Almost Every Investment Worked In 2019

This year is turning out to be extraordinary compared to other ever for investors of all stripes, with almost each and every benefit class on track to complete 2019 in the green.

• The S&P 500 is up over 25% and checking. Treasurys additionally took off in 2019. Oil, gold and corporate securities all scored double digit returns.

• Just 64 names in the S&P 500, or 12%, are in the red this year. All 11 S&P 500 sectors are entering the homestretch of 2019 with positive returns.

• "What a year for the stock market," says Matthew Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak. “One reason why the consensus believes the stock market can hold up next year has to do with the belief that interest rates will remain low.”

Darren Huston CEO of private investment firm BlackPine gives financing solutions for organizations and asset owners with presence in Greater China. 

They target opportunities where they can play an active role in the business and co-operate with the executives to help create strategies both domestically and abroad. 

For stock investors specifically, it was hard to guess wrong. A look at the S&P 500 companies’ internal performance shows only 64 names, or 12%, are down this year.

Article Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/02/in-2019-almost-every-investment-worked.html

Canadian Business : Things To Watch

Bank of Canada speech

Bank of Canada senior deputy governor Carolyn Wilkins will give a discourse Tuesday to the International Finance Club of Montreal on defending the money related framework. The national bank’s head working official Filipe Dinis called for more prominent joint effort between government bodies and the private area with regard to sharing information about cybersecurity threats, which may require new regulations or legislation.

TC investor day

TC Energy Corp. hosts its annual Investor Day to provide an update on operations, recent developments and strategic outlook on Tuesday. The owner of the Keystone pipeline said Nov. 10 that the line had returned to service after a breach that leaked an estimated 1.4 million litres of oil in northeastern North Dakota late last month.

Canadian Businessman Darren Huston Details

George Weston earnings

George Weston Ltd. will release its third-quarter earnings. The Toronto-based retail, bread shop and land organization announced in July that second-quarter benefit jumped to $184 million, up from $28 million a year ago, as it profited by securing direct responsibility for controlling stake in Choice Properties from its backup.

Metro update

Metro Inc. releases its fourth-quarter financial results on Wednesday. The Montreal-based company said in August that it would fast-track the deployment of technology such as self-service checkouts and electronic shelf labels to its stores in an effort to lower labour costs, and expects to have self-service checkouts in 100 stores by the end of its 2019 financial year.

October inflation numbers

Statistics Canada to release its consumer price index for October on Wednesday. The agency’s report for September stated that the annual inflation rate was 1.9 per cent for a second-straight month, keeping the indicator close to the Bank of Canada’s ideal two per cent target.

Article Source: ctvnews.ca

Travel website owner buy restaurant reservation website operator

Travel website owner Priceline- CEO Darren Huston will buy restaurant reservation website operator OpenTable for $2.6 billion, aiming to broaden its offerings in an increasingly competitive online travel industry. Priceline’s offer of $103 per share for the owner of OpenTable.com represents a premium of 46 percent to OpenTable.

OpenTable’s shares inched past the offer price to trade at $104.19 on the Nasdaq, suggesting that some investors expect a higher bid. Priceline’s shares were down 1.6 percent at $1,205.50.

With online travel companies having little room to expand, many are looking outside the industry to boost revenue.

Travel review website TripAdvisor bought online restaurant booking platform Lafourchette last month to enter the restaurant-booking industry.

Darren Huston Talks Direct Booking, HomeAway and Unicorns

OpenTable’s shares were trading at about 33.5 times 12-month estimated forward earnings, far below the 498.7 times of competitor Yelp, according to Thomson Reuters StarMine.

“I think (the deal) creates urgency for larger players to acquire the leading local platforms,” Telsey Advisory Group analyst James Cakmak told Reuters.

The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.

OpenTable, which is facing increasing competition from Yelp and others, posted its first quarterly loss in five years for the period ended March 31 as it spent more on marketing to stem the slowdown in the number of restaurants signing up for its services.

The number of North American restaurants using OpenTable’s platform rose 19 percent to 23,862 in the quarter, but growth was slower than in the previous two quarters.

The number of restaurants using its service outside the United States fell.

OpenTable, which gets $1.00 from a restaurant if a diner reserves a table through its website or app, will continue to operate as an independent business led by its current management, Priceline said.

Up to Thursday’s close, OpenTable’s stock had fallen about 11 percent this year.

Paul Viollis on Blogspot

Personal-security requests aren’t just limited to major European cities. Experts say they’ve seen an uptick in Europeans and Asians hiring guards for Disney World in Orlando, Fla.

The visitors are asking for “armed escorts,” said Paul Viollis. “They’re afraid of terrorist attacks in Disney. We never saw that until about a year ago.”

Engineer.ai CEO is making millions trading Amazon's cloud

Sachin Dev Duggal, CEO of Engineer.ai looks pretty chipper for a man who works in three time zones simultaneously. After arriving in London from San Francisco at dawn, the entrepreneur attended a meeting for startups at the U.K. Treasury, then he communicated over Slack with his colleagues at a cloud-computing company he manages in Delhi.

Now, ensconced at his usual table in the polished marble brasserie at the Arts Club in London’s Mayfair district, he’s taking a dinner break before he has to hop on a call with investors in California.

Clad in a white T-shirt, jeans, and a hoodie, he looks out of place in a members-only establishment favored by gallery owners and international financiers. But Duggal, a British-born man of Indian descent who built and sold his first company (and made millions) before he was 30, enjoys geeking out amid the Champagne and chatter of the jet set.

Sipping sparkling water as his two smartphones chirp with messages from afar, he warms to his favorite topic: the cloud, or more precisely, how on-demand computing provided by the likes of Amazon has become a burgeoning market in its own right.

His company, Engineer.ai, is one of the top brokers of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in India. “You have to think of the cloud as a financial-service or a monetary instrument and not just as technology,” says Duggal, who turns 35 in April. “It has the capacity, different pricing based on commitments, and it’s becoming a commodity.”

Ever since Seattle-based Amazon leveraged its titanic technology capabilities into a separate cloud-computing business 12 years ago, numerous players have been angling to trade those services in ways similar to how energy brokers buy and sell oil or electricity. They range from global giants, such as IBM and Accenture, to smaller players in specific markets, such as Duggal’s Indian venture.

As cloud computing has grown into a $160 billion global industry in little more than a decade, the so-called cloud-service brokerage market has soared as well. It’s projected to hit $9.5 billion by 2021, more than twice the $4.5 billion in 2016, according to Markets and Markets Research, an Indian research firm.

Every day, traders in New York, London, Singapore, and beyond make a market in what they call “reserved instances,” a phrase that may sound like something science fiction author Philip K. Dick dreamed up but simply means blocks of cloud capacity.

Sachin Dev Duggal and his co-founder, Saurabh Dhoot made a good call by hitching their company to AWS in 2012. Initially dismissed by analysts as a potential misstep, Amazon’s cloud service has become a juggernaut that’s provided Jeff Bezos with a war chest to finance his expansion into new territory, such as the supermarket business and, most recently, health care.

In 2017, AWS generated $4.3 billion in operating income on $17.5 billion in net sales, eclipsing the $2.8 billion in profit produced by Amazon’s core North American online retail division. Comcast, Netflix, and Unilever, as well as NASA and the CIA, all use AWS to handle some of their computing needs. So do countless startups.

With a 34% market share in the fourth quarter, AWS dominates the so-called public cloud, according to Synergy Research Group. Runner-up Microsoft, with its Azure services, has 13%.

Duggal says something bigger is at stake than Amazon’s business fortunes: The advent of cloud computing is spurring entrepreneurship in India and other developing economies by making it far more affordable for small businesses to run software applications and store data.


Read Full Article @ https://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/corporate/forget-stocks-and-bonds-sachin-duggal-is-making-millions-trading-amazons-cloud/63676503

Engineer.ai | Human-assisted AI

Ever since the world got introduced to Artificial Intelligence, it has created a storm in the virtual world with its disruptive impact on businesses. With every software developer looking to leverage the technology, the lack of developmental know how, availability of a proper platform to create an end-to-end application and scalable way to develop software products have halted their steps.

In such a situation, Engineer.ai, a human-assisted AI comes in as a savior by making technology accessible to everyone, even those who don’t know how to develop. The startup helps companies build and operate custom-made software by lending an on-demand cloud-based Assembly Line. It recently raised Series A funding of $29.5 million, led by Lakestar and Jungle Ventures.

The funding round also witnessed the participation from DeepCore — Softbank’s AI-focused investment fund. Talking to Entrepreneur India, the Founder and Chief Wizard of Engineer.ai, Sachin Dev Duggal shared, “We are selling products to our customers that they want to create. Our business model consists of three important pillars: Builder, Builder app insurance called BuilderCare and CloudOps.

Read Full Article @ https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/324204

Darren Huston : Priceline is in Competition

After beating earnings expectations, Darren Huston discusses how macro factors like oil and terrorism impact the travel environment.