Chamath’s Next SPAC (probably)

ViacomCBS to Paramount Global. "Stonks" don't always go up... Silver Banana goes to... [image]( Market Snapshot The only thing more lacking than sense on Wall Street these days is confidence. Facing a mix of rate hikes, inflation, a potential war, and batsh*t commodity prices, investors just have no idea what to do. Never has that been more true than yesterday, with markets zig-zagging all day to finish pretty mixed. The Dow saw a 0.16% drop, and the Nasdaq sank 0.11%, while the S&P gained just 0.09%. Discover new investment ideas on Commonstock, the social network for smart-money investors. Commonstock built a platform to showcase the verified portfolios, real-time trades and analysis of the best retail investors. [Join our community]( today. Let’s get into it. Macro Monkey Says Treat Yo’self — When it comes to the U.S. economy, consumers run this sh*t. Spending by regular ol’ Americans drives nearly 2/3 of total GDP, and in this past month, we consumers really came in strong. Retail sales, a proxy for consumer spending, jumped 3.8% in January, while figures for the month of December were revised down from a 1.9% drop to a 2.5% drop. Kind of a good-news-bad-news vibe, but given that economists had been expecting growth to clock in at 2%, at least we get to mock their inaccuracy. However, seeing a jump like this in January is strange. Typically, spending slows after the busy holiday shopping season in December, especially in the market for big-ticket items like cars. But as we’ve learned throughout the pandemic, nothing is typical anymore. Analysts say that motor vehicle sales last month likely did not decline as much as usual from December to January, largely thanks to a lack of semiconductors, transportation, and patience. More importantly, core retail sales (stripping out cars, gasoline, building materials, and food) jumped even more last month, gaining 4.8%. This is the part that actually matters. Core retail spending is much more closely aligned with the consumer spending data that goes into GDP calculations. Don’t be dazzled by the high, flashy number yet. Inflation is still very much a thing. Prices were elevated well over 7% from a year prior last month, meaning the spending bump could very well be a result of inflation rather than pure, Adam Smith-style economic growth. So do your part and go out and spend that cash. You’re not “wasting money” or even “treating yourself.” No, you’re contributing to the economy. And the economy thanks you. THE SOCIAL NETWORK FOR SMART MONEY INVESTORS [image]( Discover new investment ideas on [Commonstock](, the social network for smart money investors. Does anyone else feel like capital markets make zero sense these days? From equities and options to crypto and NFTs, markets are changing fast. It’s more important than ever to find trustworthy information. Commonstock built a platform to showcase the portfolios, real-time trades, and analysis of the smartest retail investors, helping you distinguish signal from noise. [Join]() Commonstock’s community of engaged investors today. What's Ripe Airbnb ($ABNB) — Bag = secured after Airbnb’s last earnings. The home rental firm kicked a** previous quarter and gave even better guidance, sending shares up 3.7% on the day. Airbnb reported $0.08/sh on $1.53bn vs. $0.03/sh on $1.46bn expected, while management updated Q1 2022 guidance to $1.4bn-$1.5bn in top line, solidly above the $1.25bn expected. Shares had traded up all week in anticipation of impressive numbers, putting the stock up over 20% in the past month. Generac Hodings ($GNRC) — Generac generated a helluva a lot of buzz with its latest earnings report. Both EPS and revenue beat, but the report became truly electric with updated guidance for FY’22, driving yesterday’s 14.4% jump. EPS came in at $2.51 vs. $2.42 expected, while revenue posted a slight beat at $1.07bn. Full year sales jumped 50%, but investors were even more charged up by expectations for top line revenue to jump 36% this year as well, which would represent a two-year increase of 104%. What's Rotten Roblox ($RBLX) — The winner of the proxy war between actual outside and digital outside is becoming more and more clear, thanks to Roblox. The metaverse/children’s video game stock absolutely tanked yesterday, shedding 26.5% on garbage earnings, largely due to kids going to school in person and playing outside again. Roblox missed both revenue and earnings, registering a $0.25/sh loss on $770mn in top-line vs. a loss of $0.13/sh expected on $772mn. ViacomCBS ($VIAC) — Well, it won’t be called that for much longer. ViacomCBS, soon to become Paramount Global, reported earnings on Tuesday in tandem with a corporate rebranding. The company reported $0.26/sh on $8bn vs. the $0.42/sh on $7.5bn expected. I can’t tell if Wall Street hates the name change or earnings more, but they’re both pretty horrendous, so who knows. “Paramount Global” sounds like a crypto-scam company that Chamath wants to SPAC. The firm also added 9.4mn streaming subscribers, above targets but at a (much) higher cost than expected, and missing EPS by nearly 50% despite sizable growth in its subscriber base was not the vibe Wall Street was looking for. Shares ended down 17.8% after falling as much as 22% by midday. And sure, while a name change leading to a nearly 20% fall doesn’t make much sense, I ask you — what does make sense in markets these days? We certainly don’t know, but folks over at [Commonstock]() sure do. Thought Banana AI Meets Memes — There are a lot of things that AI systems and neural networks are astronomically better than humans at. Meme-ing is not one of those things. As pointed out by Morning Brew in Emerging Tech, a Twitter account that is little more than an AI with a bad sense of humor attempts to guess memes. If you’re like me, don’t look at [the account]( because you will spend your entire Monetary Econ class scrolling through this comedy show. Known as ResNeXtGuesser, the account shows the ResNeXt neural network images to which the bot attempts to guess what exactly it’s looking at and how confident it is in the guess. It’s hysterical… precisely because of how bad/brainless the guesses are. Sometimes, however, ResNeXt is right on the money, and we love to see our AI friend get a W once in a while. But the real news here, of course, is that neural nets are getting good at reading really weird images. For a long time, image processing networks have been trained on a database of 14mn images often used by autonomous vehicles and for a range of military applications. Opposite of humans, it is much easier for bots to do things like recognize details in images, but they are terrible at interpreting what they might mean… for now. Although still in its early stages, AI rides an exponential curve as improvements lead to further improvements that lead to further improvements that lead to… you get the point. Who knows, maybe by this time next year, a robot will replace Dr. Parik Patel, BA, CFA, ACCA, Esq. as the best memer on FinTwit. Wise Investor Says “I make no attempt to forecast the market—my efforts are devoted to finding undervalued securities.” — Warren Buffett Happy Investing, Patrick & The Daily Peel Team Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up for the WSO Daily Peel [here](). [ADVERTISE](=) // [WSO ALPHA]() // [COURSES](=) // [LEGAL](=) Don't want The Daily Peel? [Unsubscribe here](. Click to [Unsubscribe]( from ALL WSO content Wall Street Oasis (IB Oasis Corp.) 20705 Saint Charles St Saratoga, California 95070 United States