S&P Reaches Record Despite Inflation Data

Dow: +0.06% | Nasdaq: +0.78% | S&P: +0.47%

Catch Up Quick

• GameStop hired Amazon executive as new CEO, while unveiling plans to sell even more shares

• China arrested >1K suspects for crypto-related money laundering

• Meme stocks hit a wall today → GameStop, AMC + Clover down big

• Consumer prices surged a staggering 5% (CPI Data)

• Albany, NY will erase a parking ticket in exchange for a coronavirus vaccine

• Biden will buy 500M Pfizer vaccine doses to share with the world

• Northvolt, a Sweden-based maker of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, raised $2.8B in new funding

• Klarna, a Swedish online payment platform, raised $639M at a $46B valuation (up from $31b) → Europe’s most valuable unicorn

• El Salvador's legislature officially voted to make bitcoin legal tender

• The Afternoon Audit team made a fresh new website where we plan to track our predictions (such as the below)

Thought of the Day

• As the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates software developer jobs to grow faster than other professions, tools that increase developer efficiency are becoming very popular

• Some of the hottest (most overvalued) tech stocks fall within this developer enablement vertical → Atlassian, Jfrog, Twilio, MongoDB, etc

• However, as tech companies race to acquire customers and release new software, development speed often comes at the expense of security

• For example, today, highly confidential software items (“secrets”), such as API keys and database URLs, are hastily shared by developers across various communication channels → not secure

• Founded only 3 years ago, San Francisco-based Doppler is building a centralized hub for developers to securely manage and quickly pull secrets for use while urgently writing code

• This is incredibly valuable given it optimizes developer speed and security at the same time

• Also, since Doppler handles confidential user secrets, they innately assume an advantageous position to sell new products to existing customers → companies strive to minimize the amount of vendors that help out with security, sensibly aiming to keep secrets in-house

• Not to mention, Doppler has raised money from Google Ventures, Sequoia, Greylock, Y Combinator, and Peter Thiel → copious investors with track records of continuously identifying startups that grow into tech vanguards

• Keep an eye on this one, as the startup is strategically positioned to solve a big problem in a fast growing domain!