Investors -- December 5, 2022

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.

All my posts are done quickly: there will be content and typographical errors. If anything on any of my posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find typographical / content errors, I will correct them.   

Ten Robinhood stocks: too cheap to ignore, link here, November 28, 2022:

• ChargePoint Holdings
• Lucid
• Catalyst Pharmaceuticals
• MFA Financial
• Plug Power
• Energy Transfer L.P.
• DraftKings
• Palantir Technologies
• Ford
• GM

Eight dividend hikes to watch for this week, link here, and here (same story):

• PFE: historically their dividend increases have been very little
  
• UNP: it is true that UNP usually announces a dividend increase at this time, but they raised their divided twice in the past year; it would be interesting to see UNP raise their dividend yet again

Amazon:

• launches supply-chain software service, The WSJ, November 29, 2022.

Amazon. com Inc. is adding a supply-chain management service to its web services business, jumping into an increasingly competitive technology field as companies try to get tighter control of the flow of goods from factories to consumers. 

Amazon’s launch of its cloud application, AWS Supply Chain, adds Amazon to a growing list of software suppliers, such as Manhattan Associates and Blue Yonder, that help merchants juggle increasingly complex cargo flows and inventory demands. Microsoft Corp. launched its own supply-chain management software platform earlier this month.

• Amazon's quest for the "holy grail" of robotics, The WSJ, December 3, 2022.

For decades, one of the hardest problems for robot developers to crack has been something seemingly mundane: how to replicate the human hand’s ability to pick up stuff.

Amazon.com has just come a lot closer to achieving this elusive goal, with a leap in its automation prowess that promises far-reaching effects for its huge workforce and its future growth ambitions.

The tech giant last month unveiled a collection of new robots, one of which is suited to replacing humans in the most common job at Amazon – picking up items and placing them elsewhere. The linchpin of this new kind of automation is a robot arm – appropriately named Sparrow after the tenacious, pervasive bird – that combines advanced artificial intelligence, a variety of grippers, and the speed and precision that is now standard in off-the-shelf industrial robotic arms.

The announcement was easy to miss, coming as it did amid a run of news that, in part, illustrated some of the challenges Amazon is trying to tackle with its automation effort. The company began layoffs of corporate employees in mid-November, part of a sweeping cost-cutting effort to deal with the aftereffects of its rapid expansion during the pandemic.

• ‘The Bezos Blueprint’ Review: Is Brevity the Soul of Success? The WSJ. November 30, 2022, The Bezos Blueprint, Communication Secrets of the World's Greatest Salesman, Carmine Gallo, November 15, 2022.
  

Mr. Gallo maintains that Mr. Bezos’s annual shareholder letters offer particular insight.

What’s more, until now, “no book has analyzed the forty-eight thousand words Bezos wrote over twenty-four years of shareholder letters.”

Mr. Gallo delves into those words—48,062 of them, to be exact. He delves into those 2,481 sentences, which average 18.8 words each. He measures their readability using the Flesch-Kincaid scale, created in the 1940s, to show that the letters were written at a level an 11th-grader would understand. Eventually, Mr. Bezos whittled his writing down to even shorter sentences—16 words, instead of 18.8, with a readability score fit for an eighth-grader.