These 5 tech stocks could let you play earnings season like a pro
Tag: Meta Platforms Inc
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Amazon CEO pledges AI investments will pay off as capital expenditures surge 81%
Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Mad Money in Seattle, WA. on Dec. 6th, 2023.
CNBC
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is trying to reassure investors who may be worried about the future payoff of the company’s massive investments in generative artificial intelligence.
On a conference call with analysts following the company’s third-quarter earnings report on Thursday, Jassy pointed to the success of Amazon’s cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, which has become a crucial profit engine despite the extreme costs associated with building data centers.
“I think we’ve proven over time that we can drive enough operating income and free cash flow to make this a very successful return on invested capital business,” Jassy said. “We expect the same thing will happen here with generative AI.”
Amazon spent $22.6 billion on property and equipment during the quarter, up 81% from the year before. Jassy said Amazon plans to spend $75 billion on capex in 2024 and expects an even higher number in 2025.
The jump in spending is primarily being driven by generative AI investments, Jassy said. The company is rushing to invest in data centers, networking gear and hardware to meet vast demand for the technology, which has exploded in popularity since OpenAI released its ChatGPT assistant almost two years ago.
“It is a really unusually large, maybe once-in-a-lifetime type of opportunity,” Jassy said. “And I think our customers, the business and our shareholders will feel good about this long term that we’re aggressively pursuing it.”
AI spending was a big topic on tech earnings calls this week. Meta on Wednesday raised its capital expenditures guidance, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was “quite happy” with the team’s execution. Meanwhile, Microsoft‘s investment in OpenAI weighed on its fiscal first-quarter earnings released on Wednesday, and the company said capital spending would continue to rise. A day earlier, Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi warned the company expects capital spending to grow in 2025.
Amazon has said its cloud unit has picked up more business from companies that need infrastructure to deploy generative AI models. It’s also launched several AI products for enterprises, third-party sellers on its marketplace and advertisers in recent months. The company is expected to announce a souped-up version of its Alexa voice assistant that incorporates generative AI, something Jassy said will arrive “in the near future.”
Amazon hasn’t disclosed its revenue from generative AI, but Jassy said Thursday it’s become a “multi-billion-dollar revenue run rate” business within AWS that “continues to grow at a triple-digit year-over-year percentage.”
“It’s growing more than three times faster at this stage of its evolution as AWS itself grew, and we felt like AWS grew pretty quickly,” he added.
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These 5 portfolio stocks outperformed the market’s incredible run since our September Monthly Meeting
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
Angela Weiss | AFP | Getty Images
It’s been a stellar month for the U.S. stock market, driven largely by easing monetary policy.
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AMD launches AI chip to rival Nvidia’s Blackwell
AMD launched a new artificial-intelligence chip on Thursday that is taking direct aim at Nvidia’s data center graphics processors, known as GPUs.
The Instinct MI325X, as the chip is called, will start production before the end of 2024, AMD said Thursday during an event announcing the new product. If AMD’s AI chips are seen by developers and cloud giants as a close substitute for Nvidia’s products, it could put pricing pressure on Nvidia, which has enjoyed roughly 75% gross margins while its GPUs have been in high demand over the past year.
Advanced generative AI such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT requires massive data centers full of GPUs in order to do the necessary processing, which has created demand for more companies to provide AI chips.
In the past few years, Nvidia has dominated the majority of the data center GPU market, but AMD is historically in second place. Now, AMD is aiming to take share from its Silicon Valley rival or at least to capture a big chunk of the market, which it says will be worth $500 billion by 2028.
“AI demand has actually continued to take off and actually exceed expectations. It’s clear that the rate of investment is continuing to grow everywhere,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said at the event.
AMD didn’t reveal new major cloud or internet customers for its Instinct GPUs at the event, but the company has previously disclosed that both Meta and Microsoft buy its AI GPUs and that OpenAI uses them for some applications. The company also did not disclose pricing for the Instinct MI325X, which is typically sold as part of a complete server.
With the launch of the MI325X, AMD is accelerating its product schedule to release new chips on an annual schedule to better compete with Nvidia and take advantage of the boom for AI chips. The new AI chip is the successor to the MI300X, which started shipping late last year. AMD’s 2025 chip will be called MI350, and its 2026 chip will be called MI400, the company said.
The MI325X’s rollout will pit it against Nvidia’s upcoming Blackwell chips, which Nvidia has said will start shipping in significant quantities early next year.
A successful launch for AMD’s newest data center GPU could draw interest from investors that are looking for additional companies that are in line to benefit from the AI boom. AMD is only up 20% so far in 2024 while Nvidia’s stock is up over 175%. Most industry estimates say Nvidia has over 90% of the market for data center AI chips.
AMD stock fell 3% during trading on Thursday.
AMD’s biggest obstacle in taking market share is that its rival’s chips use their own programming language, CUDA, which has become standard among AI developers. That essentially locks developers into Nvidia’s ecosystem.
In response, AMD this week said that it has been improving its competing software, called ROCm, so that AI developers can more easily switch more of their AI models over to AMD’s chips, which it calls accelerators.
AMD has framed its AI accelerators as more competitive for use cases where AI models are creating content or making predictions rather than when an AI model is processing terabytes of data to improve. That’s partially due to the advanced memory AMD is using on its chip, it said, which allows it to server Meta’s Llama AI model faster than some Nvidia chips.
“What you see is that MI325 platform delivers up to 40% more inference performance than the H200 on Llama 3.1,” said Su, referring to Meta’s large-language AI model.
Taking on Intel, too
While AI accelerators and GPUs have become the most intensely watched part of the semiconductor industry, AMD’s core business has been central processors, or CPUs, that lay at the heart of nearly every server in the world.
AMD’s data center sales during the June quarter more than doubled in the past year to $2.8 billion, with AI chips accounting for only about $1 billion, the company said in July.
AMD takes about 34% of total dollars spent on data center CPUs, the company said. That’s still less than Intel, which remains the boss of the market with its Xeon line of chips. AMD is aiming to change that with a new line of CPUs, called EPYC 5th Gen, that it also announced on Thursday.
Those chips come in a number of different configurations ranging from a low-cost and low-power 8-core chip that costs $527 to 192-core, 500-watt processors intended for supercomputers that cost $14,813 per chip.
The new CPUs are particularly good for feeding data into AI workloads, AMD said. Nearly all GPUs require a CPU on the same system in order to boot up the computer.
“Today’s AI is really about CPU capability, and you see that in data analytics and a lot of those types of applications,” Su said.
WATCH: Tech trends are meant to play out over years, we’re still learning with AI, says AMD CEO Lisa Su
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Tensions rise between banks and tech companies over online fraud liability in the UK
[ad_2]Meta is facing calls from U.K. banks and payment firms like Revolut to financially compensate people who fall for scams on their services.
Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto via Getty Images
Tensions are escalating between banking and payment companies and social media firms in the U.K. over who should be liable for compensating people if they fall victim to fraud schemes online.
Starting from Oct. 7, banks will be required to start compensating victims of so-called authorized push payment (APP) fraud a maximum £85,000 if those individuals affected were tricked or psychologically manipulated into handing over the cash.
APP fraud is a form of a scam where criminals attempt to convince people to send them money by impersonating individuals or businesses selling a service.
The £85,000 reimbursement sum could prove costly for large banks and payment firms. However, it’s actually lower than the mandatory £415,000 reimbursement amount that the U.K.’s Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) had previously proposed.
The PSR backed down from its bid for the lofty maximum compensation payout following industry backlash, with industry group the Payments Association in particular saying it would be far too costly a sum tor the financial services sector to bear.
But now that the mandatory fraud compensation is being rolled out in the U.K., questions are being asked about whether financial firms are facing the brunt of the cost for helping fraud victims.
On Thursday, London-based digital bank Revolut accused Meta of falling “woefully short of what’s required to tackle fraud globally.” The Facebook-owner announced a partnership earlier this week with U.K. lenders NatWest and Metro Bank, to share intelligence on fraud activity that takes place on its platforms.
Woody Malouf, Revolut’s head of financial crime, said that Meta and other social media platforms should help cover the cost of reimbursing victims of fraud and that, by sharing no responsibility in doing so, “they have no incentive to do anything about it.”
Revolut’s call for large tech platforms to financially compensate people who fall for scams on their websites and apps isn’t new.
Proposals to make tech firms liable
Tensions have been running high between banks and tech companies for some time. Online fraud has risen dramatically over the last several years due to an acceleration in the usage of digital platforms to pay others and buy products online.
In June, the Financial Times reported that the Labour Party had drafted proposals to force technology firms to reimburse victims of fraud that originates on their platforms. It is not clear whether the government still plans to require tech firms to pay compensation out to victims of APP fraud.
A government spokesperson was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.
Matt Akroyd, a commercial litigation lawyer at Stewarts, told CNBC that, after their victory on lowering the maximum reimbursement limit for APP fraud down to £85,000, banks “will receive another boost if their efforts to push the government to place some regulatory liability on tech companies is also successful.”
However, he added: “The question of what regulatory regime could cover those companies who do not play an active role in the PSR’s payment systems, and how, is complicated meaning that this issue is not likely to be resolved any time soon.”
More broadly, banks and regulators have long been pushing social media companies for more collaboration with retail banks in the U.K. to help combat the fast-growing and constantly evolving fraud threat. A key ask has been for the tech firms to share more detailed intelligence on how criminals are abusing their platforms.
At a U.K. finance industry event focusing on economic fraud in March 2023, regulators and law enforcement stressed the need for social media companies to do more.
“We hear anecdotally today from all of the firms that we talk to, that a large proportion of this fraud originates from social media platforms,” Kate Fitzgerald, head of policy at the PSR, told attendees of the event.
She added that “absolute transparency” was needed on where the fraud was occurring so that regulators could know where to focus their efforts in the value chain.
Social media firms not doing enough to combat and remove attempts to defraud internet users was another complaint from regulatory authorities at the event.
“The bit that’s missing is the at-scale social media companies taking down suspect accounts that are involved in fraud,” Rob Jones, director general of the National Economic Crime Centre, a unit of the U.K. National Crime Agency, said at the event.
Jones added that it was tough to “break the inertia” at tech companies to “really get them to get after it.”
Tech firms push ‘cross-industry collaboration’
Meta has pushed back on suggestions that it should be held liable for paying out compensation to victims of APP fraud.
In written evidence to a parliamentary committee last year, the social media giant said that banks in the U.K. are “too focused on their efforts to transfer liability for fraud to other industries,” adding that this “creates a hostile environment which plays into the hands of fraudsters.”
The company said that it can use live intelligence from big banks through its Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIRE) initiative to help stop fraud and evolve and improve its machine learning and AI detection systems. Meta called on the government to “encourage more cross-industry collaboration like this.”
In a statement to CNBC Thursday, the tech giant stressed that banks, including Revolut, should look to join forces with Meta on its FIRE framework to facilitate data exchanges between the firm and large lenders.
FIRE “is designed to enable banks to share information so we can work together to protect people using our respective services,” a spokesperson for Meta said last week. “Fraud is a multi-sector spanning issue that can only be addressed by working collaboratively.”
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Digital bank Revolut slams Meta over approach to scams, says tech giant should compensate victims
Revolut CEO, Nikolay Storonsky (L) and Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
Reuters
British financial technology firm Revolut on Thursday criticized Facebook parent company Meta over its approach to tackling fraud, saying the U.S. tech giant should directly compensate people who fall victim to scams via its social media platforms.
A day after Meta announced a partnership with U.K. banks NatWest and Metro Bank on a data-sharing framework designed to help prevent customers from falling prey to fraud schemes, Revolut said the pact “falls woefully short of what’s required to tackle fraud globally.”
In a statement, Woody Malouf, Revolut’s head of financial crime, said that Meta’s plans to tackle financial fraud on its platforms amount to “baby steps, when what the industry really needs is giant leaps forward.”
“These platforms share no responsibility in reimbursing victims, and so they have no incentive to do anything about it. A commitment to data sharing, albeit needed, simply isn’t good enough,” Malouf added.
CNBC has contacted Meta for comment.
New payment industry reforms will come into force in the U.K. on Oct. 7 that require banks and payment firms to issue victims of so-called authorized push payment (APP) fraud a maximum compensation of £85,000 ($111,000).
Britain’s Payments System Regulator had previously recommended a £415,000 maximum compensation amount for fraud victims, but backed down following backlash from banks and payment firms.
Revolut’s Malouf said that, while his company is on board with steps the U.K. government is taking to combat fraud, Meta and other social media platforms should do their part to financially compensate those who fall victim to fraud as a result of scams originating on their sites.
The fintech firm published a report Thursday alleging that 62% of user-reported fraud on its online banking platform originated from Meta, down from 64% last year.
Facebook was the most common source of all scams reported by Revolut users, accounting for 39% of fraud, while WhatsApp was the second-highest source of such events with an 18% share, the bank said in its “Consumer Security and Financial Crime Report.“
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Facebook owner Meta forms data-sharing pact with UK banks to counter scams
Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Facebook parent company Meta on Wednesday said that it’s working with two leading banks in the U.K. on an information-sharing arrangement to help protect consumers from fraud.
Meta said it was expanding its Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIPE) to enable U.K. banks to directly share information with the social media giant, in a bid to help it detect and take down scamming accounts and coordinated fraud schemes.
Meta said that the tech has already been tested with multiple lenders in the U.K. In one example, Meta says it was able to take down 20,000 accounts from scammers engaged in a concert ticket scam network targeting people in the U.K. and U.S., thanks to data shared by British lenders NatWest and Metro Bank.
NatWest and Metro Bank are the only banks in the U.K. that are currently part of the fraud information-sharing pact, but more are set to join later on, according to Meta.
“This work has already seen us take action against thousands of accounts run by scammers, indicating the importance of banks and platforms working together to tackle this societal issue,” Nathaniel Gleicher, global head of counter-fraud at Meta, said in a statement Wednesday.
“We will only beat these criminals if we work together and share relevant information related to scams. Financial institutions can share unique information with us which we can in turn use to train our systems to take action against more scams globally,” Gleicher added.
Meta has long faced calls from banks in the U.K. to do more to stop scammers from running rampant on its platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
In 2022, British digital bank Starling, which is backed by Goldman Sachs, began boycotting Meta and pulled advertising from its platforms over concerns that the company was failing to tackle fraudulent financial advertising.
Meta’s apps have been frequently abused by scammers attempting to swindle users out of their money through a variety of fraudulent schemes.
One of the most common forms of scams users encounter on the company’s platforms is authorized push payment fraud, through which criminals attempt to convince people to send them money by impersonating individuals or businesses that are selling a service.
Meta already has policies in place banning promotion of financial fraud, such as loan scams and schemes promising high rates of returns. The firm also prohibits ads that promise unrealistic results or guarantee a financial return.
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This AI-powered financial advisor has quickly gained $20 billion in assets
AI-generated responses are becoming more common, whether travelers know or not.
Westend61 | Getty Images
An automated financial advisor called PortfolioPilot has quickly gained $20 billion in assets in a possible preview of how disruptive artificial intelligence could be for the wealth management industry.
The service has added more than 22,000 users since its launch two years ago, according to Alexander Harmsen, co-founder of Global Predictions, which launched the product.
The San Francisco-based startup raised $2 million this month from investors including Morado Ventures and the NEA Angel Fund to fund its growth, CNBC has learned.
The world’s largest wealth management firms have rushed to implement generative AI after the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, rolling out services that augment human financial advisors with meeting assistants and chatbots. But the wealth management industry has long feared a future where human advisors are no longer necessary, and that possibility seems closer with generative AI, which uses large language models to create human-sounding responses to questions.
Still, the advisor-led wealth management space, with giants including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, has grown over the past decade even amid the advent of robo-advisors like Betterment and Wealthfront. At Morgan Stanley, for instance, advisors manage $4.4 trillion in assets, far more than the $1.2 trillion managed in its self-directed channel.
Many providers, whether human or robo-advisor, end up putting clients into similar portfolios, said Harmsen, 32, who previously cofounded an autonomous drone software company called Iris Automation.
“People are fed up with cookie-cutter portfolios,” Harmsen told CNBC. “They really want opinionated insights; they want personalized recommendations. If we think about next-generation advice, I think it’s truly personalized, and you get to control how involved you are.”
AI-generated report cards
The startup uses generative AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta’s Llama, meshing it with machine learning algorithms and traditional finance models for more than a dozen purposes throughout the product, including for forecasting and assessing user portfolios, Harmsen said.
When it comes to evaluating portfolios, Global Predictions focuses on three main factors: whether investment risk levels match the user’s tolerance; risk-adjusted returns; and resilience against sharp declines, he said.
Users can get a report card-style grade of their portfolio by connecting their investment accounts or manually inputting their stakes into the service, which is free; a $29 per month “Gold” account adds personalized investment recommendations and an AI assistant.
“We will give you very specific financial advice, we will tell you to buy this stock, or ‘Here’s a mutual fund that you’re paying too much in fees for, replace it with this,'” Harmsen said.
“It could be simple stuff like that, or it could be much more complicated advice, like, ‘You’re overexposed to changing inflation conditions, maybe you should consider adding some commodities exposure,'” he added.
Global Predictions targets people with between $100,000 and $5 million in assets — in other words, people with enough money to begin worrying about diversification and portfolio management, Harmsen said.
The median PortfolioPilot user has a $450,000 net worth, he said.
The startup doesn’t yet take custody of user funds; instead it gives paying customers detailed directions on how to best tailor their portfolios. While that has lowered the hurdle for users to get involved with the software, a future version could give the company more control over client money, Harmsen said.
“It’s likely that over the next year or two, we will build more and more automation and deeper integrations into these institutions, and maybe even a Gen 2 robo-advisor system that allows you to custody funds with us, and we’ll just execute the trades for you.”
‘Massive shake up’
Harmsen said he created the first version of PortfolioPilot a few years ago to manage his own newfound wealth after selling his first company.
He’d grown frustrated after meeting more than a dozen financial advisors and realizing that they were “basically just salespeople trying to give access to this fairly standard” approach, he said.
“It felt like a very real problem for me, because the only alternative I saw on the market was, you know, basically becoming a day trader and becoming my own portfolio manager,” Harmsen said.
“I wanted hedge fund-quality tools and ways to think about risk and downside protection, and portfolio management across all of my different accounts and the buckets of money in crypto and real estate,” he said.
So around the time he was starting a family and buying a home in San Francisco, he began coding a program that could manage his investments.
After realizing it could have a broader use, Harmsen began building a team for Global Predictions, including three former employees of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund.
The company’s rise has attracted regulatory scrutiny; in March, the Securities and Exchange Commission accused Global Predictions of making misleading claims in 2023 on its website, including that it was the “first regulated AI financial advisor.” Global Predictions paid a $175,000 fine and changed its tagline as a result.
While today’s dominant providers have been rushing to implement AI, many will be left behind by the transition to fully automated advice, Harmsen predicted.
“The real key is you need to find a way to use AI and economic models and portfolio management models to generate advice automatically,” he said.
“I think that is such a huge jump for the traditional industry; it’s not incremental, it’s very black or white,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen over the next 10 years, but I suspect there will be a massive shake up for traditional human financial advisors.”
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Lost in the market’s sharp rotation out of tech stocks is a really bullish call on major banks
Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street.
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Our 5 top-performing stocks since June’s monthly meeting (only one is Big Tech)
A trader works, as a screen broadcasts a news conference by U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell following the Fed rate announcement, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, U.S., June 12, 2024.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
It’s been another great run for stocks since the Club’s last monthly meeting in June.
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The Ambani wedding is costing millions — here’s how to have a big impact on a much smaller budget
MUMBAI, MAHARASHTRA, INDIA – 2024/07/05: Anant Ambani (son of Indian businessman Mukesh Ambani) and his fiancée Radhika Merchant seen on the red carpet during the sangeet ceremony at Jio World Centre in Mumbai. (Photo by Ashish Vaishnav/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
The lavish wedding of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant is the talk of the moment, taking place this weekend after months of spectacular celebrations preceding the event.
Ambani is the youngest son of billionaire Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries. The total cost of the wedding is estimated to be between 11 billion to 13 billion rupees ($132 million to $156 million), according to the BBC, although the families involved have not revealed any figures.
Extravagances include a three-day star-studded pre-wedding event in March in the family’s hometown of Jamnagar in the Indian state of Gujarat, with 1,200 guests in attendance including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan.
This was followed by a luxury cruise across the Mediterranean and yet more celebrations in July ahead of the big day.
Karishma Manwani, a luxury wedding planner in London who works with wealthy families, told CNBC Make It that her clients typically spend between £200,000 and £1 million ($258,620 and $1.29 million) on wedding celebrations.
Meanwhile, Priya Suglani, the founder of events and wedding planning company Pristine Events, said to CNBC Make It that her clientele tends to spend between £40,000 to £130,000.
But a beautiful wedding doesn’t need to be expensive and there are ways to put on a spectacular show with a much smaller budget, according to Manwani and Suglani.
They shared six tips on how to host a luxurious wedding without spending the earth.
Pick 5 non-negotiables
Suglani suggests opting for “quality over quantity,” which means prioritizing what you want to spend the most money on if you’re on a restricted budget.
“I always say to couples, pick your five non-negotiables, so pick your five things that mean the most to you at weddings,” Suglani said.
This means thinking about the things you’ve most appreciated at weddings in the past, such as food, drinks, music, or entertainment.
“Spend most of your money on that, so you can still get a really good personalized wedding and the stuff that you have booked is really good quality,” she said.
“It’s better to do a wedding like that, rather than trying to fit everything in, and you’ve just gone for the cheapest option for all of them, and then it just feels a bit flat.”
Refine the guestlist
It’s tempting to invite everyone you know to a wedding, but refining the guest list will trim costs and allow you to spend more on other areas.
“Try and have people that you really want there and people that you’re going to miss if you don’t see them on the dance floor that night,” Manwani said. “Every guest adds up.”
In fact, there’s a growing trend in the wedding industry of inviting fewer people, but splashing out on other areas, according to Suglani.
“[People] are now having a guest list of 200 people so they’re then able to go all out on other things that they wouldn’t have before if they were having 500 people,” she said.
DIY it
Suglani suggests being savvy when it comes to cost-effectiveness — and this could involve making things yourself at home.
“These days you can do things like make your own stationery yourselves and get it printed,” she explained.
Couple Vanessa Acosta and Sam Roberts went even further, hosting their wedding in their own backyard on a budget of $3,000.
“We DIY’ed and thrifted everything,” Acosta previously told CNBC Make It. “We thrifted my husband’s shirt, he used his really nice dress shoes he already owned. I made my dress and I thrifted the fabrics; I made my veil.”
Consider a weekday wedding
Manwani advises couples to be as flexible as possible with their wedding dates in order to save some serious cash.
“Consider weekday weddings. Don’t go for that peak Saturday bank holiday weekend in the U.K., because venues are going to be a lot more expensive. Suppliers are going to be a lot more in demand. So nobody’s willing to negotiate. Nobody’s willing to give you a good deal,” she said.
“But if you go off-peak, weekdays … suppliers are free on that day. They would happily give you a good deal that works for you. So, then you’re going to get the best suppliers, you’re going to get the venue that you want at a reasonable price without paying the premiums.”
Host some events at home
If you’re planning various pre-wedding events like the Ambani family, having them at home is a convenient and inexpensive way of doing so, according to Manwani.
“Do it in your back garden instead of doing a whole event, because each time you have a venue, there are minimum spends there and you have to provide so many things and you want to have more guests because the venue can accommodate 100 guests so you will end up inviting 100 guests,” she said.
“But if you do it in your home and you can only accommodate 25 guests, you will stick to that list.”
Fake flowers are better
Floral arrangements can make a major statement at wedding events, but fresh flowers are not your only option.
“Nowadays we’ve got really amazing fake floral options that still give all the drama and statement, but are way cheaper,” Suglani said.
If fresh flowers are a must for your wedding, then consider what is in season, Manwani says.
“Some brides come to me, and they have a favorite flower, but it’s not in season. So, then we have to import them from Holland or from other countries. But if you were to play with what’s available at that time of the year, you’re going to get a beautiful look without paying that premium for logistics that nobody actually sees,” she added.
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San Francisco’s AI boom can’t stop real estate slide, as office vacancies reach new record
Artificial intelligence has been a big boon for San Francisco real estate. But not enough of one to make up for the broader struggle across the market.
The vacancy rate for San Francisco office space reached a fresh record of 34.5% in the second quarter, according to a report Monday from commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. That’s up from 33.9% in the first quarter, 28.1% in the same period a year ago and 5% before the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the average asking rent dropped to $68.27 per square foot in the quarter, the lowest since late 2015, down from $72.90 a year earlier and a peak of $84.70 in 2020.
San Francisco is reeling from the twin challenges of bringing people back to the office after the Covid pandemic and a slowdown in the tech market that’s led to mass job cuts across the industry. Tech companies have laid off more than 530,000 employees since the start of 2022, according to the website Layoffs.fyi, with major downsizing at Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Tesla, Microsoft and Salesforce.
Softening the blow of late has been the soaring popularity of generative AI and the decision by fast-growing startups to open large offices in San Francisco.
OpenAI, the market leader with a private valuation that’s topped $80 billion, announced in October that it was leasing about 500,000 square feet of space in the Mission Bay neighborhood, the biggest office lease in the city since 2018. Robert Sammons, senior research director at Cushman & Wakefield, said OpenAI is continuing to look for more space in the city.
Also last year, OpenAI rival Anthropic subleased 230,000 square feet at Slack’s headquarters. And in May of this year, Scale AI signed a lease for a reported 170,000 to 180,000 square feet of space in Airbnb’s office building.
“San Francisco is certainly the center of AI, but AI is not going to save the San Francisco commercial real estate market,” Sammons said. “It will help.”
While richly capitalized AI startups are signing large leases for new space, the bigger trend is that tech companies, law offices and consulting firms are looking to reduce their footprint when existing leases come up, Sammons said, reflecting the widespread move to hybrid work.
In many cases, companies are looking to relocate to higher quality space in more desirable parts of the city, because prices have come down and employers need to be near restaurants and shops to get staffers to come back, Sammons added.
“The best quality trophy space continues to perform well, because tenants want to be in the best locations with the best amenities around them,” Sammons said.
Some of the city’s top employers, including Salesforce, Uber, Visa and Wells Fargo, have brought employees back to offices for part of the week. That’s helped in the financial district, where the vacancy rate is still 34.2% on the north side and 32.7% on the south side at the end of the quarter. In SoMa, which historically was a popular area for venture-backed startups, the vacancy rate is almost 50%.
SoMa is further away from mass transit options and has also been hurt by large retail departures. Vacant office space across San Francisco for the quarter totaled 29.6 million square feet, Cushman & Wakefield said.
The firm said in its report that there are positive signs in the market, with absorption poised to improve in the second half and office job numbers stabilizing following a steep drop-off. But Sammons said it looks like there’s more room for rents to fall and for vacancies to rise. Uncertainty surrounding the upcoming presidential election may be a factor delaying new leases, he said.
“Sometimes tenants postpone making decisions when there are major elections,” he said.
WATCH: Commercial real estate vacancies in San Francisco are at an all-time high
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Here are 3 major reports that could drive the stock market in the week ahead
U.S. flag is seen hanging on New York Stock Exchange building on Independence Day In New York, United States on America on July 4th, 2024.
Beata Zawrzel | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Wall Street finished higher for the holiday-shortened trading week, with tech stocks leading the way.
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Nvidia passes Microsoft in market cap to become most valuable public company
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends an event at COMPUTEX forum in Taipei, Taiwan June 4, 2024.
Ann Wang | Reuters
Nvidia, long known in the niche gaming community for its graphics chips, is now the most valuable public company in the world.
Shares of the chipmaker climbed 3.2% in mid-day trading on Tuesday, lifting the company’s market cap to $3.33 trillion, surpassing Microsoft. Earlier this month, Nvidia hit a $3 trillion market cap for the first time, and passed Apple.
Nvidia shares are up more than 170% so far this year, and took a leg higher after the company reported first-quarter earnings in May. The stock has multiplied by more than nine-fold since the end of 2022, a rise that’s coincided with the emergence of generative artificial intelligence.
Nvidia has about 80% of the market for AI chips used in data centers, a business that’s ballooned as OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and others have raced to snap up the processors needed to build AI models and run increasingly large workloads.
For the most recent quarter, revenue in Nvidia’s data center business rose 427% from a year earlier to $22.6 billion, accounting for about 86% of the company’s total sales.
Apple shares were down about 1% during trading on Tuesday, giving it a $3.28 trillion market value. Microsoft shares slid less than a percentage point, giving it a market cap of $3.32 trillion.
Founded in 1991, Nvidia spent its first few decades primarily as a hardware company that sold chips for gamers to run 3D titles. It’s also dabbled in cryptocurrency mining chips and cloud gaming subscriptions.
But over the past two years, Nvidia shares have skyrocketed as Wall Street came to recognize the company’s technology as the engine behind an explosion in AI that shows no signs of slowing. The rally has lifted co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s net worth to about $117 billion, making him the 11th wealthiest person in the world, according to Forbes.
Microsoft shares are up about 20% so far this year. The software giant has also been a major beneficiary of the AI boom, after it took a significant stake in OpenAI and integrated the startup’s AI models into its most important products, including Office and Windows. Microsoft is one of the biggest buyers of Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) for its Azure cloud service. The company just released a new generation of laptops that are designed to run its AI models, called Copilot+.
Nvidia is a newcomer to the title of most valuable U.S. company. For the past few years, Apple and Microsoft have been trading the title.
Nvidia’s ascent has been so rapid that the company has yet to be added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a benchmark of 30 stocks that’s historically included the most valuable U.S. companies. Alongside its earnings release last month, Nvidia announced a 10-for-1 stock split, which went into effect on Jan. 7.
The split gives Nvidia a better shot at being added to the Dow, which is a price-weighted index, meaning that companies with higher stock prices — rather than market caps — have outsized influence on the benchmark.
WATCH: The $10 trillion bull fight
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BlackRock-backed fintech Trustly says IPO still at least one year out even as profits jump 51%
Trustly CEO Johan Tjarnberg.
Trustly
The boss of Swedish financial technology startup Trustly says an initial public offering for the company is still a year or two away from happening, even after a 51% jump in operating profit.
In an exclusive interview with CNBC, Johan Tjarnberg, CEO of Trustly, said that his firm still needs time to prove the value of its open banking technology to investors before going public.
“We need another year or two to really demonstrate to the market that open banking is happening happening, it’s here,” Tjarnberg told CNBC.
“For me, there is so much we want to demonstrate to the market in terms of user adoption, merchant adoption. We still need some time to execute on our existing playbook.”
Trustly is holding out on an IPO even after reporting a strong set of financials. Results shared exclusively with CNBC show the firm reported revenues of $265 million in its 2023 full year.
Growth accelerated significantly in the second half of the year, Trustly said, climbing 27% compared with the same period in 2022. That was as transaction volumes spiked 48% over the same period.
Tjarnberg told CNBC that the company’s performance in 2023 was heavily driven by the growth at its U.S. business. Trustly merged with American rival PayWithMyBank in 2020.
“We invested a lot into the U.S. market,” Tjarnberg said. “We were roughly 20 people there four years ago; we now have 500 supporting the U.S. market.”
Tjarnberg said that, in the first quarter of this year, Trustly saw heightened growth in areas like utilities, retail, and travel, with 22% of volumes coming from those core verticals, up 44% over 12 months.
Chipping away at Visa, Mastercard?
Trustly increased operating profit by 51% in full-year 2023, with adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization) climbing to $51 million from $33 million in 2022.
That was as overall transaction value processed during 2023 climbed by 79%, to $58 billion.
Trustly helps companies integrate the ability to accept payments via open banking technology.
This tech lets consumers make payments directly to a merchant’s bank account without the need for an intermediary such as a card issuer.
It provides an alternative to incumbent credit card programs such as Mastercard and Visa, which charge merchants high fees for transactions.
In the U.S., Tjarnberg said, Trustly is seeing heightened demand from merchants “trying to take down costs,” as high card processing fees have made them more price-conscious.
“There is no secret that our objectives and ambition is to bring a good alternative to other payment methods, including cards,” he told CNBC.
Open banking is a trend which has gained significant momentum, particularly across Europe.
That’s thanks to the introduction of regulations which require banks to open their clients’ account data and payment functionalities to third-party firms.
It has paved the way for new entrants into finance including fintechs, startups and tech companies. Founded in 2008, Sweden’s Trustly competes with the likes of GoCardless, TrueLayer, Volt, Bud, and Yapily.
Future product plans
Trustly expects to launch a feature that allows its merchants to set up recurring payments for customers. That will be targeted at things like telecom packages and subscription-based music streaming services.
Tjarnberg said Trustly is “bullish” on the mobile space, particularly in the U.S. after having seen early success in mobile billing partnerships with the likes of AT&T and T-Mobile.
Trustly is used by more than 9,000 merchants worldwide including Facebook, Alibaba, PayPal, eBay, AT&T, Unicef, Dell, Lyft, DraftKings, Wise, and eToro.
Trustly is majority-owned by venture capital firm Nordic Capital, which owns a 51.1% stake in the business. Alfven & Didrikson is its second-biggest backer, with a 11.1% stake, while BlackRock holds an 8.9% stake.
Aberdeen Standard Investments and Neuberger Berman own 0.7% and 0.9% stakes in Trustly, respectively, while others including the Trustly management and employees own 27.4%.
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Families of Uvalde school shooting victims sue Meta, Microsoft, gunmaker
A memorial for the 19 children and two adults killed on May 24th during a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School is seen on May 30, 2022 in Uvalde, Texas.
Yasin Ozturk | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Families of the victims of the 2022 elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, filed two lawsuits on Friday against Instagram’s parent company Meta, Activision Blizzard and its parent Microsoft and the gunmaker Daniel Defense, claiming they cooperated to market dangerous weapons to impressionable teens such as the Uvalde shooter.
Together, the wrongful death complaints argue that Daniel Defense – a Georgia-based gun manufacturer – used Instagram and Activision’s video game Call of Duty to market its assault-style rifles to teenage boys, while Meta and Microsoft facilitated the strategy with lax oversight and no regard for the consequences.
Meta, Microsoft and Daniel Defense did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In one of the deadliest school shootings in history, 19 children and two teachers were killed on May 24, 2022, when an 18-year-old gunman armed with a Daniel Defense rifle entered Robb Elementary School and barricaded himself inside adjoining classrooms with dozens of students.
The complaints were filed on the two-year anniversary of the massacre by Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder, the same law firm that reached a $73 million settlement with rifle manufacturer Remington in 2022 on behalf of families of children killed in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
The first lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, accuses Meta’s Instagram of giving gun manufacturers “an unsupervised channel to speak directly to minors, in their homes, at school, even in the middle of the night,” with only token oversight.
The complaint also alleges that Activision’s popular warfare game Call of Duty “creates a vividly realistic and addicting theater of violence in which teenage boys learn to kill with frightening skill and ease,” using real-life weapons as models for the game’s firearms.
A screen image from “Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare”
Source: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare | Facebook
The Uvalde shooter played Call of Duty – which features, among other weapons, an assault-style rifle manufactured by Daniel Defense, according to the lawsuit – and visited Instagram obsessively, where Daniel Defense often advertised.
As a result, the complaint alleges, he became fixated on acquiring the same weapon and using it to commit the killings, even though he had never fired a gun in real life before.
The second lawsuit, filed in Uvalde County District Court, accuses Daniel Defense of deliberately aiming its ads at adolescent boys in an effort to secure lifelong customers.
“There is a direct line between the conduct of these companies and the Uvalde shooting,” Josh Koskoff, one of the families’ lawyers, said in a statement. “This three-headed monster knowingly exposed him to the weapon, conditioned him to see it as a tool to solve his problems and trained him to use it.”
Daniel Defense is already facing other lawsuits filed by families of some victims. In a 2022 statement, CEO Marty Daniel called such litigation “frivolous” and “politically motivated.”
Earlier this week, families of the victims announced a separate lawsuit against nearly 100 state police officers who participated in what the U.S. Justice Department has concluded was a botched emergency response. The families also reached a $2 million settlement with the city of Uvalde.
Several other suits against various public agencies remain pending.
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Pinterest shares soar 18% on earnings beat, strong revenue growth
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Shares of Pinterest popped 18% in extended trading Tuesday after the company reported first-quarter results that beat analysts’ estimates and showed its fastest revenue growth since 2021.
Here’s how the company did, compared to LSEG analyst expectations:
- Earnings per share: 20 cents adjusted vs. 13 cents expected
- Revenue: $740 million vs. $700 million expected
Revenue for the quarter jumped 23% from $602.6 million a year earlier. Pinterest’s net loss for the first quarter narrowed to $24.8 million, or a 4 cent loss per share, from $208.6 million, or a 31 cent loss per share, a year earlier.
Pinterest reported 518 global monthly active users (MAUs) for the first quarter, up 12% year over year. Wall Street was expecting MAUs 504.9 million, according to StreetAccount. Pinterest said Generation Z is its fastest-growing, largest and most engaged demographic on the platform.
The company’s average revenue per user was $1.46 for the period, while StreetAccount was expecting $1.40 per user.
In its first-quarter release, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready said the company is driving greater returns for advertisers because of its investments in AI and shoppability.
“We’re executing with tremendous clarity and focus, shipping new products and experiences that users want, and in doing so, we’re finding our best product market fit in years,” Ready said.
Digital advertising companies like Pinterest have started growing again after a brutal 2022, when brands reined in spending to cope with high levels of inflation. Meta, Snap and Google parent Alphabet all reported first-quarter results last week that exceeded analysts’ estimates for revenue.
For its second quarter, Pinterest expects to report revenue between $835 million and $850 million, which equates to growth of 18% to 20% year over year. Analysts were expecting revenue of $827 million.
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Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth plummets by more than $18 billion in Meta stock drop
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks about the Facebook News feature at the Paley Center For Media in New York on Oct. 25, 2019.
Drew Angerer | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg‘s net worth plunged by $18 billion Thursday after comments from the Meta CEO on the company’s earnings call sent its stock price to its steepest decline since October 2022.
Meta beat expectations on revenue and profit but delivered a lighter-than-expected revenue forecast. Zuckerberg told investors that the company would continue to spend billions of dollars investing in areas such as artificial intelligence and the metaverse, even though Meta counts on advertising for 98% of its revenue.
“We’ve historically seen a lot of volatility in our stock during this phase of our product playbook where we’re investing in scaling a new product but aren’t yet monetizing it,” Zuckerberg said on the call.
Zuckerberg owns around 345 million Class A and B shares. With the stock falling by $52.12 on Thursday, the value of his stake sank by about $18 billion to $152 billion by the close of trading.
The 39-year-old programmer founded the company in his Harvard dorm room in 2004, and rebranded it from Facebook to Meta in 2021, signaling to investors his plan to focus on the nonexistent metaverse.
Meta’s Reality Labs division, which houses the hardware and software for developing the metaverse, has posted cumulative losses of $45 billion since 2020, when the company first separated the unit in its financials.
Meta said it plans to spend $35 billion to $40 billion on capital expenditures this year, an increase from its prior forecast.
Zuckerberg’s fortune has swung up and down through the years, as his company’s stock has been particularly volatile. His net worth fell by around $100 billion in 2022. In early 2023, he announced Meta would embark on a “year of efficiency,” a move that helped the stock price triple for the year, bringing Zuckerberg’s net worth up with it.
Thursday wasn’t the worst day ever for Zuckerberg’s bank account. In early 2022, he lost almost $30 billion in a single day, when his company’s stock price tumbled 26% on weak earnings and disappointing guidance.
