When Dan knocks 🚪
Vaccine progress, BTC rally, and tax relief.
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Market summary: 📊
Another straight green day in India, with investors now eyeing 50,000 levels for Sensex for early 2021. Similar enthusiasm continued in the US, with non-tech particularly ending a strong day.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.13%
Nasdaq 100 - up 0.015%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.35%
Sensex - up 0.27%
Intel’s savior knocks on the door 🚪
Dan Loeb, a famed activist investor on Wall Street, has amassed a $1B+ stake in Intel and is now pushing the management of the company to take hard strategic steps to change the fate of the declining business.
To remind you, Intel has been losing market share in the PC and datacenter business. Rivals like AMD are quickly catching up with equally promising PC processors. In datacenters, GPUs and other data-acceleration chips from Nvidia, AMD, Xilinx are displacing Intel’s expensive CPUs as a better alternative for data-intensive computing.
On the other hand, Intel’s manufacturing problems see no end. Semiconductor foundries that exclusively focus on making sure they have the best manufacturing facilities (like Taiwan Semi, Samsung) are outpacing Intel’s fabrication leadership. Intel is limping along with repeated glitches in its factories, as its “integrated” approach that focuses on chip design as well as manufacturing divides the company’s focus. They stand attacked in all directions.
All of this was weighing on new business coming through the door, as well as on the sentiment of the people working at Intel, who are abandoning ship to go work for other companies.
What’s next—a few months ago when the same Dan Loeb wrote a letter to Disney management to focus on streaming and forget about everything else, people initially laughed it off, but then in a few weeks management was dancing to Dan’s music, proposing a revised streaming-first strategy and guiding for 200M+ subscribers.
In simple words, Dan plays to win. His track record of turning important but periodically out of favor businesses around is stupendous.
Intel management barely has a choice but to follow the guidance of the team at Third Point (Dan’s Hedge fund), untangle their mud-stuck rear wheel, and drive off in a direction that brings the company to renewed growth. Expect management to come out with a concrete plan soon.
The unyielding rally 📈
Bitcoin’s rally is now just short of booking $30,000. Fans, champions, and ardent supporters can’t stop touting the currency’s renewed purpose, while the rest of us watch in awe. Eyes are set for $100K by the end of 2021, but if history offers any evidence, no highs come without gut wrenching falls in this game. So hope peasants like yours truly get a chance to hop in :P
In other news, further boiling the sentiment, a prominent football player in the US (not soccer, the rugby kinda football) will collect 50% of his $15 million paycheck in Bitcoin. There was no legit way he could receive the entire amount, until an influencer-backed payment processing company agreed to work to get these “coins” in his account.
Influencer’s rolling fintech apps, paying tens of millions to sportsmen, in Bitcoin. 2020, so aptly on brand.
Today in vaccines 💉
The UK becomes the first country to formally approve the Oxford Uni & Astra-Zeneca COVID-19 vaccine and rollout is expected to begin next week.
In other news, a nurse in the US who had taken the Pfizer vaccine somehow still contracted COVID-19, adding more confusion to the debate of the efficacy of the doses and the duration between 2 doses. However, the patient's case is not a severe form of the disease, and is in line with Pfizer’s pre-rollout claims.
India is still sitting on the emergency approval of the Oxford + Astra-Zeneca candidate, which is the only viable vaccine candidate capable of mass distribution around here.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
💰 Some tax relief for ya - GOI understands how badly you hate doing taxes, and the deadline to file for this year has been pushed from Dec 31 to Jan 10 for individual taxpayers.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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