The daily view 6/30/2023: Bitcoin ETF rejection?, Apple $3 trillion, OpenAI sued

1. OpenAI sued A lawsuit claims OpenAI stole ‘massive amounts of personal data,’ including medical records and information about children, to train ChatGPT:

The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI crawled the web to amass huge amounts of data, including vast quantities taken from social-media sites. OpenAI’s propertiatary AI corpus of personal data, WebText2, for example, scraped huge amounts of data from Reddit posts and the websites they linked to, the lawsuit claims.

The data accessed included “private information and private conversations, medical data, information about children — essentially every piece of data exchanged on the internet it could take — without notice to the owners or users of such data, much less with anyone’s permission,” per the lawsuit.

This agrees with earlier posts in which I argue that OpenAI is effectively a giant parasite, and thus is vulnerable to litigation. For its training models, it’s using data that is private and or that it will have to pay for due to high usage consumption. Obviously this will hurt OpenAI’s profits, which are already negative. This is why I would never invest in an AI start-up. The expenses are very high and there is no way to recoup costs from users, who have little or no intent to ever pay for OpenAI’s services. It’s not like Meta or Google, in which finding advertisers is easy. OpenAI has partnered with companies like Quora, but I don’t think this will be enough.

2. Bitcoin ETF rejection imminent?: SEC Says Spot Bitcoin ETF Filings Are Inadequate and SEC spells out bitcoin ETF concerns to asset managers .

A few days ago I predicted that the Blackrock spot Bitcoin ETF would be rejected. Although this is not technically a rejection, the market is treating it as such, with Bitcoin breaking below $30,000 at one point on Friday, a decline of over $1,000. the odds of approval have gotten much worse, and it’s all but certain it will be rejected, along with other recent Bitcoin ETF applications such as by Fidelity.

The ETF filings by such major firms had sparked renewed investor hopes that a bitcoin ETF would finally be approved by the SEC, and revived interest in cyptocurrencies, which have been hit by a series of crypto company meltdowns including the sudden collapse of exchange FTX late last year.

The SEC has rejected dozens of spot bitcoin ETF applications in recent years, including one from Fidelity in January 2022.

In all the cases, it said the filings did not meet the standards designed to prevent fraudulent and manipulative practices and protect investors and the public interest.

As a commenter notes, it’s not gonna happen:

#3 Apple hits $3T market cap as 2023 tech rally continues .

Apple at this point is almost a quasi-government or city-state in terms of its size and influence. It started out selling beige desktops and laptops, then in the late 90s after hitting a major downturn, pivoted to translucent all-in-one computers–the iMac lineup, and then a few years later the iPod and iTunes. These were successful, but nothing like the iPhone, which debuted in in 2007, and also the App Store, the success of which continues to this day. Apple was able to dominate mobile phones after being over a decade late to it.

Crypto/bitcoin, commodities, retailers, miners, and emerging market currencies will keep falling. All money flowing into big tech, the dollar, expensive American real estate, Walmart, and McDonald’s–and correspondingly out of everything else. You can see it in real time (compare performance of Nasdaq to S&P 500). To get an idea of how bad commodities are, oil is 32 percent lower than when Putin invaded Ukraine. Had someone bought on Jan 2022 before news of the invasion, he or she would still be down 20 percent.

Here is the portfolio I am running of 1.5x leveraged tech stocks:

But non-tech stocks can also do well, although not many. Walmart and McDonald’s benefit from more obesity and people trying to save money due to inflation and stagnant wages. Even though McDonald’s is not cheaper than preparing food yourself, people think it’s cheaper, hence why a good investment. Walmart is like the Amazon of offline retail. Likewise, Amazon is the Walmart of online retail. Walmart and McDonald’s do well in any economic environment–high inflation, boom/bust, low inflation, etc.

People think investing is hard or that only ‘pros’ can do it. It is hard if you are fighting the currents. By going with the flow, investing is painless, highly profitable, and effortless. No one wants second-best. No on wants the risks of emerging markets or weak sectors when big tech companies offer unsurpassed market dominance, profits, and growth.