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

    The Seven-Year Auto Loan: America's Middle Class Can't Afford Its Cars

    This article by Ben Eisen and Adrienne Roberts for the Wall Street Journal may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Just 18% of U.S. households had enough liquid assets to cover the cost of a new car, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of 2016 data from the Fed’s triennial Survey of Consumer Finances, a proportion that hasn’t changed much in recent years.

    Even a conservative car loan often won’t do it. The median-income U.S. household with a four-year loan, 20% down and a payment under 10% of gross income—a standard budget—could afford a car worth $18,390, excluding taxes, according to an analysis by personal-finance website Bankrate.com.

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    DRAM Production Growth Could Be Less Than Previously Forecast

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

    When asked about the factors driving Micron's hiking of its calendar 2019 outlook for NAND demand growth -- Micron now expects industry-wide NAND bit demand to grow by a low-to-mid 40s percentage, up from prior guidance for mid-30s growth -- Zinser was quick to note the impact of rising smartphone storage capacities in the wake of healthy price declines.

    And in line with earnings call comments made by CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, Zinser noted that lower NAND prices are lifting solid-state drive capacities and (in what's a negative for hard drive suppliers) attach rates. He indicated the data center is an area where price elasticity is especially boosting NAND demand.

    In addition to hiking its NAND demand guidance, Micron cut its NAND industry supply (output) guidance amid ongoing capital spending cuts, forecasting NAND bit supply will only grow by about 30% this year. For 2020, Micron is guiding for NAND bit demand to grow by a high-20s to low-30s percentage, and for supply growth to be "somewhat below" demand growth.

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    The Navy Says Those UFO Videos Are Real

    This article by Kyle Mizokami for popular Mechanics may be of interest. Here is a section:

    That terminology is important. "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" provides "the basic descriptor for the sightings/observations of unauthorized/unidentified aircraft/objects that have been observed entering/operating in the airspace of various military-controlled training ranges," Gradisher told The Black Vault.

    In other words, the Pentagon says the aerial objects in the videos are simply unidentified, and for now, unexplained. The Navy is pointedly not saying the objects are flying saucers or otherwise controlled by aliens.

    Earlier this year, the Department of Defense told The Black Vault that the videos were unclassified, but never cleared for public release, and that there had been no review process within the Pentagon for releasing them.

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    Peloton Deepens IPO Slump in 3rd-Worst Unicorn Debut Since '08

    This article by Crystal Tse and Hailey Waller for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Peloton Interactive Inc. fell as much as 9.5% Thursday after raising $1.16 billion in its U.S. initial public offering, becoming the latest unprofitable startup to fail to win over investors in its trading debut.

    Peloton’s shares opened at $27 and were down 7.2% to $26.90 at 12:38 p.m. in New York trading, giving the company a value $7.5 billion. The fitness startup sold 40 million shares for $29 each on Wednesday, after marketing them for $26 to $29.

    It marks the third-worst trading debut in 10 years in the U.S. for companies that have raised at least $1 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The IPO also comes as investors have been rattled by the sudden disintegration of WeWork’s plan to go public in September.

    Peloton Chief Executive Officer John Foley said in an interview with Bloomberg Television that he had “some disappointment” about the reception but was confident in his company’s prospects.

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    Machine Learning's "Amazing" Ability to Predict Chaos

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

    “This is really very good,” Holger Kantz, a chaos theorist at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, said of the eight-Lyapunov-time prediction. “The machine-learning technique is almost as good as knowing the truth, so to say.”

    The algorithm knows nothing about the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation itself; it only sees data recorded about the evolving solution to the equation. This makes the machine-learning approach powerful; in many cases, the equations describing a chaotic system aren’t known, crippling dynamicists’ efforts to model and predict them. Ott and company’s results suggest you don’t need the equations — only data. “This paper suggests that one day we might be able perhaps to predict weather by machine-learning algorithms and not by sophisticated models of the atmosphere,” Kantz said.

    Besides weather forecasting, experts say the machine-learning technique could help with monitoring cardiac arrhythmias for signs of impending heart attacks and monitoring neuronal firing patterns in the brain for signs of neuron spikes. More speculatively, it might also help with predicting rogue waves, which endanger ships, and possibly even earthquakes.

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    How We Should Bust an Investing Myth

    This article by Jason Zweig for the Wall Street Journal may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    According to PitchBook Data, 66 companies valued at $1 billion or more have done initial public offerings from 2011 through mid-September 2019. A third of those IPOs came at prices below the value set in the companies’ last round of private funding. Bloom Energy Corp. , Cloudera Inc., Domo Inc., Reata Pharmaceuticals Inc., and Zynga Inc. all launched IPOs priced at least 40% lower than the valuation in their final private-funding round, according to PitchBook.

    Perhaps that’s because conventional valuation methods may overstate what private funds’ venture holdings are worth. Often, several share classes are valued equally even though they aren’t all entitled to the same payoffs.

    Or perhaps the brilliance of the private market is overstated. Consider a recent survey of nearly 900 venture capitalists.

    Asked whether they “often make a gut decision to invest” in a fledgling company rather than relying on analysis, 44% of venture-fund executives said yes.

    Which financial metrics do they use to analyze investments? “None,” admitted 9% of respondents. Only 11% quantitatively analyze past investment performance. A similar survey of private-equity executives found that they “do not frequently use” the methods that are standard among public investors for discounting the future cash their holdings might generate.

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    Ethereum, XRP, and Litecoin Lead Alt Season 2.0

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

    But as the saying goes, this time may be different. Altcoins are bouncing from long-term support, and the rallies are showing exceptional strength, and are even continuing to rally while Bitcoin struggles with overhead resistance – something not seen for much of 2019.

    Ethereum has been leading the charge, with as much as 20% growth. XRP , one of the worst-performing crypto assets of 2019, has also gained around 20% even as sentiment surrounding the altcoin hits an all-time low.  EOS and Dash are also up by a similar margin.

    Litecoin, Cardano, Tron, Tezos and IOTA, and others from the top 20 crypto assets by market cap are also up by about 10% or more. Stellar, which has plummeted further and further throughout the bear market spiked by 40%.

    The boom in altcoins is due to extremely oversold conditions, and a breakdown in Bitcoin dominance – a metric that weights the king of crypto against the rest of the market. But depending on the type of formation that BTC dominance is in, it could spike back up, wiping out any gains altcoins have seen during this rally.

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    Factors or Fundamentals, Quant Tremor Is Field Day for the Geeks

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

    You wouldn’t know it from benchmarks, but beneath a tranquil surface violent swings are lashing traders along obscure fault lines. Companies like real-estate firms that rose the most in 2019 are plunging, and some that have trailed are being pushed out front. It’s been a mild reckoning for hedge funds and others who have bet on the status quo persisting.

    Amid all the churn has been a renewed focus on a quantitative concept known as factor investing, which groups companies not by industry but traits such as how fast their prices move or profits rise. A question gaining currency in the past few days is whether these categories are just handy descriptions of twists in the market -- or are at some level guiding them.

    “It seems very mechanical right now,” said John Swarr, investment specialist at Penn Mutual Asset Management, which has $27 billion under management. “If you look within some of these stocks that are being hit the hardest, some are in much better shape than others and yet they’re all being affected similarly,” he said. “It does feel like it’s a rules-based rotation.”

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