The sign is estimated at $100,000 to $200,000, with a start price of $50,000.
This was the very first sign used by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to promote their Apple Computer start-up, and was displayed at the first trade shows Apple attended in 1976.
Some of you may know Gisele Bundchen as the famous Brazilian supermodel. Some of you may know Gisele as the wife of American football player Tom Brady. Some of you may know her as both.
However, What Gisele should be known for is her intelligence, her beauty, and her business acumen. As a matter of fact, back in 2007 when the U.S. dollar was weak, she refused US dollars for some of her contracts and requested Euros instead.
Back in 2007, I created the Gisele Bündchen Stock Index, which tracked the stocks that Gisele was connected to, primarily as a spokesperson or actress. The article can still be found in our Stockerblog predecessor website.
I tracked her stock index against the Dow Jones Industrial Average since then, and over the years, the Gisele stock index has continued to outperform, which you can see in the chart below. Her index even held up better than the Dow during the 2008 stock market crash.
Data Source: Yahoo! Finance: Historical Prices
Most stock market investors and stock traders today prefer to look at the S&P 500 as opposed to the Dow, as it more reflects the stock market as a whole.
So here is the Gisele index versus the S&P 500.
Data Source: Yahoo! Finance: Historical Prices
The following companies were included in the current index with information regarding Gisele’s connection. Over the years, a couple stocks were dropped due to lack of trading data for non-US companies, and added due to additional celeb endorsements.
LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton S.A. (LVMUY) owns several companies that Gisele was the spokesperson for, including Louis Vuitton (a luxury French fashion company), Givenchy ( French retailer of clothing, accessories, perfumes and cosmetics), Guerlain (the oldest perfume house in the world), and Céline (a French ready-to-wear and leather luxury goods brand). Since 2007, the stock has increased by 733%.
She was also the advertising campaign face for Ralph Lauren Corp. (RL). That stock has gone up 27% since 2007.
Gisele was the celebrity endorser for Vivo Participacoes S.A. (VIV), the largest mobile phone service provider in Brazil and in South America. The stock has actually dropped 9% since 2007.
She starred in the comedy, Taxi, in her movie debut, and The Devil Wears Prada , both produced by 20th Century Fox, formerly a division of News Corp. (NWS) at the time the Gisele Index was created. The stock, which was actually involved in a spinoff and skews the return, is down 31% since that time.
For Disney (DIS) she was a celebrity endorser and appeared in the ‘Year of a Million Dreams’ celebration photoshoot. Disney has moved up 241% since 2007.
Gisele was a spokesperson for Procter & Gamble (PG), increased Pantene’s sales in Brazil by 40% during her celebrity endorsement. The stock has had a solid return of 230%.
Finally, she was the spokesperson for the Volkswagon (VLKAY) TV commercials. The stock has had a superior return of 748% since 2007.
Based on the above stocks in the portfolio, the Gisele Index has increased by 215.89%, versus 134.44% for the Dow and 156.79% for the S&P 500.
There is one other stock that Gisele was involved with. She appeared on the Apple (AAPL) ‘Get a Mac’ advertisements to promote the new line of Macintosh’s.
Over the years, I have left Apple out of the index because the return on it was so gargantuan, I thought it would really skew the returns and the charts.
Do you know how much Apple has increased since 2007? The stock has gone up by 5,663%!!!
Here are the charts for the Gisele Index which INCLUDES Apple.
Data Source: Yahoo! Finance: Historical Prices
Data Source: Yahoo! Finance: Historical Prices
By including Apple in the index, the return is boosted to 284%, compared to the 216% without it.
Maybe some of these stocks might look attractive to you at the right price. At some point they should become fashionable, and may continue to outperform.
Prices are beginning of year first trading day close, adjusted for splits, dividends, and capital gains distributions.The Gisele Index is a price-weighted index, similar to the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Do you remember what the FAANG stocks are, or were? MAGA is the New FAANG.
by Fred Fuld III
Do you remember what the FAANG stocks are, or were?
Facebook (FB) (META), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Netflix (NFLX), and Google (GOOG) (GOOGL).
Jim Cramer created the FANG acronym back in 2013 for Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, because he said that these tech stocks were “totally dominant in their markets“.
However, in 2017, he added Apple due to its growth, adding an extra A to the acronym, changing it to FAANG.
Yet, several changes have taken place since then. First, Facebook has changed its name to Meta,along with its symbol, so the letter M has to be used in the acronym.
Second, Netflix is not really a tech stock. It is actually considered an entertainment company in the communications services sector. Plus, many investors no longer consider it a growth stock if you look at the return over the last few years.
Just in the last twelve months, Netflix has dropped over 61%. If you had bought the stock at the beginning of 2018 and held it, you would have barely broken even. If you had bought in in 2019, 2020, or 2021, and held it, you would have a good size loss.
Finally, even though Google changed its name to Alphabet, nobody calls it that, and the company is still keeping the same stock ticker symbols beginning with the letter G.
So that gives us Meta, Amazon, Google, and Apple as the leading tech stocks.
Apple (AAPL) has dropped about 18.7% from its high over the last several months. If you think the stock has bottomed out, and may be on the rise, there is an alternative to just buying the stock outright.
No, I’m not talking about stock options. What I’m referring to is Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) (BRK-B). Do you realize that Apple makes up 47.6% of the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio?
So if you buy Berkshire, that means that almost half your funds are indirectly invested in Apple.
So what else do you get when you buy Berkshire, besides Warren Buffett’s expertise?
Here are some of the other stocks that make up a large portion of the portfolio:
Bank of America (BAC) 13.5%
American Express (AXP) 7.5%
Coca-Cola (KO) 7.2%
Kraft Heinz (KHC) 3.5%
Moodys (MCO) 2.9%
There are actually over 40 stocks in the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio, spread out over a lot of different industries, so it is well diversified.
I’m not recommending Berkshire as an investment because I think the bear market will continue (and I never make any stock recommendations anyway), but if you are bullish on Apple and you don’t mind a little stock market diversification, you might want to take a look at Berkshire, if not now then at some point when you believe the market has bottomed out.
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?
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.
Apple (AAPL) will be holding it annual fall event on September 14 online due to the pandemic. It is expected to announce the release of its iPhone 13.
The big news about the iPhone 13 is that it will have satellite communications, which should work for emergency services, even if you are out of the cell phone range.
The iPhone is also expected to provide an improved camera which would allow auto-focusing with the ultra wide lens. In addition, it should allow the subject to be in focus and make the background blurred, if desired.
One other benefit would be the faster display refresh rates.
The stock is making all-time highs as I write this, reaching 157.26 per share.
We are now entering into earnings season, a time when companies will be reporting and the stocks of those companies may experience more volatility than usual.
If you are interested in doing some earnings plays, the next few weeks will be the time to look for opportunities.
The following are some of the major companies that will be announcing their earnings.
July 14, 2021 before open
BAC, C, DAL, WFC
July 15, 2021 before open
MS, USB
July 20, 2021 after close
CMG, UAL
July 21, 2021 before open
JNJ, KO, VZ
July 22, 2021 before open
AA, LUV, T
July 23, 2021 before open
AXP, SLB
July 27, 2021 before open
GE, UPS
July 27, 2021 after close
AAPL, V
July 28, 2021 before open
MCD, PFE
July 28, 2021 after close
FB, PYPL
Of course, there are many other companies reporting for the month or July, and these dates and times may be subject to change.
You know, if you are thinking of investing in Apple (AAPL) stock, you just might want to consider buying shares of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) (BRK-B) stock, as 40% of the Berkshire portfolio is made up of Apple.
This way, if Apple does well, you participate through Berkshire, and if it doesn’t, at least you have diversification though Berkshire’s ownership of over 45 other stocks.
So let’s look at the rest of Buffett’s portfolio. In the first quarter of the year, he sold out of two companies, Suncor Energy (SU) and Synchrony Financial (SYF).
Warren Buffett has been reducing positions in a couple bank stocks, US Bancorp (USB) and Wells Fargo (WFC). He has also been lightening up on General Motors (GM), Chevron (CVX), Abbvie (ABBV), Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY), Merck (MRK), Stoneco (STNE), Axalta Coating (AXTA), Sirius XM Radio (SIRI), and Liberty Global (LBTYA).
He hasn’t been buying much, but he has been adding to his positions in Verizon (VZ), buying over 12 million additional shares. He also added 17.5 million shares to his Kroger (KR) position, and bought more Restoration Hardware (RH) and Marsh & McLellan (MMC).
There is one brand new stock in the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio., the insurance company Aon (AON). The stock has a trailing price to earnings ratio of 27.5 and a forward P/E of 22.5. It pays a yield of 0.81%.
To see the list of all the Warren Buffett holdings, click HERE.
Maybe some of these stocks will make you as successful as Warren Buffett.
