Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are the first three publicly traded U.S. companies to hit $1 trillion in market value (market capitalization). WSJ’s Dan Gallagher explains how each company reached the milestone. Wall Street Journal (wsj.com) video above published May 6, 2019.
2) 5G Hype: 5G discussions are
complex, convoluted, no one really knows what's happening:
5G still has a long way to go and can't scale. The 5G network relies on mmWaves, whereas
4G LTE uses MHz.
T-Mobile's CTO Neville Ray: "Millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum has great potential in terms of speed and capacity, but it doesn’t travel far from the cell site and doesn’t penetrate materials at all. It will never materially scale beyond small pockets of 5G hotspots in dense urban environments."
See also:
3) Investing
The Week: NASDAQ Composite -3.0% |
S&P 500 Index -2.2% |
DJIA -2.1%.
$UBER at market close on Friday (10 May 2019) was
down -7.6% on its first day of trading after raising $8.1B in its IPO, which valued the company at about $82.4B.
Investor Notes:
Gundlach warns Bear Market just getting started,
"better than 50% chance"--China-US Trade Talks Collapse. China reportedly backtracked on almost all aspects of U.S. trade deal.
Warren Buffett calls the U.S. stock market “ridiculously cheap” (if interest rates stay at these low levels)--"Fed Model" indicates U.S. stocks are "cheap" relative to U.S. Treasury bonds--
here’s the math: The spread between the S&P 500’s earnings yield -- a proxy for how much equities “pay” shareholders -- and the 10-year Treasury yield currently sits at 2.9 percentage points. (The wider it is, the cheaper are stocks.) While that difference began to expand significantly in December of last year and has come in a bit since, strip out the last five months and the relative payout of stocks over bonds is the highest since 2016. Also note Buffett's most recent
annual letter (pdf):
“the annual change in Berkshire’s book value – which makes its farewell appearance on page 2 – is a metric that has lost the relevance it once had.”
Europe: the
Unbreakable, Unsustainable Eurozone--when the downturn happens, as it eventually will, the unsustainable will hit the unbreakable--
ft.com. The
EU sits
between a rock and a hard place--politically unsustainable--
fnlondon.com. Maybe
Europe Can’t Recover From the Financial Crisis--The
European Union’s flaws, cultural fragmentation and falling birth rates look like a formula for decline and there are number of signs that this pessimistic scenario will come to pass--Noah Smith in
bloomberg.com.
How Russia contaminated $2.7 billion of oil exports to Europe--contaminated oil found in Belarus, Poland, Germany, Ukraine and the Baltic port of Ust Luga,
Druzhba network.
Someone Tell Theresa May and Parliament--“The Brexit horse has bolted”--UK banks told
Reuters they would
not reverse changes already made in preparation for
Brexit, even if it was scrapped in a second referendum, nor would they financially support any future “Remain” or “Leave” campaigns. The banks have already transferred some client assets to new European Union legal entities, and moved about 2,000 jobs from London to offices in Dublin, Paris, Frankfurt and Madrid, thereby reducing costs of doing business in expensive London, and 'enhancing' the appeal of British banks to EU clients outside the UK. Instead, the bankers indicated they would continue to focus on
future-proofing their businesses, updating technology, and expanding into new markets.
China VC: Sequoia Capital China, a widely viewed bellwether for
Chinese tech investment, reportedly will lay off as much as 20 percent of its investment staff due to the
slowdown in China's
tech sector.
Investors Beware the False Narratives:
"We make up stories in our minds and then against all evidence, defend them tooth and nail. Understanding why we do this is the key to discovering truth and making wiser decisions"--fs.blog
4) ICYMI Tech News:
Google: transparency, choice and control in digital advertising--new protections and controls in
Chrome--
blog.google.
Amazon's new
Blink XT2 smart camera cheaper than the original.
Also: Why
Amazon (video) is gobbling up failed malls in the U.S.
YouTube says it will make all of its
original content free this fall, a strategy that its CBO says is in opposition to what other media companies are doing--
Variety.com.
Verizon Looks to Unload Tumblr Blogging Site--another
Marissa Mayer failed 'bright idea.' --
$VZ trying to steady a media business that has struggled to meet revenue targets.--
wsj.com.
Qualcomm's Modems Are Faster And Better--
seekingalpha.com.
See also Intel's
failure in 5G smartphone modems was just another point in a string of failures that will cost the company around $3 billion in revenues starting in 2020 ... "Avoid the stock as 2020 revenue estimates of $72 billion need to be cut"--
seekingalpha.com.
Apple: EU to launch formal
antitrust investigation into
Apple in the next few weeks after
Spotify accused the iPhone maker of
“tilting the playing field to disadvantage competitors”--
ft.com.
See also
How the Apple Store Lost Its Luster--in interviews, current and former employees say brand building became more important than serving shoppers--
bloomberg.com.
Dutch company
ASML Granted Final Judgment by US Court Against XTAL for
theft of trade secrets - $845 Million Awarded Will Be Uncollectible, But ASML Will Own XTAL IP--
asml.com.
Less to lose? Germany's poorer East embraces
tech revolution--
reuters.com.
EU's Tusk warns of risks in rise of U.S. tech giants Google, Apple, Facebook, and
Amazon: the European Union has been a leader in controlling how social media handle users' personal data, with rules known as
GDPR introduced in May, 2018, giving regulators the power to impose fines of up to 4% of global revenues for violations.
Newspapers dying--for every reporter now, there are six PR workers, the US Census reports, and the number of PR flacks will continue rising, says Labor Department--
bloomberg.com.
Personal tech: Google Pixel 3a: The $399 'Game Changing' Smartphone. Google also announced that this year and forward,
all new
Chromebook devices will be
Linux ready--
zdnet.com.
-- John Poole, Editor, Domain Mondo
feedback & comments via twitter @DomainMondo
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