Over the past decades, California has learned that all of its sun, forward-thinking culture, educated workforce, and entrepreneurial spirit couldn’t stop the gradually accelerating exodus of the aerospace industry from the Golden State. There were many factors involved, of course – but the point is that regional dominance in an Read more…
Facebook’s Power Play Last week, Facebook [NASDAQ: FB] finally announced its long-rumored digital currency initiative. Although bitcoin had been rallying since April, since the announcement it has risen almost 25%, as of this writing. Why the boost for bitcoin? Won’t FB’s currency — called “Libra” — be competition for bitcoin? Read more…
Morgan Stanley [NYSE: MS] is acquiring a Canadian firm, Solium Capital, which manages stock-compensation plans for about 3,000 companies. Collectively, Solium’s clients have a million employees — disproportionately young, and disproportionately employed in high-tech, high-growth startup companies (including, for example, Nextdoor, Sonos, Dropbox, Stripe, and Instacart). This acquisition makes sense Read more…
S&P Dow Jones Indices is the company which maintains the GICS — the Global Industry Classification System. That system assigns companies to specific industry groups; it’s important because so many exchange-traded funds are grouped together on the basis of these classifications. That can mean that many stocks get caught in Read more…
The U.S. Economy and Stock Market Fundamentally, the U.S. economy continues to be strong, and recent data indicate that the trend will continue. Fundamental stock market indicators are bullish. Corporate profit growth is strong, exceeding 23% for the first six months. Strong corporate profits are positive and correlated with stock Read more…
Several times over the past few years, we’ve written about the secretive augmented reality startup, Magic Leap, which has raised big money from technology giants, including Alphabet [NASDAQ: GOOG], and from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. “Virtual reality” (VR) headsets, such as Facebook’s Oculus, mask external reality entirely and place Read more…
The investor enthusiasm that began 2018 was based on the sense of a late-cycle acceleration. The global expansion was hitting its stride, and this would bode well for capital expenditures and therefore, many thought, for U.S. industrials. Last week we discussed some of the reasons why the script has not Read more…
We Say Yes. Last week, several major news outlets reported that detailed data harvested from Facebook [NASDAQ: FB] had been pressed into service by political consultancy firms under questionable circumstances. The data were harvested by researchers who were abiding by FB’s then-current policies when they collected them. But observers and Read more…
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