S&P 500 Hits Another Record as Tech Rallies

Dow: +0.17% | Nasdaq: +1.03% | S&P: +0.42%

Catch Up Quick

• CVC Capital Partners has offered to buy Japanese conglomerate Toshiba for ~$20B → largest leveraged buyout of Asian company ever

• Coinbase generated $1.8B in revenue during Q1 2021 — more than it brought in for all of 2020

• Rolls-Royce hits new sales record in Q1 2021 as the wealthy demand luxury cars → up 62% year-over-year

• Americans have saved 42 cents of every dollar received from March stimulus checks (survey from the New York Fed)

• Jeff Bezos backed Biden's proposal to raise taxes for U.S. businesses

• KKR invested $500M in Box ($BOX), a cloud content management company with plans to use most of the proceeds to buyback shares

• Uber says it has had more riders than drivers lately, announcing a $250M "stimulus" to improve recruitment

• Rocket Lab’s next launch will feature second booster recovery, aiming for reusability → very similar to SpaceX

• Twitter is said to have held acquisition talks with Clubhouse on potential deal worth $4B (techcrunch.com)

• Okta ($OKTA) expects annual revenue to jump by 30% with addition of new products

• Biden hasn’t spoken with Fed chair Jerome Powell and has been "very fastidious" about not talking to the U.S. central bank

Thought of the Day

• The financial technology (“fintech”) market, estimated to be sized ~$5.5T in 2019, is growing at a staggering 24% annual rate

• As more and more businesses become encoded in software, infrastructural advancements, such as API connectivity, have facilitated the delivery of cheap, personalized financial services for consumers

  An API (application programming interface) is essentially a digital messenger that enables automated flows of data between applications and companies. For example, Plaid uses APIs to authenticate user information before retrieving bank information, financial data, etc.

• However, in wake of surging fintech, big banks that have dominated economies for decades on end feel uneasy

  The growth in shadow and fintech banking calls for level playing field regulation — Jamie Damon, CEO of J.P. Morgan

The Bottom Line

• As shadow banks and fintech rivals challenge the banking sectors of the developed world, a sizeable legislative discrepancy between the two surfaces, indicating that requirements could likely either be loosened for big banks or tightened for newer tech-enabled entrants!

Afternoon Audit