Chinese Flu Watch -- December 2, 2020

CDC's weekly MMWR, for week ending November 21, 2020:

• 1.6% of visits to a health care provider were for influenza-like illnesses; last week, 1.5%
• all states with minimal activity, except for two with low activity (Rhode Island, New Mexico)
• number of tests: 33,351
• number of positives: 55 (0.2%)

Johns Hopkins data delayed. Pending. 

For the most part, the protests were peaceful. LOL. Now, this from The WSJ: no evidence of widespread voter fraud in election -- US Attorney General William Barr; for the most part the voter fraud was limited to toss-up states, blue states, and traditional red states:

• Pennsylvania
• Michigan
• Wisconsin
• Minnesota
• Georgia
  
• Nevada
• Arizona

Are you kidding me: one of the smartest guys in the US government and charged with investigating voter fraud, says, "well, you know, for the most part, there wasn't all that much voter fraud -- about what we expected -- and, in the big scheme of things was limited to only those toss-up states that really mattered. For example, no fraud seen in North Dakota. So, nothing to see here. Let's move on. And, oh by the way, I expect US Attorney John Durham to do the right thing."

And we move on.

The market: am I overusing the phrase, "holy mackerel"? But look at this: down about 200 points at the open, the Dow is now down all of 11 points (10:29 a.m. CT).

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here. 

Sempra Energy, link here:

• stock-for-stock exchange for IEnova;
• Sempra will begin trading on the Mexican stock exchange
• SRE: up a bit. I was surprised to see that. 

Saleforce / Slack vs Microsoft. This will be interesting to watch. According to talking head on CNBC yesterday, heard in passing, Microsoft's only real competitor to its "TEAMS" platform is Salesforce/Slack.  From the linked article at Yahoo!Finance:

Microsoft is a beast of an organization with impressive market positions via businesses such as Office, LlinkedIn, Skype, Xbox, and more recently, Teams. So don't expect the tech giant to spend recklessly on a splashy acquisition that takes aim at Salesforce's pricey purchase of communications platform Slack.

"Microsft" has a great product and a great presence ...."

But that doesn't mean Microsoft won't use its more than $140 billion in cash to bulk up in areas where it's under penetrated.

"Microsoft has less than 5% share in front office applications and they have less than 5% in back office applications. That's where we would see Microsoft look to expand their footprint. They would like have to do that through acquisition.

Reminder: it appears that AWS and Apple are expanding their partnerships to take on Microsoft.