In many countries around the world, although young people can do all types of sports, adults tend to like watching one sport over the rest. In the US, the National Football League and the championship game is the Super Bowl; in England, football or soccer is the number one sport; in India it is cricket. When a sport is number one, that means TV revenues will automatically be more for the media giant which telecasts the games. We see this play all over the world and some people will remember when Fox came to the US and bid high for rights to the NFL and Super Bowl; in India, two media giants are bidding for the rights.

In an article by Shilpa Jamkhandikar of Reuters, the telecast rights to India’s premier cricket league with its hundreds of millions of viewers is up for renewal. The exclusive 5 year TV and digital broadcast rights could run as high as $6.7 billion. The companies expected to make bids are: Amazon.com Inc, Reliance Industries. Sony Group and Walt Disney Co.

Cricket is the 2nd largest sport in the world with 2 and half billion fans and the IPL is like its Super Bowl said Anton Rublievskyi, head of Parimatch, a betting company that advertises at the Indian Premier League. 350 million people watch every week.

At the moment, Disney owned Star India is one of India’s top broadcasters.

India’s biggest retailer is the Reliance and its digital platform is called Jio and has a broadcasting joint venture called Viacom18. The group recently bought the rights to Spanish La Liga or football in Spain.

Amazon would the streaming on its Amazon Prime Video platform.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, all companies have a base of support and they try to diversify when and if the base changes. If you think about P&G, they started with Tide and have 10 divisions that make over a billion a piece. At the start of every year, they are in a very good place to start from to stay profitable, they need to execute on their marketing strategies. If they do well, the profits roll in and shareholders receive another increase in the dividend. The companies you invest what is they largest market and how consistent is it?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

Every company has new introduces new products and when they do there are often logistical problems because the process is under the spotlight and something that can go wrong often does. When the process is a high profile or in the national media, even a small thing is a disaster waiting for everyone to see. Former President Trump fits into the category where the media is examining his next step and it is not hard to find flaws, without looking too much.

In an article by Kennth LI, Julia Love and Helen Coster of Reuters, The Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) has launched an app on Apple’s App Store called Truth Social. The app is free to download and people have preorder the app to automatically download when it became live. As a company, your first appearance needs to be perfect, unfortunately many users reported either having trouble registering for an account or receiving a message – due to massive demand, you are are on a waitlist. The statement could be true or part of the hype that Donald Trump tends to say.

TMTG is planning to list on the stock exchange through a merger with a SPAC firm called Digital World Acquisition Corp and if it does will receive $293 million in cash that DWAC holds in trust assuming no one redeems their DWAC shares. Additionally in December, TMTG raised $1 billion from private investors which is not available until the listing on the stock exchange closes.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, one expects new products to be introduced every year and whatever is the best method to connect to their customers, the company to be involved with. With dividend paying companies, they have time to do all the things that need to be done so the operation goes as seamlessly as possible. With new companies that have more hype than action, they announce things that the public may think are operational but in reality are future hopeful actions. If the company which you own shares in does that, you should look for alternatives.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

If you watched the movie Jason Bourne series the first movie The Bourne Identity, one of the early scenes was Jason going into a Swiss bank to get to his safety deposit box. Jason had money, passports and left a gun in the safety deposit box, however to arrive at the box there was lots to security procedures to get through in this pristine looking bank. What other secrets were to found in the bank?

In an article by Jesse Drucker and Ben Hubbard of the New York Times News Service, there are reasons why the famous Davos World Economic Forum is held in Switzerland. The Swiss banks closely guard the identifies of some of the planet’s richest people and clues into how they accumulated their fortunes.

A self described whistle blower leaked data on 18,000 bank accounts holding more than $100 billion to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. The newspaper shared the data with a non-profit journalism group, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and 46 newspapers around the world including the New York Times.

The data covers accounts from the 1940’s to 2015 but not the bank’s current operations.

The leak shows that Credit Suisse opened accounts for and continued to serve not only the ultra wealthy but also people whose problematic backgrounds would have been obvious to anyone who ran their names through a search engine.

For those who treat the government accounts as their private accounts and steal money, the Credit Suisse took their money. The example of people from the Venezuela’s oil company had $270 million; Zimbabwean businessman; the sons of former Egyptian President had $200 million; General Akhtar Abdur Rahman Khan from Pakistan helped funnel billions in dollars to fight the Russians in Afghanistan send money to Switzerland. It seems if you have money, the banks welcome you.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, there are multiple countries that have bank secrecy laws and some of the money that flows was not earned money, some of it is stolen money, some of it money that the owners do not want to pay tax on, some of it is corporate money, some of its intelligence money, it all gets comingled. If you own shares in a company doing business around the world, invariably some of it goes through tax haven countries to benefit the company. If they are exposed in the media, would you be okay with it. If yes, then continue to hold, if not find alternatives.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

Every medium and large company in business will soon be using AI if they are not already. The Artificial Intelligence in general is a good thing. However at times the AI will be slightly different than what the rules call for.

In an article by Tina Bellon, Hyunjoo Jin and David Shepsardson of Reuters, Tesla makes wonderful cars to drive and more of workings are based on software. If there is concern with the software, the company sends an update, similar to the Microsoft updates you likely have seen on your computer. Sometimes the updates are not exactly what the rules are. If you drive and there is a stop sign, the police want you to actually stop and not do a rolling stop. In Tesla’s software, they had a feature for the vehicle which according to President Elon Musk on Twitter. the car simply slowed to -2 mph & continued forward if clear view with no cars or pedestrians. (in the eyes of safety officials that is a rolling stop). Tesla issued a software update to disable the function.

Tesla develops almost all of its software to allow for regular over the air updates. An analysis of public data showed 7 of Tesla’s 19 recalls since January 2020 or 37% were addressed with over the air software updates. The other recalls were something physical that had to be done at the dealerships.

When a software update is updated, the fix is less expensive than recalling the cars and all vehicles which need the fix receive it. Traditional recalls show an average compliance rate of 70 and that falls to 50% for older vehicles, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Linking to dividend paying stock, all companies want to do more for their customers and Artificial Intelligence and software will play a significant role. The issue will be the regulators – how they adapted to the new uses and how they regulated, given the fewer resources they have. At some point some companies will be similar to the risk reward as Elon, a rolling stop is not a stop according to law enforcement. What will companies do or how will they react?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

The economy of the US is based on shopping or consumer spending (66%) and the biggest retail on the planet is Walmart. If you want a good picture of how the economy is doing, you want to look at Walmart because it also one of the best run companies on the planet. Walmart is an operational superstar and given its scale, the expectation is whatever the supply chain problems, Walmart has a partial solution.

In an article by Arriana McClymore and Uday Sampath Kumar of Reuters, Walmart had a very good year in beating profit and sales expectations.

CFRA Research analyst Arun Sundaram said given high inflation, we expect consumers to trade down stores and that should bode well for Walmart in 2022.

Walmart’s 4th quarter net revenue was up 0.5% to $152.87 billion. Adjusted earnings per share was $1.53 or 3 cents higher than estimates. Stores open for more than one year showed a 5.6% increase.

Online sales was up 1% after a blockbuster increase of 69% the year before. The previous quarter was up 8% and analysts were expecting a 10% increase.

Walmart’s answer to Amazon is Walmart Connect marketplace and CEO Doug McMillon says another 40,000 sellers will be added to the service. In addition, Walmart is expanding its pickup and delivery service by a third.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, for a long time Walmart has operational excellence and it was the resources to move into any marketplace it wishes to. It might be on the minds of consumers for rolling back prices, but how it manages to do what it does is the reason why it has scale and negotiation power with suppliers. It is a company where you can see what Walmart does very well and compare them to other alternatives.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

If you think about Twitter (and maybe you use it) the short news or short form is highly desired. For a wide variety of reasons, people like a short version to help them form opinions and even make decisions. If you consider the stock market, there are thousands of companies to choose from, most you likely should not buy, but there are many choices. To help make the choices easier, you begin to establish themes that the market leaders seem to have in common. The theme helps you understand what is happening and we all do it, we all look for the theme and when we all do it, the companies which do indexing and mutual funds bring out funds to reflect the themes to make it even easier to make a decision.

In an article by Jamie McGeever of Reuters, he tells us that many themes of the past change and they tend not to last for ever. Often the themes are a gift for investment marketing teams. We tend to think of the items in the grocery store as needing marketing, but marketing in the investment world is also worth billions.

It is important to understand that each component of the acronyms has unique characteristics and dynamics that demand they be taken on their own merits. In the FAANG group, after Meta (Facebook) reported its earnings, the stock went down in value by $230 billion, while Amazon jumped $190 billion.

Jim O’Neil who coined the BRIC acronym in 2001, when he was chief economist at Goldman Sachs stresses the concept is and was aimed at shining a light on the changing state of the world economy and need for change in global governance. At the time the BRIC countries economies were growing, the age of globalization was the buzz world and BRIC indexes were rising. Then some of the countries economies went down and a new group needed to be uncovered.

CNBC host and investor Jim Cramer coined the FAANG stocks in 2013 and they have been market leaders. What will be the next theme or acronym?

Linking to dividend paying stocks, owning stocks which make a profit and can pay dividends is never out of season, there maybe groups which outperform the dividend sector for a year or two, but when the group is out of favor, they tend to lose money and when did the average person buy the group? The investment world is similar to every other market in the world, there needs to be buying and selling for the industry groups to make money, while the investor if they can buy and hold for a long time, they make money and the industry group does not not. There will always be another theme, but owning stocks which are profitable is a good thing no matter how the market is doing.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

If you follow the European press and listen to politicians, you might think the oil and gas sector is off limits and no bank or financial institution would sign on to new loans. There are government agencies whose job it is to tabulate what is going on in every economic sector. In the oil and gas sector, the agency is called the International Energy Agency.

In an article from Reuters, the International Energy Agency reported in 2021, the top 25 European banks provided $55 billion to continue and expand oil and gas production. That total is a fall from $106 billion lent in 2020 and $83 billion in 2019, but above the 2018 and 2017 with numbers of $49 billion and $50 billion respectively.

The banks at the top of the list was HSBC, Barclays and BNP Paribas.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, oil and gas companies for the past 150 years have been some of the most profitable companies in the world and with world oil prices closing on $100 a barrel, they are going to stay that way. It would be very hard for a bank not to lend to oil and gas and make the type of revenues it does. When oil and gas companies lose money, the banks will lend to other sectors, until that time you can own the companies and with the dividends you have a choice of what you wish to do with the money. Reinvest in renewables, reinvest in oil and gas or other choices.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

Recently announced Cryptocurrency was part of a balanced portfolio, and it may be. For most citizens crypto is something you have heard about or something that people who try to steal your money deal with. It can be for you, because what you may have heard was some great gains were made and then losses occurred. Is the currency regulated or non regulated, is good or stay away from. Eventually you need to make your own decision about it, however there was good news reported by the US Justice Department.

In an article from the Associated Press, the US Justice Department it seized $3.6 billion in assets and arrested a couple of laundered billions of dollars in cryptocurrency from the 2016 hack of a virtual currency exchange.

The currency exchange is known as Bitfinex and the US Justice Department sent a signal to criminals cryptocurrency is not a safe haven. We can and will follow the money, no matter what form it takes deputy attorney-general Lisa Monaco said.

The couple who was arrested did not do the hack of Bitfinex, but authorities traced the stolen funds to more than a dozen accounts controlled by the couple. Court documents accuse them on relying on classic money-laundering techniques to hide their activities and the movement of money, such as setting up accounts with fictitious names and using computer programs to automate transactions.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, cryptocurrency does not pay interest it relies on capital gains, but along with capital gains is the opposite capital losses. What goes up generally comes down, so how do your protect yourself? Buying dividend paying stocks that are profitable which can increase their dividends and over time the dividends and capital gains will make you wealthier. Compounding interest is a very powerful tool to use to create wealth. If you believe you have time, then be patient.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

On stock markets around the world, there are expected and normal returns for shareholders. One significant player is hedge funds who search for value, and have money to spend, and the ability to push the shareholding system. The hedge funds have made money from America tech companies and they search for other tech companies in the world, some have focused on Japanese companies.

In an article by Makiko Yamazaki of Reuters, Toshiba announced it will be breaking up into 2 companies as opposed to 3 companies. The previous plans called for one company to focus on devices, one for energy and infrastructure and the third for its Kioxia flash memory chip assets.

Toshiba says they will only spin off the devices business by March 2024.

One has to remember in Japan, the Japanese culture encouraged conglomerates and they are supported by the Trade Ministry. The conglomerates are interconnected and as they became larger, the government issued statements such as the company possesses important technology including nuclear power and semi-conductors that are related to national security and it is important that the businesses are maintained and developed.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, companies around the world do the same thing, however depending on where the company is headquartered, the government or one of its agencies has a say in the operations or changes in the operations. Governments around the world use the phrase economic development, and the phrase means different things to different governments. While it is important to look around the world, remember there are subtle differences which can make change more difficult. Understanding the subtle differences allows you to invest around the world.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.