Good Monday Morning, and it’s time to get back to work.
Daylight – Set aside the Galaxy 7 smartphones and washing machines blowing up, Samsung announced first thing this morning it will pay $8 billion for Harmon Industries, a chipmaker for the automotive technology industry. Chipmaker consolidation continues. By the way, instead of sending out repairmen to fix the 10-minute washing machine problem, Samsung is happily refunding online the $341.00, average cost of the Washing machine. Also, you should know JCP has rolled out appliances in 500 of its stores, a business line where they have no history or heritage. When Mr. Penny started the store, the idea was to sell “work clothes” – not to wash them. What a whopper mistake. Yes, they have Samsung washing machines.
M&A – Adobe has agreed to acquire TubeMogul, an advertising software platform, for about $540 million in net debt and cash.
Dolan Family Ventures, a tech investment firm founded by ex-Cablevision executives Kristin and James Dolan, has acquired Analytics Media Group, a data analytics company.
Authorea has acquired The Winnower, an online science publishing platform.
Economics – The stock market showed it is easily seduced and sparked a Never Trump to a Maybe Trump rally, as Wall Street realized mid-morning last Wednesday that tax cuts and big spending budgets are the future.
Here is what is now in the past: Baby Doe’s – dead on election. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), far reaching U.S. trade agreement with 11 other Pacific Rim nations, had been on a slow and steady track in Congress, but is now deader than a doornail in discussions. The TPP would have established the rules of commerce that would rope both sides of the Pacific together into a 21st century economy, while cementing the United States alliance with Asia. It’s called global commerce leadership, but it was never explained and was being negotiated in the shadows of Washington D.C. Kevin Kester, an Entrepreneur cattle rancher, said lost sales without TPP would cost his industry $400,000 per day, but these lost sales might be made up in manufacturing, where we will now have a President who will pick the phone up and call CEOs at Carrier and Ford and ask what do we need to do to keep your company in the U.S.? Trump will not go near TPP.
By the way, you should also know another broad trade deal is still being negotiated – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnerships between Europe and the the United States. Same deal opening more markets and access between U.S. and Europe. They canceled Friday’s scheduled negotiation meeting – another Baby DOE’s: dead on election.
Buzzard’s Roost – Skybomb gives us a big lesson in Entrepreneurship. Twitter announced Skybomb “is in Africa.” Skybomb is a cuckoo bird, always known in the wild kingdom and among professional bird watchers as a cynical freeloader and not-so-great flier. That perception was just turned on its head with the help of new tracking technology that showed, for the first time, the cuckoo bird’s route to its winter getaway, flying from Beijing to Africa, crossing dozens of countries, one ocean and thousands of miles. Skybomb was fitted with a satellite tag in May at the Hanshiqiao Wetland in Beijing and by late October, he had flown to Africa, humbling the ecologist experts who all had mostly guessed Skybomb would fly somewhere in Southeast Asia for a winter-rest.
Instead, Skybomb took a breathtaking gamble – in one lunge without stopping from central India, Skybomb took out across the Indian Ocean to Africa, flying roughly 2,600 feet above the sea often in crosswinds, but a tailwind would seem to catch him in the nick of time – a four-day flight without rest. Entrepreneurial Lesson – what would satellite tag technology tell you about your flock? It is not what we are wired to do, but measuring and tracking dispels myths on who we think are cuckoos and maybe some eagles who don’t fly so high. No doubt Skybomb is an Entrepreneur – how many times have we heard, “That Entrepreneur is cuckoo?” Maybe so. Most of our long formed perceptions without data are generally wrong – different than immediate gut feeling, which is generally right.
Hot – Investors were expected to pour a net $157 billion into emerging markets by the end of the year, but instead are dumping emerging market assets as fast as they can. All currencies, including the Russian ruble, are taking a beating against the U.S. dollar. The cuckoo bird bet is buy dollars with the Trump regime taking charge.
Culture – Tonight, two visually stunning events: supermoon and a six-part Mars series on National Geographic at 9 p.m. EST. Watch Ron Howard’s big new techno-colonial docudrama “Mars,” where Howard depicts the selection and settlement of humans on our nearest planet, and then go outside and see tonight’s supermoon, which occurs when the moon becomes full on the same day as its pedigree – the point in the moon’s orbit when it is closest to earth. This supermoon is 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than any moon since 1948 and will not be so again until 2034.
Live Rounds – By the way, Native Americans called the November full moon a “Beaver Moon,” because it arrives at the time of the year when fur trappers hunted the dam-building animals. Yes, a month from today, another slightly smaller supermoon will appear, but will be overshadowed by another sight to behold – a Gemini meteor shower. In other words, meteors spraying and shooting to look like they are coming from the constellation of Gemini. Of course, the pseudoscience of astrology tells us November 8 was already baked in the air. Don’t miss Mars or the moon.
Investment Banking – Trump’s people are already leaking out lowering expectations on a full repeal of not just Obama Care, but also Dodd Frank, a sweeping law to semi-regulate banks. By the way, Dodd Frank created the National Consumer Finance Board that was the first to call out Wells Fargo’s shenanigans and stop it. RARE – results are really everything.
Hedge Funds – Bonds plunged last week by more than $1 trillion – more than $1 trillion was wiped off the value of bonds, as Wall Street came to grips with the fact that Trumpeconomics will mean big boosts of spending with more inflation. Gold.
Spotlight – Many of our members like Peter Thiel a great deal, as he co-founded PayPal, funded Facebook and dethroned Gawker – a true leader in Silicon Valley. I will float some possible election good news – we will see more of Thiel and less of Mark Cuban. By the way, Cuban’s election day hedge bombed not only politically with Clinton, but also financially as he bet the market would bomb with a Trump victory. That’s not like Skybomb, who just crushed it on his gamble to fly over the ocean. By the way, to tag Skybomb with the technology, they snared him in a thin net with sounds of a fake mating call. Awful.
Deal Stream>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
IPO – Gadsden Growth Properties, a real estate investment trust focused on mismanaged commercial properties, has filed for a $58 million IPO.
WildHorse Resource Development, an oil and gas E&P, has filed to raise up to $650 million in an IPO.
Exits – American Capital Energy & Infrastructure has sold all its energy investments, which it made over a three-year period.
Venture Capital – Intuity Medical, a developer of blood glucose monitoring systems for diabetes management, raised $40 million.
ReVision Optics, a developer of implantable presbyopia-correcting corneal inlay technology, raised $32 million in funding.
Singular, a marketing analytics company, raised $15 million.
Vacasa, a vacation rental management company, raised an additional $15 million.
PillDrill, a smart medication tracking system, raised $3 million.
Heureka Software, a cyber security company, raised $1.1 million.
Nightingale Security, an autonomous robotic service, has secured funding from Impact Venture Capital.
Private Equity – Windjammer Capital Investors has acquired Advanced Instruments, a company that designs, manufactures, and markets laboratory products.
Riordan, Lewis & Haden has invested in Utegration, a provider of consulting, customization and implementation software for the utility industry.
And that’s what’s ahead, Cliff
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