Good morning. Oh my … I am real early today as I have a situation going on. It is my first day of teaching a class in a number of years and I am terrified that I will run through my planned material much too quickly … causing 34 students to give me a “hate stare” … as they silently pray for the class … and their pain … to end. Meanwhile, there is also a “hate stare” going on right now with investors seeing stock futures on the decline following a trading day which saw the Dow finally reach a new record for the first time this year. Helping, of course, were comments by Fed Chairman Jay Powell that seemed to open the door for a rate cut at the next Fed meeting. Investment manager Schroder conducted a retirement survey and reported that almost half of 401k investors are clamoring for the ability to start investing in private equity. One question I have is to what degree they might move funds out of publicly traded securities and what effect this could have. Also, there needs to be quite a bit of financial understanding needed as some of these holdings don’t have the liquidity (with the ability to sell upon short notice) to which many investors are accustomed. The big news happening later this week will be the earnings release of Nvidia (Wednesday night after the close) as the Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) train seems to continue to be plowing ahead. I, like many, are using it more and more … with interesting results. Related to this I will admit that I was like a kid in a candy store last night using ChatGPT Plus using (for example) a simple prompt such as “show me an image of a guy crying while asking himself ‘why did I buy that stock’?” Within a short time, I had the perfect picture to cut-and-paste into my PowerPoint slide. If you remember, I wrote a short while ago about a friend getting a hole-in-one … for which the odds are quite high. Well, it happened again as another friend in Florida just posted an ace over the weekend … leading me to realize it seems to be coming in waves and I better head out to the course as soon as possible. Speaking of low odds … Powerball tonight … $750 million. Buehler? Buehler? I need to rush out and get a ticket before I forget. On top of this, and my final comment for this morning, is that my rental car is acting up … and upon turning it on I get a message that says: “maintenance required, return to service” … where, of course, the place I got it from is around a half-hour away. If that isn’t enough, I noticed the car’s registration expires this week. I hate having a rental. Maybe one of my students will chauffeur me around for a good grade. Have a great day, Joseph G. Witthohn, CFA Have any questions? Please contact info@teamemerald.com
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