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Saturday, June 8, 2024

Our Granddaughter's High School Baseball Team Took Texas State Championship Today! June 8, 2024

Locator: 47983TEXASSPORTS.

The championship team and all their supporters are now going swimming -- a midnight party. I'll know more tomorrow! LOL. 

So, our granddaughter's girls' high school soccer team took state last year -- she was a junior and a captain on the team. Now, in her senior year, her high school boys’ team took the Texas baseball championship. Practicing and playing in the backyard of the Texas Rangers -- the World Champions last year -- this was really, really sweet.

Link here.

The Wealth Effect -- June 8, 2024

Locator: 47982ECON.

Link here

Or direct to Barron's: link here.

A resilient global economy is leading to a rise in wealth once again for the world’s richest individuals, despite plenty of economic and geopolitical uncertainty, according to a new report.
Globally, the population of those with at least US$1 million in investable assets rose by 5.1% last year to 22.8 million, while their wealth rose 4.7% to US$86.8 trillion, according to the 28th annual World Wealth Report from Capgemini Research Institute, a global think tank division of Paris-based Capgemini.
It’s a sharp difference from a year earlier, when global wealth fell 3.3% to US$83 trillion. The growth trend was particularly evident in the U.S. last year, where economic resilience, slowing inflation, and soaring U.S. stocks led to a 7.3% increase in the population of those with at least US$1 million in investable assets to 7.5 million, Capgemini said.
The wealth of these individuals rose 7% to US$26.1 trillion.

More later. Watching a movie.

This was from 1998, also from Barron's. The wealth effect. 

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Movie Night

Kinky Boots tonight.

Perhaps one of the most poignant films ever. I never get tired of it. 

And best music ever. 

Link here.


In 1971 when I was selling educational books door-to-door in New Jersey, across the river from NYC, I heard this song all day long, walking from house to house. Brings back great memories.

BRK Purchased 2.6 Million Shares OXY In Recent Days -- June 8, 2024

Locator: 47981OXY.

News today:

  • Barron's: link here.
  • SEC Form 4: link here.
  • BRK vs Cathie Wood: link here.
    • of note, neither own any Nvidia
  • BRK: tech, percent of equity portfolio
    • AMZN: 0.54%
    • SNOW: 0.3%
  • ARKK: tech, percent of equity portfolio
    • TSLA: 11.6%
    • ZM: 3.1%

BRK / OXY:

  • current stake: 250.6 million shares; 28% interest in Occidental.
  • bought during last three days of this past week
  • $150 million; just under $60 / share
  • OXY now accounts for 4.8% of BRK equity portfolio
  • appears to be averaging down
  • as a holder of more than 10% of Occidental, BRK must report any purchases within two days

Ticker:


 

Back of the envelope:

  • recent price: $59 / share
  • recent high: $69 / share
    • (69-59)/59 = 17% appreciation
  • $10 x 250 million shares = 2500 million dollar appreciation = $2.5 billion
  • current equity portfolio: $330 billion
  • 2.5 / 330 = 0.007575 = 0.8%

Disclaimer: I often make a lot of mistakes doing back-of-the-envelope calculations. If this is important to you, go to the source.

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Disclaimer Briefly Reminder
  • I am inappropriately exuberant about the US economy and the US market, 
  • I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple. 
  • See disclaimer. This is not an investment site. 
  • 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.
  • Reminder: I am inappropriately exuberant about the US economy and the US market, 
  • I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple. 

System On A Chip -- SOC -- Apple Silicon -- Quick! What Are Triple-A Titles? June 8, 2024

Locator: 47980AAPL.

Updates

June 17, 2024: SoC / SiP update with focus on M4.

Main Page

Locator: 47980AAPL.

Tag: Apple, SoC, AAA, Triple-T — see Apple Silicon below for “Triple-T” discussion.

 Chips, semiconductor: link here.

Wiki.

Suppliers: wiki

Companies: link here.

Apple Silicon -- CNBC -- December 1, 2023. Link here.

Apple’s soaring stock price over the past two decades has been driven by its iconic consumer devices. It started with the iPod and iMac. Then came the iPhone and iPad. And more recently, the Apple Watch and AirPods.

But there’s a lot more to the biggest U.S. company by market cap than just gadgets. At its Silicon Valley headquarters, in a non-descript room filled with a couple hundred buzzing machines and a handful of engineers in lab coats, Apple is designing the custom chips that power its most popular products.

Apple first debuted homegrown semiconductors in the iPhone 4 in 2010. As of this year, all new Mac computers are powered by Apple’s own silicon, ending the company’s 15-plus years of reliance on Intel.

“One of the most, if not the most, profound change at Apple, certainly in our products over the last 20 years, is how we now do so many of those technologies in-house,” said John Ternus, who runs hardware engineering at Apple. “And top of the list, of course, is our silicon.”

That change has also opened Apple up to a new set of risks. Its most advanced silicon is primarily manufactured by one vendor, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Meanwhile, smartphones are recovering from a deep sales slump, and competitors like Microsoft are making big leaps in artificial intelligence.

In November, CNBC visited Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California, the first journalists allowed to film inside one of the company’s chip labs. We got a rare chance to talk with the head of Apple silicon, Johny Srouji, about the company’s push into the complex business of custom semiconductor development, which is also being pursued by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Tesla.

“We have thousands of engineers,” Srouji said. “But if you look at the portfolio of chips we do: very lean, actually. Very efficient.”

Unlike traditional chipmakers, Apple is not making silicon for other companies.

“Because we’re not really selling chips outside, we focus on the product,” Srouji said. “That gives us freedom to optimize, and the scalable architecture lets us reuse pieces between different products.”

It's a very, very long article.

Buried deep in the article:

Apple’s leap to 3-nanometer continued with the M3 chips for Mac computers, announced in October. Apple says the M3 enables features like 22-hour battery life and, similar to the A17 Pro, boosted graphics performance.

“It’s early days,” said Ternus, who’s been at Apple for 22 years. “We have a lot of work to do, but I think there’s so many Macs now, pretty much all Macs are capable of running Triple-A titles, which is not what it was like five years ago.”

Ternus said that when he started, “the way we tended to make products is we were using technologies from other companies, and we were effectively building the product around that.” Despite a focus on beautiful design, “they were constrained by what was available,” he said.

Triple-A titles?


One can quickly see where Apple is headed and what it means for Apple. 

Apple is playing the long game.

TSM and AAPL.

Saturday, June 8, 2024 -- And Memories of PB -- Pateley Bridge, Yorkshire, Northern England

Locator: 47979B.

Not a day goes by that I don't think of PJB.

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Flowers



Important to read the social comments. And note the "Easter egg" in the video! 
 
"Flowers" received positive reviews from music critics and was a massive commercial success, breaking many records. 
It was the best-selling global single of 2023, earning 2.7 billion subscription streams equivalents globally, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), making it Cyrus's most successful single worldwide to date
In the United States, the single debuted at number one and spent eight non-consecutive weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 in addition to becoming Cyrus's second number-one song on the chart since "Wrecking Ball" (2013). 
"Flowers" became the longest-running number one-song in the history of the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, with 50 weeks at the top
The song was also a commercial success worldwide, debuting atop the Billboard Global 200 chart and staying at the summit for thirteen non-consecutive weeks. It topped the charts in 37 other countries including in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Singapore, South Africa and the United Kingdom. 
It also broke a string of records on streaming services, including the Spotify record for the most-streamed song in a week (during both its first and second week) and the fastest song in Spotify history to surpass one billion streams (doing so in 112 days).

One wonders if time to reflect, find new friends during the Covid lock down had a lot to do with this. 

Link here.

Trying To Make Sense Of Yesterday's Unemployment Numbers -- June 8, 2024

Locator: 47978JOBS.

Updates

June 8, 2024: even Fox was blown away by the numbers, noting that 272,000 new jobs blew past even the highest estimates (258K). Over on social media (the comments), it sounds like a lot of folks have no clue.

 Original Post

Link here.


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Wrestling
 

Natural Gas Demand Will Increase As More And More Intermittent Energy Added To The Grid -- June 8, 2024

Locator: 47977NATGAS.

WMB: link here. Seeks to put more projects into service.

Regional Energy Access natural gas project already under construction into service by July 1, 2024 ....
... seeking to provide about 0.16 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) of the roughly 0.83-bcfd project's gas capacity available to customers on an interim basis.
The company has estimated the project's total cost at around $1 billion.
The project is already partially in service.
FERC said it approved Transco's request to make the first roughly 0.45-bcfd phase of the project available on an interim basis in October 2023.
One billion cubic feet of gas is enough to supply 5 million U.S. homes for a day. Williams said on its website that it started construction in the second quarter of 2023 and expects to put the project fully into service in the fourth quarter of 2024.

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Germany

Link here.

Germany gets approval to lay in more natural gas-fired power. 

Decades ago, generating electricity from natural gas was a solution looking for a problem. Ten years later, we found the problem: large data centers are going to be consuming a lot of electricity. Absolutely amazing how things work out. 

Move over EVs. It's no longer about "you." It's all about data centers. And Nvidia.

What To Expect When The Fed STARTS Cutting -- June 8, 2024

Locator: 47976INV.

Link here.

195 days = 6.5 months.

In other words, when the Fed starts cutting, are we at the S&P 500 high for the next year?

Heat map from yesterday, June 7, 2024, the last day before NVDA splits 10:1. Link here. Or, here.

"Everyone" Laments The "Narrowness" Of The Market -- June 8, 2024

Locator: 47975INV.

TWSJ new highs and lows, link here.

"Everyone" seems to hate twitter, but if you know how to use it ...

But then we have this:


New: recently, I've been noting this on the CNBC crawler -- 2x long Nvidia ETF from Granite Shares. Very, very interesting. Link here.


Warren Buffett:

The Car Page -- June 8, 2024

Locator: 47974CARS.

New cars in 2024: no one is buying. Not a particularly good article. I can guarantee you people aren't buying 2024 models because CD players are no longer available. Two car-buying issues have converged:
older cars are lasting longer, much longer; and,
the car buying experience is as bad as ever.

CAFE standards: Biden administration relaxes another vehicle emission rule. Fuel economy will have to increase two percent per year for vehicles coming out between 2027 and 2031. But that's less stringent than the original proposal. I just talked about CAFE standards and gasoline demand a few days ago. At that post:


Now:


And then there's this: the state of Virginia scraps clean car emission standards altogether. The rules that were scrapped would have required all new cars, trucks, and SUVs sold in the state to run on electricitiy or hydrogen by 2035. Prediction: California politicians will keep up the "good fight" until they don't. When it comes to cars, that's the only state that matters.



Jeep:

My very first "car" was a very, very used 1948 Willys Jeep, which my dad bought for me in 1968 when I got my driver's license.






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Lego Raptor