Good morning, ladies and gents. Today’s action wasn’t much better than yesterday’s. S&P ticked up ever so slightly and the JSE was down. Let’s get into the big news form this week.
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📊 Palantir is buildings it’s warchest
While the Teslas and Microstrategies of the world buy Bitcoin, one emergent tech player is buying gold bars. Palantir, the big data analytics company run by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel bought $50 million in gold bars. Do people still buy gold these days? 🤷 Interestingly enough, Palantir already accepts payments in Bitcoin and gold.
🎨 NFT’s NFT’s get your NFT’s
The NFT craze has reached a whole new level. OpenSea, the NFT marketplace giant, recorded a massive milestone as its trading volume hit the $1 billion mark in August. 👏 That’s a month-over-month increase of 932%, according to DappRadar. 🤑 Earlier in August, the platform’s transaction volume saw a whopping $95 million in 48 hours, exceeding its entire volume registered in 2020. 🚀
📙 Facebook to launch a digital wallet
Novi, Facebooks digital wallet, will offer free person-to-person payments. For now the wallet will only offer fiat currency. Facebook has secured licenses and approvals for Novi in nearly every state in the U.S.,
☎T-Mobile hacked
We are hearing about companies getting hacked more and more each day. Last week, rumors floated around hacker forums that T-Mobile was hacked. The company quickly confirmed that somebody did gain access to its servers, but failed to spill the deets… until today. 😬 The company confirmed the data breach, which revealed sensitive information on at least 47 million users. The leak includes social security numbers, phone numbers, full names, dates of birth, physical addresses, IMEI numbers for phones, driver license information, and more.
🛒Walmart slows down
Walmart’s US e-commerce sales surged 97% in Q2’20, but that growth has since stalled: the retailer reported only a 6% bump in Q2’21 compared to last year. In comparison, Amazon reported a 22% increase in sales (including subscriptions) in North America for the quarter that ended June 30. Walmart credits the slowdown to the return of in-person shopping, but the rise of e-commerce will continue to put pressure on the retailer to grow its online sales.
🕵🏿 Michael Burry at it Again.
The famed asset manager Michael Burry of Scion Asset Management (“The Big Short” movie was made about him) is credited with predicting the Housing Crash. But now, Burry’s predicting diminishing returns for a famous money manager: Cathie Wood. Burry’s fund opened a bet against against the ARK Innovation ETF. Scion Asset Management purchased 2,355 put contracts against the ETF. According to Fintel, the value of the bet is worth over $30 million.
🐳 Where the Whales at?
The WhaleWisdom’s 13F Heat Map is one of the best top-down ways to gauge stock picks some of the “best institutions.” The heat map ranks stocks by institutional money’s “increased interest” — red names are hot picks; blue names are less popular. Remember this data is lagged, so they may not still hold it.
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💎 Inside The Largest Bitcoin Mine in The US
💭 Russian hackers are everywhere, even on LinkedIn.
📱 Google Announces it new budget phone The Google Pixel 5a
🏠 The 3D-printed home has arrived
Hope you all enjoyed this weeks news, don’t forget to give us a like 🧡 and hope you all have a great weekend.