracted significant synergies from its two Mediterranean units, despite their cultural affinity.”
This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
The action signals U.S. law enforcement’s ability, in some cases at least, to track cryptocurrency, identify digital wallets and seize funds, a potentially powerful tool in combating ransomware attacks in particular. The operation also reveals how quickly hacking operations can be identified by the FBI, which Abbate said has been investigating DarkSide since last year.
The FBI was able to find the Bitcoin by uncovering the digital addresses the hackers used to transfer the funds, according to an eight-page seizure warrant released by the Justice Department on Monday.
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Multi-horizon forecast models using statistical analysis have been around for years now, channeling market variables into predictions about how a stock will move over different time periods. The machine-learning techniques introduced in this research will increase the amount of data that can be processed and the potential accuracy of the predictions over longer time periods.
But to make it work, the AI has to be able to process a huge amount of data quickly. The researchers turned to Bristol, England-based Graphcore’s Intelligence Processing Unit, a pizza box-sized chip
designed specifically to handle the demands of an AI program. In the trials, Graphcore’s chip performed about 10-times faster than GPUs.
While the research and the Graphcore chips that make the model possible are the “logical next step” in the high-speed computations that Man Group is interested in, the fund hasn’t committed to rolling it out, Ledford said.
Meanwhile, not every firm would be able to deploy this kind of strategy. “You would not try this model if you did not have access to fast computation,” said Zohren, who worked with Oxford-Man Institute research associate Zihao Zhang on the research.
This article by Joe Weisenthal for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
Let’s zoom out for a second. All blockchain-based systems share two basic ideas. The first is that for the first time you can have a thing online that can be probably yours. A coin, a token, an NFT… whatever it is. You have it and control it and no third party has any say. Alice can own something and then send it to Bob. Alice doesn't have it anymore and Charlie can't interfere. The other core idea is that part of achieving this involves a sufficiently decentralized network of computers, such that no individual, company, or government has a say in what goes on.
But this is where the fork in the road emerges. The Bitcoin vision is to create a new form of money outside the authority of any central issuer. The DeFi vision inverts this, and takes the money creation part for granted. After all, you can spend a dollar on the Ethereum network using a USD-backed stablecoin, so why reinvent the wheel? Instead, the DeFi-based vision is to build unstoppable blockchain-based software and services that then do something with this money.
A couple weeks ago, I wrote that Wall Streeters are increasingly getting ETH-pilled and the above is why. There’s a certain concreteness to the value proposition. If a decentralized network of computers can match borrowers and lenders in some powerful and novel way, then the software and the tokens that power it should be valuable. And in general, this vision jibes much more with the Silicon Valley ethos. Trying to create a new form of money? That’s not really a thing you learn about at Stanford. Writing software to disrupt traditional financial services? That they get. Furthermore, Bitcoin frustrates many people in tech because of the community’s move slow and don’t break things approach.
All this being said, all these different factions and visions… they remain something of an inside game. It’s not clear how much your average crypto investor is paying attention to any of these different modes and models. If you look at the coins, you’ll mostly see a high degree of correlation. Either they’re all going up at the same time or down at the same time. This includes Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana, but also a bunch of other coins that don’t map to a trendy narrative. (For example, Litecoin is still one of the world’s biggest coins despite its founder having peaced out from the project in 2017, and neither has a store-of-value narrative nor a DeFi narrative or anything else really.)
Here’s a chart of Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Litecoin going back to the summer of 2017. You can see, everything just kind of rises and falls at the same time.
The market strongly gives off a vibe of people wanting to get into crypto and then placing their chips on a bunch of different squares without too much thought. Maybe they buy a few that they’ve heard of, maybe they buy a few with a low nominal coin price because it’s fun to have a lot of coins and maybe they buy a few that just seem interesting. That still seems to be how flows work in the space. And as long as this is all the case, we’ll probably still have these generalized boom-bust cycles where coins rise and fall together along with the animal spirits of investors and traders.
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The FDA said in a statement on Monday that it was allowing the drug on the market because it reduces amyloid, a sticky, harmful protein that clogs the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Amyloid’s role in Alzheimer’s is debated, but numerous other drugs that target it are being developed by pharmaceutical companies.
Biogen plans to sell the therapy under the brand name Aduhelm. It will cost $56,000 a year, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotechnology company and its Tokyo-based partner, Eisai Co. Ltd., said in a statement.
U.S.-traded shares of Eisai leapt 60% to $118.73.
In an interview, Biogen Chief Executive Officer Michel Vounatsos said that the company had already produced millions of vials of the drug and that it would hit the market within 10 days to two weeks, once the company had done things like printed labels.
Over 900 infusion sites in the U.S. are prepared to administer the drugs, he said.
By giving the treatment a broad label allowing it to be used for a wide swath of Alzheimer’s patients, and not just the very early-stage patients the drug was mostly studied on, “the FDA is basically empowering the physician to make the decision,” who it is most appropriate for, Vounatsos said.
