UK

https://www.redfin.com/news/the-housing-market-has-started-to-recover/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-26/how-china-is-quietly-dominating-the-global-car-market?srnd=premium-europe It’s just the beginning, according to Xu Haidong, deputy chief engineer at the state-backed China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. The target is to sell 8 million passenger vehicles overseas by 2030—more than twice Japan’s current shipments, he says.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-25/rich-chinese-plan-to-leave-with-money-with-covid-zero-s-end?srnd=premium-europe According to one private banker, wealthy individuals told him the cost of moving money offshore has risen to 12 cents on the dollar late last year from 1 cent in the years before the pandemic, as the government clamped down on money transfers. That isn’t stopping those who want to leave. Peter Luo, the principal consultant at Express Immigration, a New Zealand immigration advisory, said the requests from Chinese clients keep pouring in, with most coming from the business community. “The notable thing is that they are very urgent, with the request that applications are approved immediately if possible,” he said.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-chatgpt-openai-warns-employees-not-share-confidential-information-microsoft-2023-1 Last month, an internal Slack channel at Amazon bustled with employee questions about ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence tool that's taken the tech world by storm since its late-November release. Some asked whether Amazon had official guidance on using ChatGPT on work devices. Others wondered if they were even allowed to use the AI tool for work. One person urged the Amazon Web Services cloud unit to publish its position on "acceptable usage of generative AI tools," like ChatGPT. Soon, an Amazon corporate lawyer chimed in. She warned employees not to provide ChatGPT with "any Amazon confidential information (including Amazon code you are working on)," according to a screenshot of the message seen by Insider. The attorney, a senior corporate counsel at Amazon, suggested employees follow the company's existing conflict of interest and confidentiality policies because there have been "instances" of ChatGPT responses looking similar to internal Amazon data. "This is important because your inputs may be used as training data for a further iteration of ChatGPT, and we wouldn't want its output to include or resemble our confidential information (and I've already seen instances where its output closely matches existing material)," the lawyer wrote. The exchange reflects one of the many new ethical issues arising as a result of the sudden emergence of ChatGPT, the conversational AI tool that can respond to prompts with markedly articulate and intelligent answers. Its rapid proliferation has the potential to upend a number of industries, across media, academics, and healthcare, precipitating a frenzied effort to grapple with the chatbot's use-cases and the consequences. The question of how confidential company information is shared with ChatGPT and what OpenAI, the creator of the AI tool, does with it could become a thorny issue going forward. It's particularly important for Amazon as its main competitor Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI, including a fresh round of funding this week that reportedly totals $10 billion. "OpenAI is far from transparent about how they use the data, but if it's being folded into training data, I would expect corporations to wonder: After a few months of widespread use of ChatGPT, will it become possible to extract private corporate information with cleverly crafted prompts?" said Emily Bender, who teaches computational linguistics at University of Washington. "I'm both scared and excited to see what impact this will have on the way that we conduct coding interviews," this staffer wrote on Slack. Overall, Amazon employees in the Slack channel were excited about the potential of ChatGPT, and wondered if Amazon was working on a competing product. The corporate lawyer who warned employees about using ChatGPT said Amazon was broadly developing "similar technology," citing the voice-assistant Alexa and the code recommendation service CodeWhisperer. One AWS employee wrote that the Enterprise Support team recently started a small working group internally to "understand the impact of advanced chat AI on our business," according to the Slack messages. The study revealed that ChatGPT "does a very good job" at answering AWS support questions, including difficult ones like troubleshooting Aurora database problems. It's also "great" at creating training material for AWS Certified Cloud Architect exams and "very good" at coming up with a customer's company goals, the employee Slack messages stated. The increased use of ChatGPT at work raises serious questions about how OpenAI plans to use the material shared with the AI tool, according to Bender from the University of Washington. OpenAI's terms of service require users to agree that the company can use all input and output generated by the users and ChatGPT. It also says it removes all personally identifiable information (PII) from the data it uses. Bender said it's hard to see how OpenAI is "thoroughly" identifying and removing personal information, given ChatGPT's rapidly growing scale -- it crossed 1 million users within a week of launching. More importantly, intellectual property of corporations is likely not part of what is defined under PII, Bender said. For Amazon employees, data privacy seems to be the least of their concerns. They said using the chatbot at work has led to "10x in productivity," and many expressed a desire to join internal teams developing similar services.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-23/india-s-1-4-billion-population-could-become-world-economy-s-new-growth-engine?srnd=premium-europe

I am not sure about this tax or is it a real risk at all. I tried to find information on it myself and consulted with local tax specialists from big 4 and their answer is cool "do not worry, this only exist on paper, nobody ever pays it". It is also not broker related. But as it stands today it quite crazy and with very low exemption for non us persons.

I like/share Dimons view: war is a unknown worry, everything else is like weather forecasts:)

What is slight margin for you? 10 or 30? For me this bearish vs bullish positioning is somewhere betweeh 30 per cent cash and 30 per cent margin. I very rarely went to the margin side in the last years, because was constantly worried of zero rates, valuations and general too good mood in the market:). In hindsight it was mistake not to do this in the end of 2018 and start of 2020.

I still use only IB (IE), but from time to time am thinking about this question myself. I do not really worry about this in case of IB too much, but it seems the main benefit with Schwab would also be much higher SIPC insurance vs EU based broker. Is this part of your consideration? However, margin rates (if one would use some leverage) is unthinkably higher with Schwab vs IB? On the separate issue, what is your opinion on this U.S. Estate Tax for Foreign Investors? It is not Schwab related and theoretically should apply for any US investment for non US person and as far as I understand this tax is not practicaly implemented. However with US based broker you would be much closer to IRS, than with EU based?

Does anyone has any opinion on SFOR (S4 Capital)? https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2021/08/19/why-sorrell-s-s4-capital-just-so-damn-attractive-right-now https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2022/jul/21/s4-capitals-share-slump-means-sir-martin-sorrell-has-a-crisis-on-his-hands

https://www.theverge.com/23560328/openai-gpt-4-rumor-release-date-sam-altman-interview

Some countries are already pre anouncing their new support for Ukraine, seems after tomorrows meeting they will receive a lot of new stuff.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-18/chatgpt-will-be-the-calculator-for-writing-top-economist-says?srnd=premium

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-19/china-creates-strong-nation-ride-app-as-data-regime-tightens?srnd=premium

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-18/summers-now-more-optimistic-on-us-outlook-than-three-months-ago?leadSource=uverify wall

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-18/wagner-group-founder-prigozhin-is-putin-s-model-entrepreneur?srnd=premium

https://www.investing.com/news/world-news/wagner-chief-prigozhin-attacks-putin-administration-over-failure-to-block-youtube-2982772 He said there were two reasons why it had not been banned in Russia, which has clamped down on foreign media since invading Ukraine in February: that it was supposedly indispensable for ordinary citizens and, primarily, the opposition of President Vladimir Putin's administration. Moat:)

It seems you a right. Though it is only a benchmark, in his case it would be much better to use just to SNP in EUR including dividends or some ETF (SXR8 or VUA1), available as real alternative for investor. At least this is how I understand a benchmark:). It is interesting that I have never spoted this issue with benchmarks myself, despite of following RV and his results for quite some time, maybe because it seems totaly out of character for him.

or: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-17/china-s-population-starts-shrinking-first-drop-since-1960s?srnd=premium-europe The population drop-off came much faster than previously expected, and could act as a brake on economic growth by slowing demand for goods such as new houses. Due to the decline, the Chinese economy may struggle to overtake the US in size and the nation could lose its status as the world’s most populous country to India this year. As recently as 2019, the United Nations was forecasting that China’s population would peak in 2031 and then decline, but last year the UN had revised that estimate to see a peak at the start of 2022. The labor force is already shrinking, long-term demand for houses will fall likely further, and the government may also struggle to pay for its underfunded national pension system.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-17/microsoft-azure-to-add-chatgpt-to-cloud-services?srnd=premium-europe