Once upon a time, the acronym FANG (for Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google) was the symbol for tech stocks. But almost unnoticed, Broadcom snuck into the club of trillion-dollar companies, and now there is a new acronym: BATMMAAN (Broadcom, Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia). Barron's came out with an excellent analysis including a price comparison. What does it show? Nvidia is the cheapest stock of the bunch.
BATMMAAN stock performance in the last year: up 66% on average.
Forget FANG, here's BATMMAAN
This is especially noteworthy since Nvidia was already by far the best-performing stock among the tech giants over the last year. Propelled by the AI hype, Broadcom (symbol AVGO) is also coming on strong, while Tesla is mostly driven by members of Elon Musk's cult.
The entire BATMMAAN club made an average return of 66% last year. In fact, Apple and especially Microsoft are doing substantially worse than the S&P 500, which has proven to be a solid investment at 25%. Both icons are suffering from the AI hype: Apple because it derives no identifiable revenue or profit benefit from AI and Microsoft because it is making tens of billions in additional investments in AI, the long-term returns of which investors doubt.
Return of top cryptocurrencies: 174%
Investors with a strong stomach have had a wonderful year in the crypto world, where the average rise of the largest crypto currencies measured by market cap, has been a whopping 174%.
The most frequently asked question in crypto remains: which coin should I buy? But the largest crypto currencies were already doing 174% year-to-date.
In addition to the rise of memecoin Dogecoin, carried in part by Doge fan Elon Musk, it is particularly notable that XRP, a Stone Age token by crypto standards, rose over 450%. Trump's upcoming presidency ensures that a new SEC boss will be appointed, following notorious cryptohater Gensler. The hope of XRP holders is that under the new administration, the SEC will end the ongoing legal proceedings against XRP.
The week's winner: Elon Musk. Image created with Midjourney.
There is already so much reporting on politics that it is usually easy to avoid the topic here. Only Elon Musk is unavoidable, including last week. First, Donald Trump appointed his new best friend Musk and fellow querulant Vivek Ramaswamy to head a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to be created, an initiative aimed at reducing "bureaucratic spending." Sounds like an American version of the Ministry of Magic from Harry Potter, in a global political climate where wishful thinking has become the norm on both sides of the center.
DOGE is S3XY
Not coincidentally, the acronym DOGE corresponds to the popular cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which Musk has previously backed. Dogecoin, measured by market value the seventh largest cryptocurrency in the world, rose as much as 83% over the past week. Fans of Musk recognized in the acronym Doge the same joke Musk previously played on the naming of Tesla models that appeared chronologically as S, X, 3 and Y, but together spell S3XY.
Bitcoin reached a new "all time high" but Dogecoin rose four times as fast this week.
SpaceX and xAI raise billions
The devil sch33t on the big heap last week. as Musk's companies xAI and SpaceX raised impressive funding, with valuations of $45 billion and over $250 billion, respectively.
SpaceX, the largest privately held company in the US, is preparing for a tender offer in December in which existing shares in the company will be sold for about $135 each, according to insiders. This would value the rocket builder at more than $250 billion, up $40 billion - more than one and a half times the value of Philips, to put it in perspective - from the $210 billion during a similar deal earlier this year.
In addition, Musk's AI start-up xAI has raised $5 billion on a valuation of $45 billion, nearly double the valuation of a few months ago. Meanwhile, Musk's team's lightning-fast construction of a supercomputer on Nvidia technology spooked competitors to the point that a rival company even flew over Musk's data center in Texas to investigate what was going on.
Finally, on Friday, Tesla closed a stock market week full of declines with a 3% gain; in total, TSLA shares rose 45% last month. We can conclude that last week, both politically and corporately, the left was not winning.
Netflix live with UFC?
The boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul, streamed live on Netflix, yesterday marked the streaming platform's debut in live sports broadcasting. The match drew such a large simultaneous worldwide viewing audience that Netflix was plagued by ongoing streaming problems.
No doubt Netflix will learn from this, nor is it to be expected that there will ever be another boxing match that draws as many viewers as a fight between the elderly best boxer of all time and Mr. Leerdam. Not even if, as rumors suggest, Netflix strikes a deal with the UFC to broadcast MMA fights live for the next few years. The question is whether Apple will get more involved in live sports besides U.S. MLS matches (mainly because of Messi).
AI and Augmented Reality (AR) in your ears
Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley's new company Hopscotch Labs is developing a service that uses data in large AI systems and today's ubiquitous AirPods. It then adds smartphone functionality to provide relevant local information when someone walks past a particular location, such as a restaurant, cocktail bar or even a street corner.
As author of the article on Hopscotch, the unsurpassed Om Malik states, "It feels like a panacea for information overload. Instead of looking into a browser or constantly peeking at a phone, the information comes through our ears or other devices, such as glasses."
I continue not to believe that many people will voluntarily wear glasses, but the choice of AirPods is a very interesting variant for information transfer and Crowley always develops very nice products. Hopscotch is a startup to follow.
Microsoft organizes "bake-off" for CO2 removal
Microsoft faces a challenge to meet its goal of becoming carbon-negative by 2030, as the company has seen carbon emissions increase by more than 40% since 2020, in part due to the growth of its AI business. Microsoft therefore already invested in Direct Air Capture (DAC), where it funds startups and purchases carbon credits upfront. However, DAC is still in development and the carbon credits from DAC could quickly cost many times more than other types of carbon removal credits.
Microsoft and the Royal Bank of Canada have now committed to purchase 10,000 metric tons of CO₂ over ten years from Deep Sky, a DAC project in Alberta, Canada. Deep Sky is organizing a "bake-off" for Microsoft and inviting eight startups to test their carbon removal technologies on site. In the week when COP29 in Baku is dominated by unappearing politicians, it is notable that business is taking the lead in removing CO₂ from the atmosphere.
"Bitcoin could go to $800,000"
"There is much less selling pressure. The reality is that although people say they're going to sell at $100,000 or $125,000, when Bitcoin gets to parity with gold, that means $800,000 per Bitcoin. So I think many Bitcoin holders will hold for the long term, and we can see that in the charts. Big 'whales' with more than a thousand coins have barely moved coins to exchanges this year." Thus crypto guru Meltem Demirors at CNBC.
The question is when Bitcoin's total market value will equal the size of the gold market, but the largest cryptocurrency is on its way. According to Demirors, the moment Bitcoin's market size equals that of gold, the price per Bitcoin will be $800,000. Sounds astronomically high, but so did $93,000 this summer, and that highest price ever was smoothly reached this week.
2024 is a bizarre stock market year: the S&P 500 is rising faster than Apple, and despite all the hype, Bitcoin has risen less than Nvidia and Palantir.
"This will enable a future in which we can realize the many consumer benefits we are excited about: giving people ownership of their digital identities, new revenue models for creative creators, cross-border transactions with stable coins at low to no cost, new ways for small businesses like restaurants to connect with their customers, the emergence of decentralized social networks, the development of physical infrastructure like energy grids, and blockchains that democratize AI and games - and much more we can't even imagine right now."
Still doesn't sound fascinating, but maybe the enthusiasm will come when those blockchain-based products hit the market. Andreessen Horowitz urges crypto entrepreneurs to get started already. Under President Biden, all crypto was lumped together while notorious scammers like Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX were not given a leg up. Clear regulations will have to lead to new, better crypto projects.
Private chefs in Silicon Valley lash out
Customers who only drink the first sip of a can of Coke, or tea that has to be boiled and cooled in three stages and then drunk half lukewarm: private chefs in Silicon Valley experience the craziest things with customers who don't know the difference between a truffle and an apple pie - as long as it's expensive and inconvenient.
Of the largest tokens, Dogecoin stands out with over 20% rise, but Shiba Inu is the winner with 34% rise in a week.
Again (and I can repeat this almost weekly): I don't give financial advice, but the public markets determine the financing of innovations that startups develop, the core of this newsletter. That's why I try to follow the public markets for stocks and crypto.
It is particularly notable that Bitcoin passed through the $65,000 mark again this week, leading many analysts and experts (of which I am certainly not one) to suspect that the altcoin season has begun.
The strange thing is that the huge increases in Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, the big memecoins, were not accompanied by a good week for Ethereum, which remained flat. That leads to a dilemma:
"Recently, Glassnode founders Jan Happel and Yann Allemann, also known as Negentropic on X, revived hopes of an approaching altseason. According to them, the crucial moment could occur when Bitcoin surpasses its previous all-time high (ATH) of $74,000. For now, altcoins are merely hitching a ride on the leading crypto's upward trend, but a shift could be near.
They believe that once this threshold is crossed, the crypto market could experience a general surge. The usual cycle would then begin: “Bitcoin in the lead, followed by Ethereum, then large caps before mid and small caps,” Negentropic specifies. But since May, Bitcoin has made three surges without triggering this famous altcoin season."
In other words, no one understands what is going on, but things are looking good.
Crypto is no longer a fad
From the comments, I understand that crypto is a very polarizing topic. Returns (or losses!) of 20% to 35% per week are only for the investors with strong stomachs. Next month marks the 16th anniversary of Bitcoin's white paper, so we can conclude that it is not a short-lived fad.
If you are reading this newsletter, I assume you are interested in innovation and not too conservative to try new things. My main arguments for at least starting to experiment with crypto with a limited amount are, first, financial sovereignty, the fact that you have complete control over your own assets without the intervention of a bank or broker; and second, protection against inflation, especially with crypto currencies with a guaranteed maximum supply like Bitcoin.
I hate to end this newsletter as some sort of quote from Wikipedia, but I don't want to leave unmentioned that smart contracts in blockchain are similar to Lego bricks in that, as building blocks, they offer infinite possibilities to automate services and processes. Compared to Amazon's AWS, for example, smart contracts offer the same flexibility and scalability within the blockchain, but without a centralized service provider. And instead of users then just lining the pockets of Jeff Bezos and Amazon shareholders, participants in crypto ecosystems share in the profits.
Of course, governments must protect consumers from fraud and money laundering, as I wrote about the problems at Binance in 2022. But it will be interesting in the coming weeks and months to see how Kamala Harris, if elected president, will strike the balance between ensuring investor safety and encouraging innovation.
