Stocks Hover as U.S. Retail Sales Surprise

Dow: -0.18% | Nasdaq: +0.13% | S&P: -0.16%

Catch Up Quick

• Gary Gensler (SEC Head) said that most cryptos are indeed securities

• Uranium stocks have surged in recent weeks, as nuclear energy companies garner the attention of Reddit investors

• Facebook’s internal research from 2019 declared that the social media giant made body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teen girls

• Ray Dalio warned that regulators will kill Bitcoin if it becomes a true medium of exchange / store of value

• An electric aircraft from Rolls Royce completed its 1st flight in Britain

• AMC Theaters added Ethereum and Litecoin to its year end crypto adoption schedule

• The CEO of Weber said the company is “barely keeping up with the demand” for its new portable gas grill

• LG is now making a 2,000lb TV that costs nearly $2M (The Verge)

• Bank of America predicted a 50% gain in Lucid Motors → compared the electric vehicle maker to Tesla and Ferrari

• OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, made its platform available on Google Play and the App Store amid an ongoing insider trading controversy

• Credit Suisse upgraded Cisco, claiming continued adherence to management’s plan could drive a ~30% share price increase

• Acorns hired a former Amazon executive as its new President → says crypto investing is coming

Thought of the Day

• Given how important “the cloud” has become to businesses of all kinds, it is important for investors, especially those in tech, to have a high level understanding

• As a refresher, cloud computing refers to business technology resources (servers, storage, networking, load balancing, etc) delivered over the internet, currently by tech giants such as Amazon (AWS), Google (Google Cloud), and Microsoft (Azure)

• A simpler abstraction of this → the cloud provides access to powerful yet affordable technologies for businesses to help store data, deliver stored data to different applications, handle large volumes of web traffic, etc

• The origins of cloud computing can be traced to 15-20 years ago, when Amazon was emerging as a household eCommerce name, requiring unprecedented volumes of these businesses technology components

• However, as the internet evolved and more businesses developed a digital footprint, Amazon saw an opportunity to deliver these information technology resources from it’s data centers to other businesses using the internet

• Taking a step back, before desktop computers were available for workplaces across the world, the first type of (electronic) computers performed operations from a centralized location, just like today’s cloud infrastructure for the most part except of course with more privative technologies

• And with respect to the history of computing as a whole, this development of large tech companies delivering IT resources from a centralized location (giant data centers, a.k.a “the cloud”) is therefore not a new concept, but a reversion to the first ever generation of computers

• From a 30,000 foot view (similar to financial markets) the pendulum effect can also be found in tech!

• Maybe there will soon be a groundbreaking reversion back to distributed computing → perhaps along the lines edge computing, etc

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  Hang in there! Friday / the weekend are on the horizon :)