The Market News Reel for this week! Get the most important market news & updates for the week ahead each Monday!
Major headlines, excerpts from news sources and a link to the full article are shown below. "Breaking Thoughts" section is purely our opinion.
Canadian founded Embark Trucks Completes $5B Deal
"On Thursday, that company — Embark Trucks Inc., based out of San Francisco — started trading on the Nasdaq. It’s now made the 26-year-old Canadian one of the youngest heads of a publicly-held business, valued at about US$5 billion.
Embark’s technology is inherently designed for long-haul trips like highways. That distinguishes the company from others too, Rodrigues said, “because we’re building a system that’s a lot simpler and is clearly much safer in that way — you’re passing it off to a human for the last bit of the journey.”
The idea being that while Uber, Google parent Alphabet’s Waymo or General Motors' Cruise have been busy with robotic taxis and figuring out self-driving vehicles within congested cities, Embark looked at the places where those road obstacles aren’t much of a problem." - read more on BNN Bloomberg here
Breaking Thoughts: The self driving car space is the most direct real world AI problem. Almost 50,000 die each year in car accidents in just Canada and the US alone. Obviously human or super human level AI agents, which can never be drunk, distracted or sleepy would crash far less often.
But, the space is riddled with mostly capital burning mirages - Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, Aurora have raised about $20 Billion with almost nothing to show for it. At best you can get a "robotaxi" ride in a small geo-locked neighborhood, at worst you can get nothing from them (i.e. you cannot buy software, a device, a car, or hail a ride). Their lack of data collection and over reliance on 3-D mapping, lidar, and rules based software means they are doomed to never solve general self driving.
Two firms seem to get how to actually solve the problem while offering customers semi-self driving features in between - are Tesla ($TSLA) and Comma.ai. Both collect data from thousands of real world drives then train visual neural networks on that data. From Tesla, highway autopilot is built into their cars and you also have the option to buy their "Full Self Driving Beta" as a software add on. From Comma.ai their software can be downloaded for free but they offer devices for using "openpilot" that can be installed on over 100 existing car types.
Embark is unique in the space as its not trying to solve general self driving, but instead focusing purely on highway driving for trucks. Since both Tesla and Comma.ai have demonstrated that reliable highway driving is achievable we know they will eventually solve the technical challenge. Given that, their addressable market of augmenting where and how truck drivers are needed (less long haul, more short haul/last mile) seems like a much stronger commercial case than a Waymo or Cruise type of firm. If you are considering investing in this risky SPAC transaction, beware of the technical challenges but also the possibilities Embark offers that many other firms in this space do not.
Major Earnings This Week
Monday November 15:
Canoo (GOEV): Expected Q3 earnings of $-0.44 per share
Rackspace Technology (RXT): Expected Q3 earnings of $0.24 per share
Tuesday November 16:
Archimoto (FUV): Expected Q3 earnings of $-0.20 per share
Home Depot (HD): Expected Q3 earnings of $3.40 per share
La-Z-Boy (LZB): Expected Q2 earnings of $0.73 per share
Sea (SE): Expected Q3 earnings of $-0.65 per share
Walmart (WMT): Expected Q3 earnings of $1.40 per share
Wednesday November 17:
Lowe's (LOW): Expected Q3 earnings of $2.35 per share
NVIDIA (NVDA): Expected Q3 earnings of $1.11 per share
Progressive (PGR): Expected Q4 earnings of $1.01 per share
Target (TGT): Expected Q3 earnings of $2.83 per share
TJX (TJX): Expected Q3 earnings of $0.81 per share
Thursday November 18:
Alibaba (BABA): Expected Q2 earnings of $12.36 per share
Canadian Solar (CSIQ): Expected Q3 earnings of $0.18 per share
Macy's (M): Expected Q3 earnings of $0.31 per share
Friday November 19:
Footlocker (FL): Expected Q3 earnings of $1.38 per share
Major IPOs Expected This Week
Monday November 15:
Q4 (TSX: QFOR) investor relationship software is raising up to $100M at a $500M valuation
See you next week!
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