Cleaning Out The In-Box -- Part 1 -- June 4, 2023

Locator: 44836INV.

US battery storage:

• updating y/y US battery storage; source story here.
• look at Texas: whoo-hoo!
  

NYISO: 

• forward power prices 60% lower y/y; link here.

Walmart:

• stays the course.
• no fanfare, no histrionics; no backtracking; stays true to their mission statement.
• still my favorite brick-and-mortar store, by far.
  

Healthcare investing:

19 best healthcare dividend stocks in which to invest. Link here. I do not know if companies were placed in any particular order:

• Johnson & Johnson; Pfizer, Merck, Abbott, Bristol Myers Squibb;
• Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca; GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Sanofi;
• Cardinal Health; AbbVie; Amgen;
• Gilead, Johnson Controls; Elevance Health;
• UnitedHealthGroup; Medtronic; Stryker

Baker Huges; link to The WSJ.

• aims to boost dividends; be more judicious with buybacks;
• great article; sounds like the CFO is listening to shareholders.

Dividend-paying tech stocks, three, The Motley Fool, link here. 

• Microsoft has a good claim on the pole position in AI and its revenue growth is reaccelerating. 
• Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is a pick-and-shovel play on the growth in chip demand. 
• Equinix is a great way to play the growth in data centers. 

Best two FAANG stocks and one to avoid, link here to The Motley Fool;

• the top one being bought by billionaires: Netflix:
• and, the second: Alphabet (GOOG)
• avoiding like the plague: AAPL.

From the article, re: AAPL

To be clear, Apple is an amazing business. It's brought home close to $110 billion in operating cash flow over the trailing-12-month period, offers one of the largest nominal-dollar dividends in the world, has repurchased $586 billion of its common stock over the past decade, and is the clear-cut leader in U.S. smartphone market share.

But it's also a consumer-driven business that's struggling a bit. Through the first six months of fiscal 2023 (Apple's fiscal year ends in late September), Mac sales are down by 30% from the prior-year period, and iPhone revenue is down by $5.1 billion (about 4.2%). All PC makers have seen demand slow following the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which explains the weakness in Mac sales. Meanwhile, the iPhone 14 simply didn't offer enough differentiation from previous iterations to drive sustained sales growth.

Comparatively, services revenue hit a new record during the fiscal second quarter, but the rate of sales growth in services has slowed considerably in fiscal 2023.

Although Apple continues to be a cash cow, its valuation is a tough pill to swallow in a potentially weakening economic environment. Even with above-average inflation as a tailwind, sales are expected to decline 2.5% in fiscal 2023. Shares are also going for 30 times Wall Street's consensus earnings. That's a far cry from the price-to-earnings ratio of 10 to 15 Apple consistently traded between from the start of 2013 through 2018.

Apple stores: Apple planning 53 new or revamped Apple Store locations through 2027. Link here. 

There are 15 new stores coming to the Asia-Pacific region, five stores coming to Europe and the Middle East, and four stores coming to the U.S. and Canada

Another 28 stores in Asia, Europe, and North America will be revamped or relocated, with Apple working on the updates through 2027.

Three of the Asia-Pacific stores will be in India, one will be in Malaysia, two will be in South Korea, and one will be at the Jing'an Temple Plaza in Shanghai, with Apple also planning to overhaul its Shinsaibashi store in Osaka, Japan.

In Europe, Apple plans to upgrade its Paris Opéra location and open new stores at the Battersea Power Station in London and La Vaguada in Madrid.

Short sellers: link here. 

Short sellers have lost more than $13 billion betting against these 5 AI stocks this year.

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. 

Again, all my posts are done quickly. There will be typographical and content errors in all my posts. If any of my posts are important to you, go to the source.