X wants to be the news

Clumsiness kind of helped out in World War II. Earl Dickson’s wife was very accident-prone and he desperately wanted to save on medical bills. He cut a small piece of gauze and placed it on another strip of gauze with adhesive on each end and voila! The band-aid was created in 1939, just in time.

Elon Musk is in the news with X and his plans for twitter. AWS is not looking back and we just realized, all that glitters in dark times is more often than not, gold.

The Big Picture

Gold has been historically used as a hedge against inflation in the past, and right now it’s trending upwards. The most actively traded Gold contract grew 13% year to date. There are reports of Federal reserve reducing or pausing the interest rate levels and yet there is optimism in gold futures. Analysts say, there is embedded inflation in the economy and we are not going back to 2% inflation target anytime this year. George Cheveley, portfolio manager at Ninety One believes once interest rates decrease ‘gold will do well’.

Sector Sweep

Technology

• Amazon is entering the AI race in the market with Google’s Bard and ChatGPT. They intend to target corporate customers by offering custom made chips which run more efficiently than competitors.

• Twitter Inc officially merged in X corp according to a legal filing last week. Elon Musk has repeatedly talked about creating X as the WeChat for US market.

Automotive

• US Environmental protection agency published new regulations with stricter norms from 2027 to 2032 for tailpipe emissions. Major automakers are already gearing up for complete or partial electrification as they don’t intend to lose market share in electric vehicles compared to Tesla and Rivian.

Consumer Products

• Gojo industries, the Ohio based company and the maker of the Purell hand sanitizer is looking for the buyer. Post covid-19 pandemic, the company has shot to 1 billion in annual sales. The company has hired JP Morgan to run an auction.

• Bath and body works CFO, is planning to leave the company as they face inflation and excess inventory due to milder demand.

Energy

• Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is estimating the oil demand to be higher this year. The demand is expected to go up by 2.3 million barrels a day escalating oil prices.

Media

• Elon Musk is trying to acquire part of the news market with real-time reporting from ‘citizen journalists’ on Twitter. He contends that click-based advertiser led news companies can be disrupted by a system of fact-checking through a crowd sourced approach.

• NPR criticized Twitter Inc for being a state affiliated media as they argued that only 1% of its budget comes from federal grants.

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

Zero interest rate decade was awesome bro

Honest mistake in my honest opinion..