Overview Of The Week 26: Who Said Steve Jobs Was Not Funny?
Hi Multis
Can you believe it? It's already Sunday again.
Time flies when you are having fun.
And fun it is, with the markets hitting record highs.
There was not that much news this week, so this will be a short and sweet Overview Of The Week.
Well, according to my standards, that is. I see some calling texts only half as long as this Overview Of The Week 'deep dives.' Let's say that the word deep dive saw more inflation than the economy in that case.
Articles In The Past Week
We are in the calm between two earnings seasons and that's when I traditionally research more. That's also the reason why this is only the second article this week.
The first article was about Hims & Hers and the scorching attack Novo Nordisk launched this week on breaking the partnership. Not a simple situation and I waited a few days to think this through. This is the result of my thinking.
Memes Of The Week
After a slew of memes in the last few weeks, just one meme this week. Multi bep posted this in our #stonkmemes channel.
Who said Steve Jobs was not funny?
Interesting Podcasts Or Books
This week, I listened to an interview with Barry Ritholtz.
Barry Ritholtz is co-founder (with Josh Brown) and CIO of Ritholtz Wealth Management. He's also an author and recently released How Not To Invest.
The book is on my wish list.
Just like his co-founder Josh Brown, Ritholz is a no-nonsense guy, a straight-talker and interesting to listen to.
I listened to his interview with Bogumil Baranowski.
You can listen to the podcast episode here.
The markets in the past week
If you saw all the victory posts on X this week, I don't think I need to tell you that the markets were up a lot. The Russell 2000 was up 3%, the S&P 500 was up 3.44% and the Nasdaq shot up 4.25%.
The recovery since April is remarkable. The Russell 2000 is up 23.39%, the S&P 500 is up 23.89%, and the Nasdaq is up 32.78%
The Greed & Fear Index went from Neutral to Greed.
I feel that there's some hot air in the market. That doesn't mean I will time it now. But if you don't have money on the side, I think it could be a good moment to take some profits. Just look at this chart a friend shared.
That means that the S&P 500 is expensive.
Could there be good reasons? Yes.
The market is always forward-looking, and AI could definitely boost productivity. Margins are also higher for a lot of businesses. But overall, I think the market in general is quite expensive. That doesn't mean there are no attractive individual stocks, of course. And markets can stay expensive for a very, very long time.
Quick Facts
1. Payments
Multi BK Lee often shares excellent content in our community and this is definitely one of those.
It's a chart from Morgan Stanley of the digital wallets. As you can see, since 2022, no player has lost users compared to three years ago.
From 2020, only PayPal is down. This indicates that we are all using more digital wallets. I also wanted to share this to point out Shop Pay, which grew from 7% to 11%.
2. Cloudflare recognitions
Cloudflare (NET) has received some industry recognitions that I would like to share with you.
In the Forrester Wave for serverless development, it's recognized as a strong performer, already bordering the segment with the leaders AWS, Microsoft, Alibaba, and Google Cloud.
For Security Service Edge, Cloudflare is a much younger player, but it was included for the first time by Gartner.
That's the great thing about Cloudflare: it keeps innovating so fast that it develops new markets.
A new Cloudflare product I'm excited about is its AI Labyrinth. It's a tool that can prevent bots that scrape your website for AI training without your permission. This is done in a typical Cloudflare way: it’s a free tool. Cloudflare often does this, improves the product from the feedback and then offers a premium version later.
