Tackling some of the biggest stories from the past two weeks in today's pod. From a lawsuit against Apple to March Madness tipping off and in between, it's been an eventful two weeks. We break it down here.
Thanks for listening!
Website: Yourwm.com
Blog
Schedule with me
Tackling some of the biggest stories from the past two weeks in today's pod. From a lawsuit against Apple to March Madness tipping off and in between, it's been an eventful two weeks. We break it down here.
Thanks for listening!
Website: Yourwm.com
Blog
Schedule with me
Hey guys, welcome back to the show. This is the modern outlook. And I'm Eddie Thomas, your host brought to you by wealth management services in Hershey, Pennsylvania. And today, we are just going to jump into a, we have a bi weekly breakdown, a new content piece that we're looking to put out here. And it's gonna be in two versions, you're gonna have a blog version, and then we're gonna have the pod version right now. And I'm just looking to kind of go over the past two weeks and see what exactly has been happening cover three or four stories and just kind of shed some light on some things. And not always is it going to be business and finance. And Mike kind of it from time to time, it'll go outside that scope. But it's just yeah, something fun to put together over the last couple of weeks to keep people up to date on some of the things happening that slip under the radar when life gets busy. So with that, let's jump right into it. And that first topic we have over the past two weeks. And this was one that when I saw it kind of scratched my head a little bit, and I didn't fully understand it. But it's the Department of Justice suing apple. Yes, the iPhone maker apple. And the DOJ has sued Apple stating that it's violating antitrust laws and using the iPhone as an ecosystem to build a monopoly around the smartphone market. So pretty much just that they think Apple has a monopoly around the smartphone market, and how it's doing so and how the DOJ is saying that Apple is doing this. And if you have an iPhone, or any sort of Apple device, you can kind of see the validity and the argument here. But Apple knows what they have. And they know when you control the main device that everyone uses being the iPhone, you then control the other devices that they want to potentially use, and or the apps they want to potentially use. And so what the DOJ is saying is that Apple uses its practices, whether it's its software, or how other devices operate, or apps operate on iPhone software, to make those apps and devices worse. So in turn, you are forced to use an Apple product. And, again, if you have an Apple product, you can kind of see how that is the case. I mean, if you have an iPhone, you probably only gonna buy the Apple Watch, you might buy a different watch, but it won't connect as well as Yeah, watch the Apple Watch does. If you have the iPhone, you're probably gonna buy air pods or some other Apple device for headphones, not gonna go out and get something third party not that it wouldn't work, but it might not work as well as the air pods. And same thing with like the something like the Wallet app is something that they mentioned here, saying that, okay, you if you have the iPhone, you're going to use Apple's Wallet app instead of a third party, wallet, app or messaging. This is the big one, blue bubbles, which is hilarious that companies and the DOJ is making a big deal of something like texting, and how Apple creates this sort of fence around what's cool and not cool to text. And if you have green bubbles, or blue bubbles, or whatever, whatever each means, but that's what they're saying. And you can kind of see that. And everyone's been a group before a group chat, where someone has a green bubble pop up, and it's no longer all blue bubbles, and someone tends to make a comment about it. And so it's all these kinds of things that you don't really think about as a consumer, because it's making all of our lives easier, especially if you have an iPhone. But you can see how that would make a company have somewhat of a monopoly around the market of smartphones, and the devices and apps that are used on them. However, my kind of standpoint on this is Apple is not the only company that creates phones. They're not the only company that creates devices to pair with those phones. And they're not the only company that creates apps to use on those phones. They're just the company that does it best. And I get that is how monopolies form. And that is the role of kind of government of making sure there is no monopoly, because that comes into its own dangerous territory of having one. But is something like this, when those other devices and apps work on iPhones? You kind of have it that okay, you can still use them if you want to. They're just not going to work as well as something that is an Apple brand. What? And so staying somewhat neutral on the opinion right now, Apple did react, and their stock did pull back that day roughly about 4% When this news broke, and that mostly cousin investors look at something like that and they say okay, well this is just something that I don't feel like putting up with over the next weeks, months years until this is settled. and you have that kind of price volatility in the very beginning, my opinion is that Apple was gonna kind of even out. And then if they have some good earnings calls going forward, that you'll see Apple kind of continue the growth that we've seen them have over the past couple years. With that, as of right now, apples has for that pullback and they've kind of stay flat a little bit. They deny everything in this kind of lawsuit. And this isn't even the first time that they've been sued. Over the past 14 year they they've been to three times, and two of them have ended ended in settlements. When companies especially big tech companies get this big lawsuits just kind of find their way at their door. And for good reasons, for bad reasons for nonsense for very valid reasons. You kind of have it all. And so right now you kind of have exactly what I said the DOJ going after Apple hoping they can kind of mitigate some of the power that Apple has. And we'll see what that looks like it's entering a situation now where you're gonna find depending on how this result goes, you'll be interesting to see how Apple reacts and how they continue to create that ecosystem that Apple has famously created, and how they continued to implement that to make sure they're a step ahead of their competitors. But again, this will be years until this is kind of settled. But I did think it was interesting that it actually did happen. Something else that happened in the past two weeks, March Madness tipped off, and both the guys and the females, brackets and tournaments. And it took a day before my bracket was busted. So when I was looking at this, itself, and over the past few weeks, I just want to look at strictly the numbers around what the tournament brings in, especially over the past year or so as NHL has started to make its way into the college ecosystem. And if you're unfamiliar with NHL, really at the base of it, it just allows college players to be paid for their kind of brand and the name they have around themselves. And that was never the case before but it is now and players don't get any money from the tournament. They don't get any paychecks for being in a tournament, they don't get any kind of packages for Hey, thanks for all the awareness and the money we've made throughout this entire month long process. So I wanted to see what the NCAA made. And the numbers are staggering. And I kind of figured they would be. But again, keep in mind that this tournament spanned a few weeks, and 64 teams are in it. It's across different cities throughout the country. And in this time, the NCAA brings about$1 billion of revenue in a year for just this tournament. That is a couple of weeks long, insane numbers already and I could see it. I mean, it's a massive deal. March pretty much shuts down as far as the sports world concern because everyone's focused on March Madness, but $1 billion of revenue, a bigger sum of money, a much, much larger sum of money. And this is an estimate in 2023 that there was$15.5 billion gambled on the tournament throughout the duration of the few weeks that it is ongoing. And I'm sure that number will go up in 2024. And I'm sure it will go up in 2025 and six and seven as sports gambling comes to the forefront more and more. But $15.5 billion, gambled over a couple of weeks. And I'm sure he got some winners, but I'm sure he got a whole lot more losers. And so it's something that, hey, that money print, the tournament prints money. And that's all you could really say about it. But it is exciting to watch so I could see it. Third, and this was this next one I'm going to talk about was actually really interesting. And I think this is a trend we're gonna see over years and years to come. Because depending on how this goes, Mr. Beast and Amazon have struck a deal reportedly worth around$100 million for Mr. Beast to create and produce a show a reality show while competition show on Prime Video, Amazon streaming platform. Again 100 million dollar deal. And if you don't know who Mr. Beast is, his actual name is Jimmy Donaldson. But he is the most popular YouTuber in the world. And he creates these kind of mini versions of this exact show he's going to create on his YouTube channel and his YouTube channel generates hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue per year. Again, he's he's the most popular YouTuber there is. And so Amazon has kind of seen this and went to him and said, Hey, if you're going to do this, we will back you up Here's all the funding, tell us what you want to do. And we will help you create it, and it will go on our platforms exclusively. And this is going to be called the beast games as the show. And it's being touted as the biggest reality competition in television history by Amazon. It's 1000 contestants, and they're competing for $5 million, which is also the biggest payout in television history for a reality competition TV series. I think the one before that was Netflix, when they put out the like real life squid games. That was 4.5 6 million. So this kind of is over that by, you know, the half million. And the interesting part about this is, if the question comes up is, is this going to continue to be the case of streaming platforms going out and going to popular content creators on YouTube? Or on Instagram or Tiktok? Or whatever app? And are they going to pretty much give them a contract to say, hey, instead of doing it there, how about you just do it for us. And this is a step in that direction. It seems like Amazon was in a bidding war with another company, I again, I'm not going to speculate on who that is. So there was another streaming service that was potentially up for this same sort of contract. But again, I'm sure the hoops all these companies have to jump through and the legalities behind it all is a pain. So it looks like Amazon one out. And so it's actually interesting to say, Okay, this YouTuber, who creates all this content on YouTube's platform, and does this all himself and has a massive, massive audience, enough to the point where Amazon says, Hey, here's $100 million, make the show for us, we're gonna put it on our platform. And then all of the risk and everything else is kind of to the wayside for Mr. Beast a YouTuber, because Amazon's backing him, and as long as he can bring a crowd to Prime Video, and as long as they market this correctly, this has every makings, to be one of the biggest shows ever created and produced, because of the backing that he already has generated through YouTube. And now they're now Amazon's reaching a whole brand, not that it's a brand new audience, because everyone watches YouTube, but potentially a demographic of audience that they wouldn't have had before. And we will see, I think, if this works, I wouldn't be surprised to see them continue to take these small steps into finding content creators to make content for their platform. Again, it's something that Mr. Beast is kind of an outlier, because he's, he is that big, he's much bigger than everybody else on YouTube's platform. But there is pockets and spaces there where I think Amazon can use a smaller sum of money, learn some of the content creator, and then potentially have something that is really cool. And also competition for YouTube that YouTube doesn't really have right now, they kind of own operate and run the entire market of user generated content. And so if these other streaming companies start to kind of dip their efforts into that water as well be curious to see what it looks like kind of down the line. But I think you'll have Prime Video, Apple, YouTube, and Netflix all competing for the same eyes. And it'll be interesting to see how it goes. And the last topic, and this one we've seen before, but we're gonna see it again, and we'll see how this one ends this time. It is a US government verse, tick tock, once again. And we've tried to do this, the government's tried to do this in the past, and they've tried to ban Tik Tok. And that's exactly what's happening. Now. They're trying to get to a point where they can either remove Tiktok from bytedance, who is their parent company, who is a China linked tech company. And if they can't remove them from bytedance, then they want that app banned inside the United States. And you see China do this with apps like Facebook, I'm pretty sure and now they're starting to work at Banning iPhones. And you see China kind of block some Western technologies and services from their country. But you haven't really seen it on our side. And you've seen kind of rumblings of it or attempts but we haven't gotten there yet. And this one seems so far, to have the most legs to it, because it's getting through the kind of governmental steps pretty quickly. And the reason being, is the US government has cited tic toc as a national security threat. I believe they already can't have the app on their actual government devices. But I think this is now going to be the most widespread kind of push we have to get rid of it on throughout the entire country. And it's important to remember that while tick tock itself says the operations inside the US are separate from the operations inside China. It's really hard to tell that from The government standpoint, and the government knows that if China and the way they have their last setup for companies ever goes to bite dance and says, Hey, we want all of your data on all of your users across the platform, no matter what country they're in, by dance is going to potentially or there's a very good chance to hand that over. Then China has all of this data on 100 plus million US users. Now, when you look at the US users total, I've seen a number of 100 and 2 million, which I use in the bi weekly breakdown, because I don't want to overstep what that number potentially is. But I've seen as much as 170 million. So it's, it's a lot, it's over 100 million, and it grows rapidly. Tik Tok has been growing in popularity from 2020. To now and it's going to continue to be so. And the US knows that the government knows that. And they see it as a way of they can at least ban this app or get tick tock to remove themselves from bytedance, that will have a little bit more security with regards to the users using this app, and the data that they are sharing. The way we're going to do this or the way the government's going to do this is they're going to give Tiktok five months to remove themselves from by dance. If after that five month period, they're not removed from by dance the parent company, then they will force tick tock to be banned from app stores within the US. For the app stores that are still going to offer tick tock, if any do for consumers inside the US. It will be a $5,000 penalty per user of the app to these App Store providers. Now, the two big app store providers are Apple and Google. So they will be the ones who will be fined$5,000 per user at over 100 million plus users is a massive, massive number that will be fined so and lobbied by the government. So I would venture to say if the government gets this kind of bill through and we pass it, and everyone agrees that tick tock has to release themselves from bytedance. And if they don't, they're banned inside the US, app stores will not carry that app anymore. And Tik Tok will actually just be non usable and won't be something that you can operate inside the US. And like I said, this seems to be the closest or at least with the most conviction that we've had as a government of getting rid of tick tock on consumer devices inside the United States. But ultimately, it'll just like anything else, this has to jump through a ton of hoops and government and we have to make sure we're checking all the legal boxes off. So who knows where it's going to ultimately end up but there was an article that I saw that was very interesting, because anytime you have something like this, it's something that's going to create a lot of noise and generate a lot of media. But these things take time. So just like the DOJ in the Apple case, it's something that we're going to have to wait a little bit to see how this all kind of falls but those are the four things I saw over the past couple of weeks that I thought really caught my eye time to see what the next two weeks brings and do this all over again. But uh, until then guys, stay happy, stay healthy and I will see you. Securities offered through securities America Inc. Member FINRA slash SIPC. advisory services offered through securities America advisors Inc. Wealth Management Services and securities in America are separate entities. The opinions and forecasts expressed are those of the author and may not actually come to pass. This information is subject to change at anytime based on market and other conditions and should not be construed as a recommendation of any specific security or investment plan. Past performance does not guarantee future results.