Imagine opening your laptop or cell phone and catching a whiff of your favorite perfume. Scroll back to last summer’s Maine vacation photos and smell the pine forest at your campsite. Digital scent technology can make that happen sooner than you think. Digital scent technology, also called olfactory technology, is an engineering discipline that enables media, such as video games, movies, music and web pages, to sense, transmit, and receive scent-enabled content. Simply put, the day when you can smell through the internet is almost upon us. The market is tiny right now, with less than $20 million in sales,…
Insights & Advice
General Interest
The movies return
The Memorial Day weekend launched the unofficial beginning of the summer season. Movie owners are holding their breath in hopes that consumers, once vaccinated, may start to return to the cinema. Is it a false hope? Much has been written about the demise of the movie theater, even before the world was ravaged by the Coronavirus Pandemic. Sky high prices for tickets and the exorbitant costs of concessionary items like $8 bottles of water and $15 baskets of popcorn had made the movie-going experience almost as costly as a rock concert. At the same time, consumers were being offered the…
The carbon market comes of age
At the beginning of this year, the global price of carbon was $24.05 per ton of CO2. In order to achieve the emissions reduction goals of members of the Paris Agreement, prices need to reach a range of $50-$100 per ton of CO2. That makes buying carbon an attractive investment.The ongoing concerns about climate change have spawned several emission trading schemes over the last decade. The reasoning is simple: if left unchecked, carbon emissions (among other factors) will have a material impact on our environment and will do severe damage to the global economy.The ratification of the Kyoto Protocol of…
Fed puts markets on notice while crypto crashes
It had to happen at some point with economic growth spiking as high as it has, and inflation beginning to creep up. Investors should have expected the Fed to think about a change in policy. This week, we had our first mention of the dreaded “T” word. T is for taper and in the minutes of the Fed’s April FOMC meeting released on Wednesday, the entire financial community jumped on just one phrase: “it might be appropriate at some point” to consider tapering asset purchases if the economy shows “rapid progress.” In other words, the Fed is signaling that they…
Gold regains its mojo
In inflationary environments, investors historically have hedged their bets by buying gold. However, this time around, the precious metal has languished as investors bought alternative investments. But times are changing. The primary alternative to buying gold has been cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin and Ethereum, two of my 2021 buy recommendations (for those with a strong stomach) have enjoyed spectacular gains in 2021. Bitcoin, at one point in May, had gained almost 100%, while Ethereum saw gains of more than 400%. In addition, other commodities held more interest than gold for most investors. In January 2021, I recommended investors focus on some specific…
Inflation fears weigh on investors
Most stocks took it on the chin earlier this week. Technology shares lead the rout, but it didn’t take long before just about everything else followed tech lower. By the end of the week, it was as if nothing had happened. That’s called “chop.” Get used to it. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), which investors use to gauge future inflation, took the lion’s share of the blame for the downdraft in equities. Economists had warned that we should expect a higher monthly reading (0.2%) for April, but the data came in at 0.8%. That computes to a 4.2% price gain…
A labor shortage solution
The hiring boom that was expected in April 2021 fizzled. Last Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report came in at 266,000 jobs gained compared to over a million expected. It was the biggest miss in decades. Politicians and many corporations were quick to provide a ready scapegoat for that failure. They blamed it on the weekly payments of $300 in federal unemployment aid through September 2021, on top of the regular unemployment benefits paid out by the states. In short, the fault apparently lies with the Biden Administration’s stimulus package. If the president and the Democrats had not provided these overly generous…
Are Inflation fears real or imagined?
If you have been grocery shopping lately, there is no question that prices and inflation are going higher. The same can be said for the price of a gallon of gas. But is it a transitory event, or are we at the beginning of an inflationary era not seen in decades? Clearly, commodity prices, which are usually the harbinger of future inflation, are soaring. Copper, oil, sugar, corn, steel, aluminum and lumber, as well as many other food and material prices, are hitting multi-year highs. But it is not just commodities that are seeing a price surge. Shipping costs are…
Fed signals an ‘all clear’ for equities, but the markets don’t care
Investors were bolstered by the Fed’s message this week. Low interest rates and monetary stimulus will remain pillars of the nation’s economic recovery for as long as it takes. Investors were comforted, but not enough to materially move stocks higher. It was indicative that despite bullish news on a variety of fronts, investors ignored the good and focused on the negatives. First quarter earnings results, for example, have been better than good, but not enough to satisfy the bulls. Apple smashed earnings estimates, sending its stock price higher in after-hours trade, but the next day it finished down. It has…
Empty oceans
Oceans cover more than two-thirds of the earth’s surface. For centuries, these bodies of water have supplied us with a bountiful harvest of ocean wildlife and millions of well-paying jobs. Unless something changes, however, the future of fisheries is in serious jeopardy. The demand for fish is growing with aquaculture trends reaching a growth rate of 527% from 1990 to today. At the same time, fish consumption has doubled as well. Declining fisheries, the destruction of the marine habitat, and the near-depression-like economic conditions of more and more coastal fishing communities, is no surprise to most of us. It has…
Stocks hit with possible tax hike
It was a losing week for stocks. Most of the blame can be pinned on a proposal by the Biden Administration to double the capital gains tax on investments. It is not official yet, but investors are counting on an announcement next week. Before you hit the sell button on all those huge capital gains you have accumulated over the last few years, know the facts. Right now, there aren’t any. What we do know is that Joe Biden ran his winning presidential campaign on increasing taxes on the rich and on corporations. He plans to do just that, so…
Our hospitals are in trouble
COVID-19 effectively put a halt to most elective surgeries. As the nation gets vaccinated, however, medical authorities have given the all-clear to a resume those surgeries. But will patients come back? The answer to that question is important to the nation’s hospitals, whose bottom line has suffered as much as, or even more than, most of their patients. Last year, hospitals were forced to shut down surgery in order to create capacity for skyrocketing cases of the coronavirus. But even after beds opened up again (as a result of the reduction in new, serious Covid-19 cases), most patients are still…
Selling dirty
According to a survey performed by AlixPartners (AP), U.S. consumers are the “most anxious” about their health and finances. Chinese consumers rank the lowest in terms of anxiety pertaining to those issues. AP’s April 2021 survey concluded that “half of all global consumers say their spending habits have changed permanently due to the pandemic.” Whether you are a business owner or an investor, it is essential to understand where consumer spending will be directed. To figure out the “where,” we have to understand the “why.” According to the AP survey, nearly one out of every three U.S. consumers identified as being very…
Stocks soar on stronger economy
A combination of stronger economic growth, declining interest rates, and expectations that the economy will get even better pushed the U.S. stock markets to another set of record highs this week. As fears of higher bond yields continue to fade, sectors that do well under lower interest rates took off this week. Commodities in general came back in favor and even the greatest laggard of all—gold—saw some fresh demand. That’s right, the precious metal I least favored at the beginning of the year actually came to life, although it has a long way to go before recapturing its former luster….
A highway of opportunity
Most Americans seem excited and hopeful about the prospects for the Biden Administration’s infrastructure plan. Local politicians as well as their construction buddies are salivating at the possible promise of getting their share of this multi-trillion-dollar prize. But looking beyond the pork barrel, we might want to consider how innovation and technology could help America regain its first-class status in infrastructure. As of 2019, the United States is ranked 13th in the quality of its infrastructure, after countries like Singapore, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom among others. Of course, it may not be a fair comparison since the U.S….