The Market News Reel for the week of September 27th! 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.
Tesla Releases its Full Self Driving Beta in the US
"After months of waiting, Tesla owners who wish to take part in the company’s FSD Beta program could now formally request the advanced driver-assist system to be loaded into their vehicle. The release of the “Request FSD Beta” button comes before the rollout of FSD Beta 10.1, which is expected to be distributed to the company’s testers over the weekend.
The company further made it clear that while FSD Beta would provide vehicles with advanced driver-assist capabilities that would enable navigation on areas such as inner-city roads, “FSD Beta does not make (vehicles) autonomous.” Tesla also made it clear that access to the advanced driver-assist system could be revoked at any time." - read more on Teslarati here
Breaking Thoughts: Tesla has been developing self driving software & hardware since at least 2015. Since 2020, about 2,000 lucky Tesla owners were part of the beta for "Full Self Driving" (FSD).
This expansion of the beta program to all US owners, who purchased FSD software (a ~$10,000 add on), and who pass a safe/responsible driving evaluation will likely total about 100,000 people (~1M USA Tesla's x <25% FSD x <50% acceptance = ~100k).
With additional users they will be able to collect more data for their AI team to train its neural networks further improving performance. Achieving level 4 or 5 self driving, would completely reshape Tesla vehicles into a Software + Entertainment (in car gaming, media, apps) + Transport Service platform.
While this may still be several years away (or longer), the progress has been remarkable. Below is a video of FSD beta in action!
China "Bans" Crypto... Again
"China took its most forceful action so far against cryptocurrencies by saying crypto-transactions are illegal. But Beijing stopped short of prohibiting possession, shielding bitcoin from long-term price pressure amid an ongoing crackdown, analysts said.
Friday's move, "seems to us to be a reaction to what news [China] had earlier this week with Evergrande," Chris Kline, COO and co-founder of Bitcoin IRA, told Insider." - read more on Yahoo here
Breaking Thoughts: China has had a rough few weeks, with Evergrande seemingly bailed out or supported by the government to prevent collapse, its Tech sector values near all time lows, and other economic headwinds...they probably didn't need to score this unforced own goal.
While crypto markets declined heavily on the news, they have since recovered slightly and stabilized. Perhaps investors/users/traders remembered that that China has announced bans on various aspects of crypto use trading, mining, etc. every year for the last few years without much effect (in part due to crypto's decentralized nature & enforcement challenges).
In the long run China will likely make its own government issued crypto for its citizens while the rest of the world continues to innovate in the space on a global scale. After all, Facebook & Google are also banned in China but that hasn't stopped them from being worth trillions of dollars.
We described & anticipated these types of issues in our post "The Complete Guide to Investing in Cryptocurrencies".
Major Earnings This Week
Monday September 27:
Aurora Cannabis (ACB): Expected Q4 earnings of $-0.27 per share
Tuesday September 28:
IHS Markit (INFO): Expected Q3 earnings of $0.83 per share
Micron Technology (MU): Expected Q4 earnings of $2.33 per share
Thursday September 30:
Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY): Expected Q2 earnings of $0.52 per share
Carmax (KMX): Expected Q2 earnings of $1.89 per share
Major IPOs Expected This Week
Friday October 1:
First Watch Restaurant Group (FWRG) raising up to $190M at a $1B valuation
See you next week!
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