January 12: Sunday Funday #35
Articles, streams and books that caught our attention this week
Articles 📰
How ‘Disaster Girls’ Are Cashing in on the Digital Economy
Rachel O’Dwyer’s book Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform described an online economy spilling over into real life. It’s a place where cold, hard money is replaced by gift cards, wish lists, phone credits, bitcoin and even emoji. The implications are vast, driving rapid changes in banking, politics and the way we live today. In this Next Chapter, O’Dwyer explains how some young women are molding their identity to profit from this non-cash digital world.
Amazon Is Selling Its Adtech to Other Retailers, Taking Direct Aim at Firms Like Criteo
Amazon built a $50 billion ad business by selling sponsored placements on its website and app. Now, the ecommerce giant wants to do the same for other retailers.
One Man’s Attempt to Get a Perfect 850 Credit Score
Credit scores are also playing a more influential role in our lives right now. No longer just a tool to help lenders decide whether to approve loans and how much to charge, credit scores are now an all-purpose ranking system. They are used to decide whether you can rent a home, what your insurance premiums should be and even if you can get a date.
Alcohol effects may increase with age as brain changes
Tolerance to alcohol does not change as we age, but we may feel alcohol’s impact more because of age-related brain changes.
Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.
The coming battle between social media and the state
Just because one wants a thing to be regulated, that does not make it capable of actually being regulated. If a thing is unpleasant or unwelcome, the instant demand is that something should be done, and that the unwanted thing can be regulated so it cannot happen. The notion that all we need to make the world a better place is “better regulation” is deeply embedded in our culture. And one thing for which the cry for regulation is made is social media platforms. If only they were “better regulated”, the popular sentiment goes, then various political and social problems would all be solved. But there are two problems with regulating social media platforms.
Chick-fil-A’s Lemon-Squeezing Robots Are Saving 10,000 Hours of Work
Squeezing 2,000 lemons a day was such a pain for staff at Chick-fil-A Inc. that the company enlisted an army of robots to do it. In a plant north of Los Angeles, machines now squeeze as many as 1.6 million pounds of the fruit with hardly any human help. The facility, larger than the average Costco store at roughly 190,000 square feet, then ships bags of juice to Chick-fil-A locations, where workers add water and sugar to whip up the chain’s trademark lemonade.
And with the mention of lemons, we’re angling to give this a whirl this week: Lemony Grilled Scallops and Blistered Long Beans
Of course, we’ll want something sweet to finish, and that means a hat tip to Ben and David over at the Acquired podcast for alerting us to Dandelion Chocolate.
What We’re Streaming 📺📲
The Reading List 📖📚
The Secret Hours by Mick Herron
Two years ago, a hostile prime minister launched the Monochrome inquiry, investigating “historical over-reaching” by the British Secret Service. Monochrome’s mission was to ferret out any hint of misconduct by any MI5 officer—and allowed Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, the two civil servants seconded to the project, unfettered access to any and all confidential information in the Service archives in order to do so.
But MI5’s formidable First Desk did not become Britain’s top spy by accident, and she has successfully thwarted the inquiry at every turn. Now the administration that created Monochrome has been ousted, the investigation is a total bust—and Griselda and Malcolm are stuck watching as their career prospects are washed away by the pounding London rain.
Until the eve of Monochrome’s shuttering, when an MI5 case file appears without explanation. It is the buried history of a classified operation in 1994 Berlin—an operation that ended in tragedy and scandal, whose cover-up has rewritten thirty years of Service history.
Don’t be a stranger
Thanks for reading and if you have a suggestion for an article or book we should read, or a stream we should catch, email us at info@tematicaresearch.com. The same email works if you want to know more about our thematic and targeted exposure models listed below.
The Strategies Behind Our Thematic Models
Aging of the Population - Capturing the demographic wave of the aging population and the changing demands it brings with it.
Artificial Intelligence – Software, chips, and related companies that facilitate the collection and analysis of large data sets and autonomous generation of solutions given non-machine language prompts.
Cash Strapped Consumer - Companies poised to benefit as consumers stretch the disposable spending dollars they do have.
CHIPs Act – Capturing the reshoring of the US semiconductor industry and the $52.7 billion poised to be spent on semiconductor manufacturing.
Cloud Computing – Companies that provide hardware and services that enhance the cloud computing experience for users, such as co-location, security, and edge computing.
Core Holdings – Companies that reflect economic activity and are large enough to not get pushed around by day-to-day market trends. Low-beta, large-cap names able to better withstand economic turmoil.
Cybersecurity - Companies that focus on protecting against the penetration of digital networks and the theft, ransom, corruption or destruction of data.
Data Privacy & Digital Identity - Companies providing the tools and services that verify authorized users and safeguard personal data privacy.
Digital Infrastructure & Connectivity -The buildout and upgrading of our Networks, Data Storage Facilities, and Equipment.
Digital Lifestyle - The companies behind our increasingly connected lives.
Digital Payments - This model focuses on companies benefitting from the accelerating structural adoption of digital payments and financial technology (FinTech).
EPS Diplomats - Profitable large capitalization companies proven to produce above-average EPS growth and provide investors with the benefit of multiple expansion.
EV Transition - Capturing the transition to EVs and related infrastructure from combustion engine vehicles.
Guilty Pleasure – Companies that produce/provide food and drink products that consumers tend to enjoy regardless of the economic environment and potential long-term health hazards associated with excessive consumption.
Homebuilding & Materials – Ranging from homebuilders to key building product companies that serve the housing market, this model looks to capture the rising demand for housing, one that should benefit as the Fed returns monetary policy to more normalized levels.
Luxury Buying Boom - Tapping into aspirational buying and affluent buyers amid rising global wealth.
Market Hedge Model – This basket of daily reset swap-based broad market inverse ETFs protects in the face of market pullbacks, overbought market technicals, and other drivers of market volatility.
Nuclear Energy & Uranium – Companies that either build and maintain nuclear power plants or are involved in the production of uranium.
Rebuilding America - Turning the focused spending on rebuilding US infrastructure into revenue and profits.
Safety & Security – Targeted exposure to companies that provide goods and services primarily to the Defense and security sectors of the economy.
Space Economy – Companies that focus on the launch and operation of satellite networks.
The Strategies Behind Our Dividend Income Models
Monthly Dividend Model – Pretty much what the name says – this model invests in companies that pay monthly dividends to shareholders.
ETF Dividend Model – High-yielding ETFs that provide a range of exposures from domestic equities, international equities, emerging market equities, MLPS, and REITs.
ETF Enhanced Dividend Model – A group of high-yielding ETFs that utilize options to enhance yield through collecting option income.
Don’t be a stranger
Thanks for reading and if you have a suggestion for an article or book we should read, or a stream we should catch, email us at info@tematicaresearch.com. The same email works if you want to know more about our thematic and targeted exposure models listed above.