UK

https://stratechery.com/2023/from-bing-to-sydney-search-as-distraction-sentient-ai/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jobs-hiring-boom-layoffs-employment-11675947399?mod=hp_lead_pos7

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-08/ex-goldman-exec-s-top-housing-market-predictions-for-2023?srnd=premium-europe#xj4y7vzkg

More TSM?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jobs-market-parties-like-its-1969-11675443737 Second, the annual revisions included in Friday’s report suggest the economy has more capacity to add workers. December’s count of the noninstitutionalized population aged 16 and higher was revised up by 954,000, and the labor force—people who are either working or looking for work—was revised up by 871,000. Last year the Labor Department revised up its December 2021 population estimate by 973,000 and its labor-force estimate by about 1.5 million. These upward revisions are likely largely the result of increases in immigration, which plummeted in the first year of the pandemic and then came back—the Census Bureau in December reported that net immigration to the U.S. rebounded over the 12 months ended July 1, 2022, to the highest level since 2017. One thing the population gains might mean is that employment can grow more quickly without exhausting the supply of available workers. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/12/net-international-migration-returns-to-pre-pandemic-levels.html#:~:text=Net Migration Between the United,Reaches Highest Level Since 2017&text=The U.S. Census Bureau projects,its lowest levels in decades.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-aids-russias-war-in-ukraine-trade-data-shows-11675466360?mod=hp_lead_pos1

https://www.barrons.com/articles/berkshire-hathaway-stock-warren-buffett-51675450214

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2023/01/29/ukraine-should-and-properly-supported-can-seize-crimea-argues-ben-hodges

Citi: "Given that we go into recession, historically SPX has never bottomed before the start of the recession. Typically, there are even several months between the start of Fed easing and the bottom in U.S. equities," they wrote in a client note. On the other hand, the S&P 500 has now crossed above the 200 daily moving average, which is "an important technical level." "Technicals related to SPX 200dma are indicating that the bottom may already be in. Equity markets broke more than 3.5% above the 200dma, a level at that we have never seen SPX make a new low from during a bear market," the strategists note.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-01/ukraine-russia-war-us-tanks-missiles-may-bring-putin-to-the-table?srnd=premium-europe https://www.newsweek.com/what-are-small-diameter-bombs-us-weapon-might-cross-putins-red-line-1775059

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-31/black-swan-s-taleb-warns-disneyland-is-over-for-investors https://www.wsj.com/articles/black-swan-manager-preps-for-financial-mega-tinderbox-timebomb-11675177877?mod=lead_feature_below_a_pos1 The upshot for ordinary investors is faintly reassuring, though, according to Mr. Spitznagel. Rather than trying to replicate a Universa-style safe haven strategy or moving into some “safe” asset class like gold bars, the least-bad alternative might be to just to buy and hold stocks passively through the cycle, as Warren Buffett and others have advised. He has suggested that, absent the opportunities he has as a mathematically-sophisticated hedge-fund manager, that is probably the least bad course of action to preserve wealth in the conflagration that he foresees.

Is very small something like 0.2 or 1-2 per cent? Sometimes I too make 1-2 per cent speculative or leveraged bets and also have a basket of very small, like 0.2 per cent positions, which for me is kind of version of wachlist of companies I just want to follow for some good or strange reasons:)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-30/russia-s-war-in-ukraine-is-accelerating-the-shift-away-from-oil-and-gas-bp-says?srnd=premium-europe

Interesing! But isnt this thing is full of cloud, saas and similar businesses:)? And isnt most of them (except for Alibaba, Tencent and maybe a few other) is very similar to ARKK type of holdings?

Thanks for sharing!

Thanks, yes very good story:). Not sure cloud is just commodity storage though. Everything might as well develope into nice oligopoly market, controled by few players. It remainds me IBM 360 of old era more than just storage. Only my guess of course.

Astronomical PE is dangerous for any sector, but dont you agree, that cloud is a growing (not necessarily by 40 per cent) market for a long term?

I agree with most of your observations. Just wanted to say, that between tech stocks, especially after they finaly went down much more than the market, just like between other stocks, there could also be good oportunities, just like value traps. I myself never owned any US tech stock in large allocation untill last autumn, except for IBM (at the same time, when MSFT was at almost single digit multiple, dont ask why), so I understand my limitations on circle of competence with tech company and what a value trap is:). I think you have to be more open minded and be able to change your mind with these.

I agree that tech stocks carries some additional risk for buy and forget type, but also think what you call arrogant ant lazy in sometimes could be just smart and easy. Large cap tech, just as any large cap or small cap, can be also mispriced. Just look at APPL, when WB bought it. So called law of large numbers not so obvious also sometimes (same was said about APPL size like 10 years ago), not sure it applies to AMZN today at all, considering its business TAM. Then if you look at META, which is btw already like +50 from autumn low, it was very and still is cheap, like value stock. I think somebody even put it in value index last year:). TSM is another interesting case. Then of course there is TSLA and similar things, but most of this kind of growth or non for profit tech already went down 2000 style, like at least 80 per cent:). So I am not sure lumping all tech stocks together serves any better than dealing with the market on the SNP level.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-26/microsoft-openai-investment-will-help-keep-chatgpt-online?srnd=premium-europe “There’s a somewhat of a proxy war going on between the big cloud companies,” says Matt McIlwain, managing director at Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group LLC, which invests in AI startups. “They are really the only ones that can afford to build the really big ones with gazillions of parameters.” After an extended period of technological innovation during which a handful of companies consolidated their dominance of the internet, some people see AI developing in a way that will only strengthen their grip.

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