Comment of the Day
Video commentary for April 26th 2022
A link to today's video commentary is posted in the Subscriber's Area.
Some of the topics discussed include: contagion spreading into the commodities and megacaps as correction intensifies, gold, oil and natural gas firm, shipping comapnies steady, China promises assistance but is shy on delivering as COVID spreads, Treasuries begin to steady as growth slows.
Email of the day on industrial metals miners
“All the big mining companies coming down 20-25 pct in 4 to 5 days. pretty scary to me. what am I missing? Beside talk about the Fed raising interest rates in May with 0,5 pct and a growth scare or the lockdowns in China? Any other reasons? Should we now buy the miners again with the positive future ahead? Gold and copper also look attractive now. your opinion please”
My view - Thank you for this question which may be of interest to the Collective. Ultimately, the question can be distilled down to whether we believe the rest of the world is going to invest in enough infrastructure to outpace a significant economic slowdown in China. The answer is not necessarily binary. We probably get one first, then the other.
Eoin's personal portfolio: fixed income investment position initiated
One of the questions subscribers as most often is how to find details of my open trades. To make it easier I will simply repost the latest summary daily until there is a change.
Russia to Halt Gas to Poland on Wednesday in Major Escalation
This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
Moscow appears to be making good on a threat to halt gas supplies to countries that refuse President Vladimir Putin’s new demand to pay for the crucial fuel in rubles. Europe has said that doing so would breach sanctions and strengthen Russia’s hand. Poland has been particularly vociferous in its criticism of Russia and has refused to comply with the new terms.
My view - The energy volatility from the Russian invasion will continue to be a source of worry for the global economy for as long as sanctions are in place. That’s likely to be at least a few years and will weigh more heavily on countries lying close to Ukraine.
I helped build ByteDance's vast censorship machine
This article from Protocol may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
Our role was to make sure that low-level content moderators could find "harmful and dangerous content" as soon as possible, just like fishing out needles from an ocean. And we were tasked with improving censorship efficiency. That is, use as few people as possible to detect as much content as possible that violated ByteDance's community guidelines. I do not recall any major political blowback from the Chinese government during my time at ByteDance, meaning we did our jobs.
It was certainly not a job I'd tell my friends and family about with pride. When they asked what I did at ByteDance, I usually told them I deleted posts (删帖). Some of my friends would say, "Now I know who gutted my account." The tools I helped create can also help fight dangers like fake news. But in China, one primary function of these technologies is to censor speech and erase collective memories of major events, however infrequently this function gets used.
Dr. Li warned his colleagues and friends about an unknown virus that was encroaching on hospitals in Wuhan. He was punished for that. And for weeks, we had no idea what was really happening because of authorities' cover-up of the severity of the crisis. Around this time last year, many Chinese tech companies were actively deleting posts, videos, diaries and pictures that were not part of the "correct collective memory" that China's governments would later approve. Just imagine: Had any social media platform been able to reject the government's censorship directives and retain Dr. Li and other whistleblowers' warnings, perhaps millions of lives would have been saved today.
My view - The thing I find most interesting is how these kinds of stories are proliferating. It’s not like Chinese censorship of ideas is new. It is a measure of how much the West’s relationship with China has soured that the appetite for this kind of critical content is sustaining large numbers of articles.
The Chart Seminar June 6th & 7th in London
Now in its 53rd year, the first venue for The Chart Seminar in the post pandemic era will be in London on June 6th and 7th at the Army & Navy Club.
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Fuller Treacy Money Subscriber rate: £850
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