Tech, Business, Finance and Everything Else
Coinbase is looking to go public very soon and its valuation in the secondary markets has just gone over $100 billion.
Coinbase’s valuation over the years:
Coinbase reported revenue of $530M for 2019 and $691M for the first nine months in 2020. The company posted a net income of $141M between January-September 2020, up from a loss of $30M in overall 2019. Notably, these numbers don’t include 2021, when the Bitcoin price surged more than 90% YTD.
Wallstreetbets is a sub-reddit where they wanted to try to build a community to for the big short sellers out of certain stocks, but what they didn’t realise is that they can really kill these companies with the power of the retail investors.
Short Seller percentages of outstanding stock:
Most companies tend to be below 2% in short sellers.
At the time of writing this GME is up to $337 per share (up 128% in one day) and AMC 19.35 per share (up 286% in one day).
The community seems to be using their retail power to try to force these short sellers out of the market and make them bankrupt.
Stick it to the man!
The S&P 500 is an index of some of the leading companies in the United States. The S&P 500 doesn’t push extremely high in one area as its supposed to show a cross section of America.
Here is the breakdown the S&P 500 by Market Sector:
As you can see there is a very broad cross section of companies in all sectors of America. Technology is the leading sector, but it’s not the whole S&P 500.
Great article on Bloomberg about Jetbrains – the company behind the popular programming language Kotlin.
Key numbers:
It’s great to hear from other founders who are far more interested in the issue they are trying to fix than the billions of dollars they could be personally making.
The US Commerce Department recently announced that DJI is now on the US Trade Ban list.
DJI has since come out and stated that Americans will be able to continue to buy and use its products “normally” despite the companies presence on the list.
This ban only affects the companies from purchasing parts from American companies, so I’m assuming DJI saw this ban coming and already had a plan B supply chain in place ready to go at any time.
I’m not entirely sure how a drone company is helping to support human rights abuses in China. It seems like if this is the case then all Chinese companies will be in the same position!
Baidu shares rose 14% on Tuesday after news was announced that the Chinese search engine based company was planning on building their own electric vehicles.
Its great to see that Chinese technology companies are starting to think about the EV sector and how they can disrupt the auto industry. Alibaba has also partnered with Chinese automaker SAIC to develop premium EVs for the Chinese market.
It will be interesting to see how this unfolds as technology companies are very well placed to enter this market and make huge disruptions in the same way Tesla has.
I have been running investment portfolios for a company and also some high net worth individuals for the past 5 years. Over those years I have managed to beat the S&P 500 index every year in terms of overall yearly returns. I have always had a very simple investment philosophy which revolves around Benjamin Grahams teachings with a few tweaks for the modern day (also look up to Warren Buffett).
Im going to be starting a section on here for personal finance in which I’m going to tell everywhere when I’m buying a stock – at what price and why. I hope this might give everyone a little insight into my thinking.
I have started a new category on here called Portfolio. This will be the easiest place to follow the latest happenings.
I’m hoping this just helps one other person!
Rafael Nadal will most likely still be winning Roland Garros in 2050!
This videos really shows how technology has moved on and the ability to make even the small details (like hair) move in the right direction when he moves his head in this interview.
Amazing Deep Fake technology.
When I read most of the leading technology sites like The Verge or TechCrunch or Business Insider there is a distinct focus on US based technology companies (with a hint of EU), which of course is understandable. However, I find myself these days wanting to find more about companies in Asia or the Developing World. This is where true innovation will come from!
There are a growing number of musicians and labels all over the world that would like to get their music live for Free in Spotify! Music distribution to Spotify and other services can take some time and the vast majority of them have poor customer service – however, you should check out RouteNote.
RouteNote is a very large music distribution service that allows artists and labels to get their music live in Spotify and other stores for free within 48 hours. This is outstanding!
RouteNote is free to create an account and artists can upload for free and keep 85% of the royalties with monthly payments straight into your Paypal account or International Bank Account.
Philip Kaplan seems to be the owner of Slaps.com, which is a new music website. Phil is a serial entreprenuer who seems to create a lot of startups and then a few years in will get a little bored and start a new project.
Slaps.com seems to be a very early and very basic Soundcloud streaming services, but with basically no features and hip hop heavy.
Blackstone Group is looking to raise $5 billion for its second Asian fund.
Blackstone is seeing huge potential in Asia and really wants to invest heavily and faster than ever before. Around 66% of their first fund $2.3 billion has been invested.
Blackstone see’s great growth potential in China and India and really wants to get a foot in those markets before they mature.
I have just come across Tara AI (via DaringFireball), which provides a completely free to use alternative to Jira and other project management software.
I had a very quick look at it seems to have a very strong user interface and provide a strong amount of features.
However, WHY IS IT FREE?
SellerX is a startup from Berlin that focuses on acquiring top Amazon sellers. SellerX has just raised $118 million led by Cherry Ventures, Felix Capital, TriplePoint Capital, participation from Village Global, et al.
It seems like buying Amazon based businesses is becoming an interesting proposition. Once Amazon sellers get to a certain level they need a lot of back office support and the vast majority aren’t set up to do this. It will be interesting to see if they are able to get a lot of great Amazon sellers together and turn this into a strong long term business.
Shutterstock has acquired AI driven Amper Music.
Amper Music claims to have over 1 million individual audio samples in its catalogue.
It seems like Shutterstock wants to be able to create endless AI driven music and be able to monetize that in its marketplace and keep 100% of the royalties. It will be interesting to see what happens to Amper Music after the transaction closes, as I expect that the company will be completely shutdown immediately.
RouteNote has started offering Free Music Distribution to TikTok and Resso. RouteNote was one of the first music distributors to partner with TikTok and Resso globally and they can provide full access into the platform for no upfront fees and artists and labels keep 85% of the royalties.
TikTok and Resso pay royalties to both artists and labels so its worth adding your music into the music library into TikTok so creators of all shapes and sizes can find you and promote your tracks to a global audience.
It was confirmed that Spotify is buying Megaphone for $235 million.
Megaphone is a podcasting hosting and advertising company – it’s easy to see how this fits into Spotify’s plans for world domination in the podcast market, but it will throw up a lot of concerns on how powerful Spotify is in this market now and how they plan to control all the data around podcasts.
These podcasts should be platform agnostic – like music. However, they seem to be getting acquired and then made exclusive for either Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal or whoever has the most money at the time.
Who is going to lose out? CONSUMERS!
Very interesting performance from Halsey – but it really seems like the video has been recorded separately from the audio and then its been placed together.
It is great to see companies like Magnum realise the influence of music within current culture.
Extremely strange interview with Erling Haaland, which talks about the him not taking a girlfriend at home and that he will sleep lonely tonight. Very awkward!
With 2020 being so rubbish I have been spending a lot of time on YouTube. Here is a video from Selected – which showcases their New Years Mix. It’s from 2017, but it still really packs a punch.