✅ Have you heard of greenwashing?

25 years ago Marc Randolph came up with a wacky idea - customized dog treats. ‘Puppy treats and chill’ unfortunately did not make it to mainstream pop culture. Ideation can be iterative, as your second idea, more often than not is generally better than the first.

US economy is slowing this year, ‘greenwashing’ is a no-go in Europe, Ulta beauty is rollicking ahead while bars are hiring faster than tech companies. Let’s parse through the data.

The Big Picture

IMF forecasted the US economy to grow by 1.6% this year down from 2.1% in 2022. US banks reportedly have a decreased lending capacity of 1% due to combination of bank failures and increased lending rates. There is a correction expected in mid-sized bank stocks as well. Ripple effects of lending contraction is impacting small and medium sized businesses in local communities. There’s more. Customer deposits migrated from small-medium sized banks to large banks. 25 biggest US banks gained 120 billion dollars in deposits as banks below that saw withdrawals of 108 billion dollars days after Silicon Valley bank and Signature bank collapsed.

Sector sweep

Technology

• Discord is in the middle of investigation by the Defense Department as highly classified documents have surfaced on the platform following the probe.

• Cathie Wood CEO of Ark Investment, just bought 2 sub-5 dollar stocks in medical technology. Butterfly network is working on handheld ultrasound technology. SemaLogic, a clinical diagnostics company working on large scale study of proteins to solve delivery, care and data analytics.

• Talking about proteins, Meta has built a tool which can predict the structure of hundreds of millions of proteins. Deep Mind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, using its AlphaFold AI system has been used to predict all most known proteins to science. The models of protein structure are to be used as an approach towards treating various diseases.

Consumer Products

• Ulta Beauty, the beauty retailer has managed to navigate inflation and reduced consumer demand as they reported a record annual revenue more than 10 billion dollars; their highest to date. Ulta Beauty COO Kecia Steelman said “The whole store is hot”.

• Consumer products with environmental friendly and sustainability labels are under the microscope. Barring evidence of scientific reports, this deceptive labeling is broadly known as ‘greenwashing’. European officials are cracking down on it which is supposed to impact several businesses.

• Green sprouts Inc, which makes sippy cups for babies is recalling over 10,000 cups voluntarily. If the base of the cup breaks off, children are exposed to lead which is present in the soldering.

Space

• Satellite operators SES SA and Intelsat are in talks of a merger to compete with SpaceX Starlink. Starlink has launched 4000 satellites to date and reportedly hit 1 million subscribers for its internet service in December 2022. Starlink also reported a cashflow positive quarter in 2022.

Automotive

• Global car makers want a piece of Indian car market as demand in China has receded. Passenger vehicle sales in India have increased by 23% last year alone and expected to double to 7.3 million by 2030 according to management consulting firm Arthur D Little.

Hospitality

• Pent up demand post-covid and tech layoffs over the year has caused hiring rate in hotels, bars and restaurants to grow at 7% vs the tech industry at tech industry at 4.5%

That’s all for today folks. Do keep a lookout for our weekly email about stock deep dives and personal finance strategies this Saturday.

Okay this is just a meme guys, just a meme.

Sibling trolls continue.