Advice For POTUS -- September 15, 2023

Locator: 45659B.

Chart of the day. I have no idea what to make of this. Note: the data is a bit old -- revenue from four quarters ending November, 2022. In the USA, Amazon, Wayfair, eBay, and Chewy top the list. Chewy? Compared to Amazon, Chewy's revenue is a rounding error (7.8 / 502 = 1.6%). But, again, this is "just" e-commerce.

Strategic thinking requires milestones. We've talked about this before. The "BIG DEM" goal: to not have Biden / Kamala run in 2024. Milestones:

• Nancy Pelosi alleged to have stated that neither will run for re-election in 2024
• Nancy Pelosi is the most influential / most powerful woman in politics right now
• Hunter indicted
• a very, very, very legitimate indictment
• in the big scheme of things, "Mickey Mouse"
• DC is so corrupt, powerful figures could have prevented the indictment had they wanted -- but they didn't
  
• Vince Foster, exhibit A
• timing?
• if I were Biden, I would:
• hire a food tester, assuming he already hasn't
• stay away from second-floor windows
• hold the railing when getting on a plane
• not chew gum while walking
  

Hope springs eternal. Link here. If I had a "nickel" for every "oil prices soar" I would have ... a lot of nickels.

The consumer juggernaut: I was hoping someone would notice. I forgot to post this yesterday.

August’s retail data, expected to show a slowdown, instead came in even stronger than July's, thanks in part to higher gas prices. Friday follows up that hard data with University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey numbers.

Consumer sentiment: pending. Preliminary: 69.4 expected; 69.5 previously. 

Carrying this to the "tenth" decimal suggests this is done to give this metric some gravitas. This is a poll for heaven's sake -- based on 500 telephone interviews. Fifty core questions are asked. Holy mackerel!

And I thought scam phone calls were bad. "Hi, Bruce. I'm a first-year student at the University of Michigan. Do you have time to answer 50 really esoteric questions on the economy?"

Pause. "Fifty. Not fifteen."

Hunch: University of Phoenix Online to report a daily AI-generated "consumer sentiment index" starting in July, 2024.

Social security COLA: to rise 3.2% next year?

Arm: I don't often "parrot" the word "bubble," but in this case .... all agree -- even Jim Cramer -- this is a non-growth company. At this price, is it even a "value" company? Over at Yahoo!Finance it leads the "trending list" and is up another 5.25% in pre-market trading [6:38 a.m. Friday, September 15, 2023].

My favorite meme from CNBC panelists: "At 29x earnings, AAPL is really expensive."

Arm: 110x earnings, if it's reported at all. At Finance!Yahoo the P/E for ARM is ... N/A. 

Wiki:

While ARM CPUs first appeared in the Acorn Archimedes, a desktop computer, today's systems include mostly embedded systems, including ARM CPUs used in virtually all modern smartphones.

Processors based on designs licensed from Arm, or designed by licensees of one of the ARM instruction set architectures, are used in all classes of computing devices

Arm has two lines of graphics processing units (GPUs), Mali, and the newer Immortalis (which includes hardware-based ray-tracing).

Arm's main CPU competitors in servers include IBM, Intel and AMD.

Intel competed with ARM-based chips in mobile but Arm no longer has any competition in that space (however, vendors of actual ARM-based chips compete within that space).

Arm's main GPU competitors include mobile GPUs from American and Japanese technology companies Imagination Technologies (PowerVR), Qualcomm (Adreno), and increasingly Nvidia, AMD, Samsung and Intel.

While competing in GPUs, Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia all have combined their GPUs with Arm-licensed CPUs.