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☆ What 20 years of equal-weighted indexes that try and improve on the S&P 500 show
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-01 | by ( Bob Pisani | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

This is the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Invesco S & P 500 Equal Weight ETF (RSP). The index weighs all 500 stocks in the S & P 500 equally, as opposed to the S & P 500, the modern version of which was launched in 1957 as a market-cap weighted index. "Broad, market cap weighted indexes are the purest form of indexing," Ben Johnson, head of client solutions at Morningstar, told me. With north of $7 trillion indexed to the S & P 500, and getting larger every year, there is an awful lot of passive money at stake. Invesco says that over the last 20 years, an investment in the RSP has outperformed the market cap weight S & P 500: Market cap weighted investing vs. equal-weighting (last 20 years) S & P 500 (SPY) + 553% Equal weight S & P 500 + 667% Source: Invesco What do you own when you own an equal-weight S & P 500?

So far in 2023, this index of what are the leading lights of the U.S. economy is up 36% - six times the year-to-date gains of the S&P 500 index (.SPX). Put another way, this year's rise of these 10 mega tech stocks accounts for pretty much all of the S&P 500 gains. "But given how often the S&P 500 has been used as Exhibit A for overall 'resilience', it's important to acknowledge just how idiosyncratic this macro gauge has been." Are tech stocks overpriced? There are certainly plenty of concerns that these mega stocks may be overbought and just too expensive - even though that concern will hardly be a new worry for these stocks.

☆ The creepy secret behind online therapy
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Tanmoy Goswami | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +16 min

Crisis Text Line, now in its 10th year of operations, uses artificial intelligence to respond to people experiencing emotional abuse, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts. 'The vast majority of mental-health apps are exceptionally creepy'BetterHelp, a poster child of online therapy founded in 2013, calls itself "the world's largest therapy platform" and says it has over 2 million users. One of the first popular mental-health apps, PTSD Coach, was launched by the US Department of Veteran Affairs in 2011. But for mental-health companies these practices can undermine the very foundations of mental-health care: dignity, trust, and psychological safety. As Crisis Text Line wrote on its website extolling its deal with Loris: "Why sell T-shirts when you can sell what your organization does best?"

☆ ‘Ghosted’ Review: A C.I.A. Meet Cute
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Calum Marsh | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

“Ghosted,” a frothy spy-thriller rom-com in the tradition of “Romancing the Stone” and “The Jewel of the Nile,” is one of the least convincing movies I have ever seen. I mean that “Ghosted” barely seems like a real movie. It has movie stars, in the figures of Ana de Armas and Chris Evans (and, as the villain, Adrien Brody). It has a competent director, Dexter Fletcher, whose hit “Rocketman” wasn’t half-bad. But this tedious, unfunny, screamingly unoriginal romantic adventure film is so flimsy and so insubstantial that it’s practically vaporous.

☆ Exclusive: AI startup LangChain taps Sequoia to lead funding round at a valuation of at least $200 million
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-13 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

AI startup LangChain is raising between $20 and $25 million from Sequoia, Insider has learned. The latest round scored the hot upstart a valuation of at least $200 million, according to sources. Just a week after announcing a $10 million seed investment from Benchmark, AI darling LangChain has scored even more capital from yet another top-tier VC. As an open-source project, LangChain is especially known for its strong community — one that Chase is personally involved in. Chase's dedication to openness and collaboration is a major differentiator for the founder's community, and therefore, his startup, Turow said.

☆ Alphabet's A.I. frenzy hits startup scene as CapitalG unit leads $100 million investment in AlphaSense
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-11 | by ( Jonathan Vanian | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

Google's hefty investment in artificial intelligence and the latest boom in generative AI doesn't end with its homegrown products. Alphabet's late-stage venture capital arm, CapitalG, told CNBC that it just led a $100 million investment in corporate data firm AlphaSense, valuing the company at $1.8 billion. Generative AI wasn't a talking point in the prior two rounds because the term hadn't yet jumped into the popular lexicon. Generative AI has been the one bright spot this year, turning rather frothy in some corners. He said the money will also help AlphaSense improve its technology, taking advantage of advances in generative AI.

☆ Landlords who bought thousands of apartments are facing a reckoning
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-11 | by ( Daniel Geiger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

Investors showed outsize interest in apartment buildings during the pandemic. Rents and occupancy rates were rising, interest rates remained relatively low, and rental-property prices were climbing with no sign of letting up during a surge in housing demand. Laguna Point did not respond to a request for comment. Marc McDevitt, a senior managing director at Cred iQ, said it was possible Laguna Point had lost some, or even all, of its investment in the deal. While offices have been going through a paradigmatic shift as more workers do their jobs remotely, apartment buildings have experienced robust demand from tenants.

☆ Rob Arnott pioneered a stock investing technique that exploded into a trillion-dollar industry. He presents a new approach to help everyday investors beat the market, even in crises.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-06 | by ( Marley Jay | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Rob Arnott of Research Affiliates pioneered "smart beta" investing, which has gone global. Arnott and his firm say they've created a better way to index stocks than market cap weighting. Indexes have become the stock market's North Star, as passive investing turned into a global investment trend over the last decade. Meanwhile, Research Affiliates itself has grown to advise on $141 billion in wealth by the end of 2022. Arnott and his team at Research Affiliates suggest looking at the economic footprint of companies instead of their market capitalization.

☆ Y Combinator's head of admissions is reviewing over 20,000 startups for its summer 2023 cohort. Here's what she's looking for.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-29 | by ( Madeline Renbarger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

For early-stage founders looking to grow their startups in an accelerator, few names spark as much excitement as Y Combinator. Several of Silicon Valley's marquee companies are Y Combinator graduates, including Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox. While the number of startups that were part of last year's summer cohort were down 40% from the previous batch, this winter batch had 17.5% more startups accepted, said a Y Combinator spokesperson. Now, Y Combinator is looking ahead to its next batch, accepting applications for the summer 2023 cohort, which are due by April 7th. Stephanie Simon, the head of Y Combinator's admissions team, wants founders to know she's still sifting through all those applications.

☆ SVB collapse is double-whammy for tech startups already navigating brutal market
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-19 | by ( Ashley Capoot | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +11 min

He'd started the process six months earlier during a brutal period for tech stocks and a plunge in venture funding. Investors were just pulling in their horns, the SPAC market had fallen apart, valuations for tech companies were collapsing." In the absence of venture funding, money-losing startups have had to cut their burn rates in order to extend their cash runway. Since the beginning of 2022, roughly 1,500 tech companies have laid off a total of close to 300,000 people, according to the website Layoffs.fyi. Kruze Consulting provides accounting and other back-end services to hundreds of tech startups.

☆ The Fed needs to stop raising rates now, former FDIC chair says after Silicon Valley Bank failure
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-13 | by ( Matt Egan | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

Silicon Valley Bank is second only to Washington Mutual in terms of the biggest bank failures in US history. Those interest rate hikes have contributed to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in at least two key ways. First, higher borrowing costs rocked the frothy parts of the US economy, especially the tech industry that Silicon Valley Bank catered to. They panicked, yanking $42 billion last Thursday alone when Silicon Valley Bank’s stock crashed by 60%, according to filings by California regulators. By the close of business that day, Silicon Valley Bank had a negative cash balance of about $958 million.

☆ Stocks week ahead: US banks sitting on unrealized losses of $620 billion
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-12 | by ( Nicole Goodkind | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

US banks were sitting on $620 billion in unrealized losses (assets that have decreased in price but haven’t been sold yet) at the end of 2022, according to the FDIC. What’s happening: Back when interest rates were near zero, US banks scooped up lots of Treasuries and bonds. The result is that most banks have some amount of unrealized losses on their books. “Unrealized losses weaken a bank’s future ability to meet unexpected liquidity needs,” he added. Before the Bell: Do we need unemployment to rise in order to ease inflation rates?

☆ Keep an eye on banks, economic data, Jim Cramer says
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-09 | by ( Rohan Goswami | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +1 min

Frothy markets and banking tumult cast a pallor over the broader markets, but investors should keep an eye on economic data and the Federal Reserve's continued rate hikes, CNBC's Jim Cramer said on Thursday. Sharp declines in Silvergate Bank and SVB Financial shares came as the broader banking sector underwent a major collapse, Cramer said. Cramer pinned the collapse on a victory from the Fed and a general flight from three different spaces: commercial real estate, venture slowdown and crypto. A flurry of downgrades prompted concern about a couple of big commercial real estate names, Cramer said, including SL Green and Vornado Realty Trust . Cooling and weaker numbers for those reports, respectively, could be a boon for financials and for tech stocks, Cramer said.

☆ A real estate investor who owns over 1,000 units and retired at age 36 explains how leveraging his equity and harnessing the 'velocity of money' helped him make 'millions and millions and millions of
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-04 | by ( Lisa Kailai Han | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Just 13 years after buying his first property, Dave Allred retired at age 36. Altogether, he estimated that his portfolio equity has currently reached over $30 million in total value. On the other hand, an investor's equity in a deal rises every year due to natural market appreciation. "Every month there's a principal reduction on your mortgage, so you're building real equity there as well, also through market appreciation," Allred said. In other words, paying attention to cash-on-equity means that investors can harness the leveraging power of equity to rapidly grow their portfolios.

☆ US home prices could tumble nearly 20% and Fed economists warn further rate hikes risk an even worse housing correction: 'The bubble hypothesis merits attention'
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-28 | by ( Phil Rosen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Dallas Fed economists warned of a 19.5% housing market correction in a Tuesday research report. "[I]f the observed price-to-rent ratio grows at an explosive rate relative to its fundamental-based ratio estimated with long-term interest rate and rent growth data, the bubble hypothesis merits attention," they said. For the US housing market to return to its fundamentals, they estimated that a 19.5% correction would be necessary. There were signs that the US price-to-rent ratio began to fall in third quarter as prices cooled faster than rents, they added. For now, a modest housing correction remains the baseline scenario, but the authors warned that more hawkish monetary policy could trigger a steeper correction.

☆ Speculative bets are cool again and Reddit's army of retail investors is partying like it's 2021
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-23 | by ( Phil Rosen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

And yet, despite the dip this week, markets right now are brimming with bullishness — and Reddit-loving retail investors are partying like it's 2021. Retail investors are rebuffing Jerome Powell in piling into speculative assets. Remember, at the start of the pandemic, government stimulus and near-zero interest rates gave retail investors the perfect opportunity to lay down speculative bets. "With all of these headwinds, retail investors are jumping in on maybe some ill-conceived optimism," Goldman said. But economic data be damned, retail investors are still piling into the riskiest corners of the market.

☆ Europe's venture capital firms are facing a painful 2023 as some struggle to prove returns to LPs in bid to raise fresh capital
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-23 | by ( Callum Burroughs | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Some of Europe's venture capital firms are struggling to show returns on their investments. Europe's venture capital sector has enjoyed a booming run in recent years. Now, the dramatically changed economic landscape has left not only the startups facing a scarcity of available capital, but also the venture capital firms that fund them too. There are likely to be countless more who are also struggling to raise capital. For some smaller firms, the frothy days of 2021 are looking increasingly like a distant memory.

☆ BHP investors aren’t seeing the wood for the trees
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-21 | by ( Antony Currie | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

Granted, BHP’s earnings of $6.5 billion for the six months to the end of December missed estimates by some 7%. BHP’s investors are missing a bit of the wood for the trees. Iron age: Miners are rallying as iron ore prices riseFollow @AntonyMCurrie on Twitter(The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The company attributed the drop to lower prices for iron ore and copper. BHP is paying a dividend of 90 cents a share for the period, down from $1.50 a share a year earlier.

☆ A real estate investor who owns over 1,000 units explains how he was able to officially retire at age 36 by 'reverse engineering' his financial freedom
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-19 | by ( Lisa Kailai Han | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +12 min

He was able to achieve this feat by "reverse engineering" his financial freedom. In fact, he attributes much of his success today as a real estate investor to setting "audacious" goals for himself — and achieving them by whatever means necessary. To Allred, achieving true financial freedom meant having enough recurring passive income to entirely cover his family's cost of living. At that time, he decided to officially retire from door-to-door sales and go into real estate full-time. Continuing to grow his real estate fundAround 2015, Allred also began getting involved in real estate syndications.

☆ A.I. hype lifts Microsoft shares at Alphabet’s expense. An opportunity may be emerging for investors
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-08 | by ( Michael Santoli | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

This is the daily notebook of Mike Santoli, CNBC's senior markets commentator, with ideas about trends, stocks and market statistics. It must work to absorb the pricing-in of another potential rate hike and some emotional, messy trading in parts of tech. Stocks rallied the days before, during and after the Fed hike, a decent sign Wall Street can handle the current stance. Worth noting GOOGL shares are down nearly 8% Wednesday afternoon, but they are still only back to week-ago levels. Is it an opportunity for anyone thinking the short-term AI hype is getting overdone?

☆ Potential buyers are leveraging high-profile blowups like Frank and FTX to get better terms. Insiders detail how dealmaking is changing in 2023.
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-07 | by ( Paige Hagy | Bianca Chan | Carter Johnson | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +10 min

We don't want to look like JPMorgan,'" Jason Mikula, fintech analyst and writer behind Fintech Business Weekly, told Insider. How closely they adhere to it matters greatly in terms of if a deal is on the line," Mandelbaum told Insider. Investors pumped $132 billion globally into fintechs in 2021 and there were more than 900 fintech M&A exits, according to CB Insights. "It's now a buyer's market," Rob Brown, CEO of Lincoln International, a global investment-banking advisory firm, told Insider. One way companies might optimize the due-diligence process without cutting corners is by leaning on machines to help with the heavy lifting.

☆ Amazing start to the year for stocks, but warning signs are flashing
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-03 | by ( Bob Pisani | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Amazing start to the year for stocks, but there are warning signs. "In seven of the ten other instances [where the S & P was up at least 7% by Feb. 2nd], the S & P continued higher for the remainder of the year," according to Jeffrey Yale Rubin, director of research at Birinyi. In eight of the 10 years where the S & P was up at least 7% by Feb. 2nd, the S & P moved at least 10% in the remainder of the year, according to Rubin. It is fairly unusual for major indexes like the Nasdaq and S & P 500 to go into overbought territory. while tech stocks have been heavily bought (the Nasdaq-100, a barometer of tech interest, is up 17% year to date).

☆ 2022's stock losers are this year's winners so far
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-30 | by ( Paul R. La Monica | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +4 min

But it’s still been a solid start to the year for the market — and many of last year’s losers have led the way on Wall Street so far in January. Discovery, which plunged nearly 60% last year, has surged 55% so far in 2023 and is the best performer in the S&P 500. Rising market tide lifting questionable boatsStill, some investors are worried this year’s market rally is eerily reminiscent of prior market bubbles. GameStop (GME) is up nearly 25%. “Most investors don’t realize the Fed has to fight the inflation in the stock market, too,” Trainer added.

☆ The dealmaking boom meant fast timelines and loose due diligence. But high-profile implosions like FTX and Frank mean would-be sellers can expect more scrutiny, insiders say.
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-27 | by ( Paige Hagy | Bianca Chan | Carter Johnson | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +10 min

☆ The CIO of a $14.6 billion firm explains why hunting for bargain stocks now could hurt investors in the long run as yesterday's market leaders like tech are overtaken by new companies — and shares whe
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-19 | by ( Lisa Kailai Han | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

RBA's Dan Suzuki believes that bargain hunting for cheap stocks now may be an investing fallacy. Instead, investors should be focused on identifying tomorrow's market leaders. "That's the worst possible combination of macro factors for markets, so we're still pretty cautious in the outlook." He also listed examples of other real assets such as energy, manufacturing, and transportation infrastructure that require significant modernization. Playing offense in 2023Aside from high-quality defensive stocks, Suzuki also sees a few areas with attractive opportunities to play offense in this year.

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