Enrique thinks he has found a 10-bagger; Dogecoin Demolished After Musk SNL Snafu; The Martian; The digital currencies that matter; Don't Freak Out (Yet) About Jobs; The best places to go on vacation right now
1) My colleague Enrique Abeyta has been absolutely knocking the cover off the ball, with 10 of his stock picks in Empire Elite Growth and Empire Investment Report up at least 90% – and that's not even counting his crypto pick last month in Empire Stock Investor, which is up more than 90%...
So when he says he thinks he's found his first 10-bagger since he joined Empire Financial Research a year and a half ago, pay attention!
In this special essay he penned for Empire Financial Daily on Saturday, How I Found What Could Be the First 10-Bagger in Empire Financial Research History, he explains how he and his team look for stocks with multi-bagger, long-term upside potential and concludes with a link for more information about the potential 10-bagger he's found:
This is the biggest, most obvious investment opportunity I've uncovered in 25 years. It's a unique company that gives investors the chance to catch the upside of the exploding cryptocurrency market without buying a single crypto... And I believe it has the potential to skyrocket 1,000%. Learn more here.
2) I'll put my track record of calling the top of obvious, stupid bubbles up against anyone's.
My most recent call was in Friday's e-mail, where I heaped scorn on the cryptocurrency dogecoin. Unlike bitcoin, which at least has a finite number of coins, there can be an infinite number of "doggy-coins" (my name for them), thus making them worthless. That's why I predicted that dogecoin's price "will be down 30% within a month, 50% within three months, and 80% within a year."
It's far too early to declare victory of course, but I like my odds. Dogecoin speculators were expecting Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk to plug the dog during his appearance on Saturday Night Live over the weekend, but instead he said "it's a hustle" in this funny segment.
Here's ZeroHedge with more on the story: Dogecoin Demolished After Musk SNL Snafu. Excerpt:
The world's 2nd richest man was the main reason why an entire generation of young Dogecoin "traders" turned on SNL for the first time in their lives... only to see their favorite joke of a cryptocurrency (which it is by definition) demolished after weeks of breathless buildups for what Elon Musk had in store. Unfortunately, as with most things Musk, the action was all in the fervent anticipation of the main event... which turned out to be a fiasco.
Having surged to a record high of $0.73 (making it the fifth most valuable cryptocurrency) on Saturday ahead of the show, it started to drop as soon as Musk took the microphone...
Doge 0.658
– zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 9, 2021
... then dropped more as Musk's rambling monologue and boring skits failed to excite...
Doge 0.55
– zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 9, 2021
... or properly promote his favorite joke of a cryptocurrency. It ultimately dumped as low as $0.42 of 8:05 a.m. ET...
... a 35% decline in 24 hours and a disappointment for all those who had expected that Musk's SNL appearance would be the catalyst that pushes the "dog" above parity with the dollar. Or, as Baird's Michael Antonelli put it, "Bad jokes and no funny memes leading to a Doge crash absolutely makes sense to me. It's like an earnings miss but for a new era."
P.S. I actually thought Musk was pretty funny on SNL – and this New York Post writer agreed: Billionaire Elon a 'Musk see' on 'mediocre' episode of 'SNL'. Here are links to four of his segments:
3) Here's NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway with a very thoughtful, nuanced take on Musk: The Martian. Excerpt:
The deeper problem? Our elevation of Musk as a capitalist idol has distorted the flow of capital and talent. Healthy markets don't take cues from the tweets of one man.
Man in the Mirror
As SNL's Lorne Michaels likes to say, "Here's the thing." Musk is going to keep tweeting, appearing on SNL, and ensuring he has a bigger rocket than other masters of the universe... because it works. While we're watching the fireworks, he's building cars and rocket ships. Is he the best person to build those things? Is the most efficient amount of capital flowing to his factories, versus those in Ingolstadt or Toyota or Detroit? A healthy market is supposed to answer that. It's the allocation platform. It's also hard to deny that Elon has inspired an extraordinary flow of capital into EVs and innovation in transportation.
But our idolatry of innovators and the algorithmic media ecosystem have distorted the allocation platform. In the spectacle economy, it's about the show, the now, the short-term hit. We're the richest country in the history of humanity, and we can't garner the political will to fix our bridges, let alone reach for the stars.
This all raises the question: What do we expect? You only have to drive a Tesla around the block to know that Musk is not a grifter. He is a genius (see above: rocket ships landing on a pad floating in the ocean). Maybe a world-saving, visionary genius should deploy any weapon at his disposal to garner the resources, fend off the challengers, and most importantly, buy the time to achieve his vision. Maybe.
We say we want straight shooters. We say we want wealth to be fairly distributed. But 53 million of us follow Musk's Twitter feed, and tens of millions of us are going to watch him on Saturday night, and the Elon show will go on.
If there is a glitch in the matrix, it's us. One in five U.S. households with children is food insecure, and we have a man telling his 53 million acolytes to purchase a digital currency so he can sell it at a profit to pad the earnings of a company that's worth more than automakers producing 60 times the vehicles. And why wouldn't he? When you tell an innovator he's Jesus Christ, he's inclined to believe you. Once we idolized astronauts and civil rights leaders who inspired hope and empathy. Now we worship tech innovators that create billions and move financial markets. We get the heroes we deserve.
4) Speaking of cryptos, here's an insightful article on them in The Economist: The digital currencies that matter. Excerpt:
TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE is upending finance. Bitcoin has gone from being an obsession of anarchists to a $1trn asset class that many fund managers insist belongs in any balanced portfolio. Swarms of digital day-traders have become a force on Wall Street. PayPal (PYPL) has 392m users, a sign that America is catching up with China's digital-payments giants.
Yet, as our special report explains, the least noticed disruption on the frontier between technology and finance may end up as the most revolutionary: the creation of government digital currencies, which typically aim to let people deposit funds directly with a central bank, bypassing conventional lenders.
5) This news on Friday has a lot of people worried about the pace of the economic recovery: U.S. Employers Added 266,000 Jobs in April as Hiring Slowed.
My take: We are likely falling into the behavioral finance trap of overweighting vivid, recent evidence. If dozens of data points indicate the mother of all economic booms and one doesn't, which are you going to believe?
Here's a Wall Street Journal article about this: Don't Freak Out (Yet) About Jobs. Excerpt:
April is also just one month. Given all the shifts the economy is going through, as well as issues such as how the Labor Department's adjustments for seasonal changes in the job market may have been thrown out of kilter by the pandemic, it probably isn't a good idea to read too much into the report.
But neither is it a good idea to completely ignore it. There might not be any reason to lower your expectations for what the job market will do over the remainder of the year now; if the next employment report also disappoints, though, then there will be real cause for worry.
6) Following up on my April 26 e-mail about where vaccinated Americans should go on vacation right now, if you're adventurous, I continue to recommend avoiding the popular hotspots in Florida and the Caribbean that this Bloomberg article highlights: Americans Jet South to Caribbean Beaches.
Instead, I suggest Iceland, Croatia, Greece, and South Africa, which you'll have to yourself. Here's a New York Times article about Greece, 'We Cannot Wait Until June': Greece's Reopening Gamble, and here's a broader one about the opportunities and challenges: The Dream: International Travel. The Reality: Chaos and Confusion. Excerpt:
In recent days, a steady stream of promising news has painted a rosy picture of the return of international leisure travel.
More than 105 million people in the United States are fully vaccinated. Greece, Iceland and Croatia, among a growing list of countries, are now open to American tourists. Airlines are resuming overseas flights. And perhaps the biggest development of all: Come summer, fully vaccinated Americans will once again be welcome across Europe.
But the optimism may be premature. At the moment, the broader reality is more chaotic, and more sobering.
The U.K. may also open to U.S. tourists within a matter of weeks – when it does, I plan to visit!
Best regards,
Whitney