The Infrastructure Bill Passed: Here’s What’s Included

by Fred Fuld III

The new infrastructure bill went to a vote last night, Friday, November 5, passing 228 to 206, with 13 Republicans joining all but 6 Democrats in supporting the legislation.

First, the various names of the bill:

Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF)
Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal
INVEST in America Act
Infrastructure Bill

Details about what is included can be found at Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

Here is a summary:

$110 billion for roads and bridges
$66 billion for Amtrak
$65 billion for broadband Internet
$65 billion for the electric grid
$55 billion for clean drinking water
$48 billion for water infrastructure improvements
$39 billion for public transit
$25 billion for airports
$11 billion for transportation safety programs
$7.5 billion for s network of electric-vehicle chargers along highways
$5 billion for zero-emission buses including electric school buses
$2.5 billion for ferries

If you want to read the whole bill, you can check out H.R.3684.

Year End Stock Market Holidays

If you are interested in knowing whether or not the stock market will be open on Veterans Day (November 11) or the day after Thanksgiving (November 26) or another of the other days that are coming up before the end of the year, you have come to the right place.

You might want to bookmark the following:

Holiday	Day	NYSE	NASDAQ
Veterans Day	Thursday, November 11	Open	Open
Thanksgiving Day	Thursday, November 25	Closed	Closed
Day After Thanksgiving	Friday, November 25	Early close 1 pm ET, 10 am PT	Early close 1 pm ET, 10 am PT
Christmas Day observed (Christmas Eve)	Friday, December 24 (Christmas holiday observed)	Closed	Closed
New Years Eve	Friday, December 31	Open	Open
New Year’s Day 2022	Saturday, January 1, 2022	Closed (Saturday normally closed)	Closed

Happy Holidays!!!

The Largest Company Right Now: Not Tesla or Apple or Amazon

by Fred Fuld III

At the time this is being written, 1:09 am PT on October 29, 2021, the largest US publicly traded company by market cap is Microsoft (MSFT) at $2.478 trillion.

In second position is Apple at $2.462 trillion.

Surprisingly, Google, I mean Alphabet (GOOGL) is ahead of Amazon (AMZN), Tesla (TSLA), and Facebook (FB), I mean Meta. Alphabet has a market cap of $1.956 trillion.

Check out the list below. Market cap values are in trillion dollars.

MSFT	2.478
AAPL	2.462
GOOGL	1.956
AMZN	1.698
TSLA	1.104
FB	0.902

Do you think we will ever see quadrillion dollar companies?

Stocks Going Ex Dividend in November 2021

The following is a short list of some of the many stocks going ex dividend during the next month.

Many traders and investors use the stock trading technique called ‘Buying Dividends,’ also commonly referred to as ‘Dividend Capture.’ This is the strategy of buying stocks before the ex dividend date and selling the stock shortly after the ex date at about the same price, yet still being entitled to the dividend.

This technique generally works in bull markets and flat or choppy markets, but you need to avoid the strategy during bear markets. In order to be entitled to the dividend, you have to buy the stock before the ex-dividend date, and you can’t sell the stock until after the ex date.

The actual dividend may not be paid for another few weeks. WallStreetNewsNetwork.com has compiled a downloadable and sortable list of the stocks going ex dividend in the near future. The list contains many dividend paying companies, lots with market caps over $500 million, and some with yields over 2%. Here are a few examples showing the stock symbol, the ex-dividend date, the periodic dividend amount.

Realty Income Corporation (O)	11/1/2021	0.236	3.95%
Intel Corporation (INTC)	11/4/2021	0.347	2.81%
American Electric Power Company (AEP)	11/9/2021	0.78	3.65%
Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. (WBA)	11/12/2021	0.477	3.88%
Target Corporation (TGT)	11/16/2021	0.90	1.41%
Discover Financial Services (DFS)	11/23/2021	0.50	1.60%
DuPont de Nemours, Inc. (DD)	11/29/2021	0.30	1.66%
Lockheed Martin Corporation (LMT)	11/30/2021	2.80	2.99%

The additional ex-dividend stocks can be found HERE . (If you have been to the page before, and the latest link doesn’t show up, you may have to empty your cache.) If you like dividend stocks, you should check out some of the other high yield stock lists at WSTNN.com HERE .

Dividend definitions:

Declaration date: the day that the company declares that there is going to be an upcoming dividend.

Ex-dividend date: the day on which if you buy the stock, you would not be entitled to that particular dividend; or the first day on which a shareholder can sell the shares and still be entitled to the dividend.

Record date: the day when you must be on the company’s books as a shareholder to receive the dividend. The ex-dividend date is normally set for stocks at two business days before the record date.

Payment date: the day on which the dividend payment is actually made, which can be as long at two months after the ex date.

Don’t forget to reconfirm the ex-dividend date with the company before implementing this technique.

Disclosure: Author did not own any of the above at the time the article was written; affiliate links are on this page.

The Future of Artificial Intelligence: Can You Invest In It Now?

by Fred Fuld III

Artificial intelligence, also known as AI, is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by humans.
AI applications include advanced web search engines, recommendation systems, speech recognition, self-driving cars, and much more. Now AI is involved in the areas of writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and graphics.

This Woman Does Not Exist

First, let’s start out with art. The woman that you see above was created with artificial intelligence (and a little input from me). This person does not exist in real life.

I don’t consider myself an artist, but with the help of a website called ArtBreeder.com, I was able to adjust such things as the ethnicity, eye color, hair color, happiness, age, and many other features.

I could have even added eyeglasses, different earrings, makeup, and various aspects of the picture itself, such as color hues, brightness, and sharpness.

And that is only the beginning. I could have even merged her image with another image.

The best part is that you can try it out for free.

Let me give you one more example. I took the image of Benjamin Franklin, from the $100 bill, and made him younger with some facial hair.

Notice the difference? Incredible technology. You should give it a try.

Who Wrote This?

Now I’m going to give you one more example of AI, this time in the form of writing. You can actually use AI to write non-fiction articles and even fiction.

Check out the following in italics. It is an article that I had a website called ShortlyAI.com write, that based on a starting informative sentence, will write a passage or article for you.

Read it and see if you think a software program could have written this.

It is amazing what artificial intelligence can do now. Websites created by researchers have been able to write text and create pictures that seem like a person wrote them. This is the future of AI and it is amazing what we can learn in this new point in history.

Artificial intelligence can perform amazing tasks, from writing articles, pictures, music, etc. The future of AI will bring us closer to robots taking over many jobs from humans. In the future artificial intelligence may be capable of all these things without any help from a human being.

This futuristic idea is not new and journalists have been talking about this for years. The problem with all this new technology is that it may take away certain jobs from humans and make them obsolete. So robots and computer programs could replace humans at some point in the future.

The AI industry has grown rapidly in the past few years and people are still trying to figure out how to use it correctly. The things that artificial intelligence can do today are amazing and we will look back on this time as the beginning of a new revolution.

The future of AI will also bring us to the point where AI will think for itself, not just work on specific tasks. AI is able to learn and grow and help humans with projects. AI will be able to do things by itself that we cannot even imagine at this time.

Artificial intelligence will continue to get better at more tasks, from writing articles, pictures, music, and other media.

Not bad for a computer. Obviously, it could use a little tweaking and some additional information, but it should give you a good idea of what AI can do. Give it a try.

How to Invest in AI

Unfortunately, there are not really any pure plays in the artificial intelligence arena. Most of the major companies are involved in AI in some way. These stocks include:

Alphabet Inc. (GOOG)
Apple Inc. (AAPL)
Amazon (AMZN)
Twilio Inc. (TWLO)
ServiceNow, Inc. (NOW)
NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA)
QUALCOMM Incorporated (QCOM)
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)
Splunk Inc. (SPLK)
DocuSign, Inc. (DOCU)
CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. (CRWD)
and many others.

One of the closest pure plays is C3.ai, Inc. (AI), with the appropriate stock ticker symbol. The company is an enterprise artificial intelligence software company with customers around the world. This $4.7 billion market cap company is currently generating negative earnings. Revenues for the latest reported year rose by over 17%. The company has no long term debt. 18% of the float is short.

Another pure play is Remark Holdings (MARK), markets its AI-based products and services under the Remark AI brand in the United States; and under the KanKan brand in China. The stock has a market cap of $228 million. Revenues for the latest reported year rose by over 100%. The short percent of float is 12%.

Maybe one of these days, AI will come up with a way of beating the stock market.

Disclosure: Author owns AAPL, AMZN at the time the article was written.

Affiliate links on this page.

What the New Name for Facebook Will Be

In case you haven’t heard, Facebook (FB) has announced that it is planning on changing its name in order to rebrand as a met averse company. This plan is supposed to help the company distance itself from the issues that the Facebook division has been having.

Remember, that Facebook owns Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and many other companies.

The announcement is expected to be made next week.

An online gambling website, SportsBetting.ag, has put together a list of potential names and their odds of being selected.

The name with the best odds on the list is Virtuel, with Connect and Horizon tied for second place.

Here is the list of possible names along with the odds:

Virtuel 4-1
Connect 5-1
Horizon 5-1
Ecoverse 7-1
Metabook 8-1
Immerse 8-1
Omniverse 10-1
Persistem 12-1
Ecompass 12-1
Metanet 14-1
Sodigeco 20-1
MetaRack 25-1
Openverse 25-1
MetaLand 33-1
MetaLife 33-1
Dataverse 33-1
MetaMatrix 40-1
WeOwn 40-1
MyFace 50-1
Lifelog 50-1
ZuckRack 66-1
Subversive 66-1
MetaMark 80-1
MetaBeast 80-1
Zuckers 100-1

I’m surprised that the name Zuck wasn’t;t on the list. It’s a nice short, four-letter, easy-to-remember name.

The site is also offering bets on whether Mark Zuckerberg will resign as CEO before 2023. The results are:

Yes 3-2
No 1-2
which implies that there is a 66.7% probability that Zuckerberg will not resign

So, what do you think would be the best name for the company?

Disclosure: Author has a long biased option position in FB.

Top Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Stocks

Maybe you have heard of cryptocurrencies but you’ve been concerned about investing in them. Or maybe you have dipped your toe into bitcoin, but want to diversify your crypto holdings in another asset class.

You might want to look into investing in cryptocurrency stocks. These are companies that either mine for crypto, own crypto, or provide ownership and trading services for cryptocurrencies.

Coinbase (COIN) is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States. This $74 billion market cap company trades at 21 times trailing earnings and 47 times forward earnings.

MicroStrategy (MSTR) is a business intelligence company that has spent over $2.2 billion purchasing Bitcoin. The stock has a forward price to earnings ratio of 105.

PayPal Holdings (PYPL), the online payments company, now allows the purchasing and trading of cryptocurrencies. The stock has a trailing P/E ratio of 65 and a forward PE of 46.

Square (SQ ) is another financial services company that has invested about half a billion dollars in Bitcoin. It has a sky high trailing ratio of 225, but a forward PE of 103.

Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA) is a patent holding company which has purchased Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining equipment, and is involved in a joint venture to create a bitcoin data center. The stock has a forward PE of 12.

Voyager Digital (VYGVF) is involved in a digital platform to trade cryptocurrencies. The stock has a forward PE of 18.

Galaxy Digital Holdings (BRPHF) is a digital asset management company, which trades at 6.5 times trailing earnings and 13 times forward earnings.

Of course, you can alway buy a blockchain ETF, such asAmplify Transformational Data Sharing ETF (BLOK), which includes many of these stocks.

Also, stay tuned for a pure play bitcoin ETF that will invest in bitcoin directly.

Disclosure: Author has a long position in COIN and PYPL.

Price of a Gallon of Gasoline Around the World and Across the US

You may have been reading about the gas shortage in the United Kingdom, with long lines forming at the pumps. Even if British drivers can find a gas station with petroleum available, they may have to wait over an hour to fill their tank.

Hopefully, this won’t happen in the United States like it did in the 1970s.

Yet, the price of gasoline at the pump in the US, has been increasing with prices around six dollars gallon for high octane gas in California.

Have you ever wondered how the US gas prices compare to other countries and how prices compare across the United States? The following is a selection of prices per gallon in US dollars from various American cities and countries around the world, based on recent averages.

Prices per Gallon of Gasoline Around the World

Hong Kong	$9.72
Italy	$7.43
UK	$7.08
Switzerland	$6.62
Japan	$5.29
India	$5.26
US – San Francisco	$4.69
Canada	$4.64
US – Los Angeles	$4.64
China	$4.44
Australia	$4.29
US – Chicago	$4.23
Mexico	$4.18
US – New York	$3.62
US – AVERAGE	$3.54
US – Oklahoma City	$3.25
US – Austin	$3.18
Russia	$2.61
Saudi Arabia	$2.35
Iran	$0.23
Venezuela	$0.08

Investing in Old Collectable Baseball Cards: How to Get a Share for Free

by Fred Fuld III

Did you collect baseball cards or other sports cards when you were a kid? Did you save your collection?

Hopefully you did, and hopefully your collection is in good condition, because you could be sitting on a lot of money.

If your mother threw away your collection after you moved out, not to worry. You can still build your collection again, albeit at a much higher price.

Some investors are even looking at sports cards and other memorabilia as long term investments and short term trading vehicles.

This is done through shares in these cards, just like shares of stock, through a company called Collectable, and the shares are registered with the SEC.

The company offers IPOs (Initial Public Offerings) in shares of rare sports cards. After 90 days, the shares start trading like regular stocks.

Collectible has already had substantial buyout offers on some of its cards. Just one example from a few months ago. Collectable received an offer to buy out the Wilt Chamberlain 1954 High School Full Uniform for $632,000. The uniform was IPOed on Collectable on December 10, 2020, for $316,000. The asset had been trading on Collectable’s secondary market at $442,400.

As another example, back inn April, Collectable received an offer to acquire a 1979 Wayne Gretzky card for $225,000 which had its IPO in December at $67,000. Including Collectable’s equity interests in the offering and broker dealer transaction fees, the offer represented a 213.8% premium over the price investors paid on the IPO.

Collectable is now offering a free share of a collectable sports card or other memorabilia, just for signing up. They give you a free share and me a free share.

If you are interested, click HERE.

Just remember, I never recommend collectables as investments. Don’t forget to check out my article called Last month I bought a Racehorse, an NFT, and a Collectable Baseball Card: Are We In a Bubble?

Affiliate links on this page

Stocks Going Ex Dividend in October 2021

The following is a short list of some of the many stocks going ex dividend during the next month.

Physicians Realty Trust (DOC)	10/1/2021	0.23	5.02%
J P Morgan Chase & Co (JPM)	10/5/2021	1.00	2.45%
Oracle Corporation (ORCL)	10/8/2021	0.32	1.42%
Abbott Laboratories (ABT)	10/14/2021	0.45	1.45%
Lowe’s Companies, Inc. (LOW)	10/19/2021	0.80	1.54%
Clorox Company (CLX)	10/26/2021	1.16	2.82%
Texas Instruments (TXN)	10/29/2021	1.15	2.29%

Dividend definitions:

Declaration date: the day that the company declares that there is going to be an upcoming dividend.

Payment date: the day on which the dividend payment is actually made, which can be as long at two months after the ex date.

Don’t forget to reconfirm the ex-dividend date with the company before implementing this technique.

Disclosure: Author did not own any of the above at the time the article was written; affiliate links are on this page.