With Friday being the last trading day of 2023, it’s almost if investors simply want to reach new highs. We closed within 0.5% of our 2022 record here in the US yesterday. It’s thin trading, as we mentioned earlier this week.
Shipping behemoth Hapag-Lloyd says that it’s still staying away from the Red Sea because of militant attacks. The detour through Cape of Good Hope costs companies thousands of miles of time/money, disrupting about 12% of global trade. Per BBG, spot rates have increased by +26% over the past 4 weeks. The US is policing the area, changing some companies’ minds. The second-largest container group, AP Moller-Maersk, is going to try heading through the Red Sea, and others are rescheduling to go through at night to avoid drone attacks. But a lot of companies are still weary.
The NY Times is suing OpenAI and MSFT because of their use of copyrighted work to train their models/chatbots. So, now aging judges across the country are learning what AI and ChatGPT mean. The NY Times is asking for money and the destruction of any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material.
BBG is out with a story about 21 and counting companies that went public by merging with a SPAC going bankrupt this year. Blank-check firms got them public, but then, I guess, in irony are making them non-public as well. (With the most ironic failure being WeWork which didn’t work.) I guess it’s like a fond memory of Pets.com or Web Van for some of us. Now a new generation will think of SPACs fondly of their pandemic days.
Haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate (I had to count those out). Sure, the Magnificent Seven didn’t deliver as much as other stocks in 4Q, but give some props where they are due.
Says chocolate lovers and makers everywhere. We’ve not seen the full impact of a jump in prices—cocoa futures are at a 46-year high. Choco prices are up +17% in the past 2 years, per Euromonitor. Cocoa production in West Africa (which represents ~70% of inputs) is tight. Plus we’ve got dryness from El Nino. Sorry, can’t figure out the tilde on my computer. Basically, the pods dry out, and the pods contain the beans needed to grind for chocolate. Even butter is having sticker shock—it’s at a record too and represents around 20% of the ave weight of a bar of chocolate.
China’s BYD Co will now be the largest EV car brand, knocking Tesla off that perch. Stop laughing, Elon.
