🍋 Meta Wins Xmas

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Short Squeez
December 28, 2021

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"(Gold) gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.” – Warren Buffett

Good Morning! S&P 500 recorded its 69th record close of 2021 yesterday (nice). Goldman Sachs is maintaining its hard stance on returning to office. All employees coming into US offices will be required to get booster shots by Feb. 1 and in the meantime, mandatory testing will double to twice weekly. Meanwhile, Airbnb is celebrating grinch szn and planning to crack down on New Year's Eve parties; customers who don't have positive reviews will be subject to restrictions. The Giving Pledge has announced that 14 more billionaires, including the CEOs of DoorDash and Pinterest, have promised to donate more than half their fortunes (raising total to 231 philanthropists from 28 countries).

For those looking for career development and/or new work opportunities, check out today's sponsor Tal&Dev, your personal digital career compass.

1. Story of the Day: Meta Wins Xmas

Meta (ex. Facebook) manifested a Meta Xmas by its name change. The virtual reality app, Oculus, owned by Meta was the most popular in Apple’s app store over the festive period. It’s the app you have to download to manage the VR Oculus headset. Its top-ranking shows that it was one of the most popular gifts over the holidays.

Metaverse commander-in-chief, Mark Zuckerberg (Zuck) announced that Meta will invest $10 billion to build the metaverse, which he believes is the next coming of the internet.

The VR headsets are not yet powerful enough to enable Zuck’s vision for the metaverse but it will give Meta a chance to gather data on how people use virtual reality and iterate on the product.

Other companies making bets on the metaverse include Roblox, which went public this year at a $40 billion valuation. Its shares are up 130% from its IPO price. Nvidia and AMD are some other names that have exposure to the metaverse, with chips that power it.

Short Squeez Takeaway: Meta’s holiday success is no guarantee that Meta’s headset or the metaverse in general, is here to last. Apple, Google (Fitbit) dominated Christmas in the past with their new gadgets, but nothing stuck. This time around, there seems to be a broader metaverse movement with metaverse games/platforms such as Axie Infinity, Sandbox, Decentraland all having a record 2021. 2022 might just be a big year for the metaverse.

Source: CNBC

2. Markets Rundown

US stocks finished higher Monday, as consumer spending during the holidays and gains in tech and energy shares helped to push the S&P 500 to records.

Movers & Shakers

  • (+) GoDaddy ($GDDY) +8% following a Wall Street Journal report that activist investor Starboard Value has taken a 6.5% stake in it.

  • (+) Ralph Lauren ($RL) +4% after early holiday shopping sales numbers showed strong consumer spending in recent weeks.

  • (–) Didi Global ($DIDI) -5% after Financial Times reported Didi is blocking employees from selling company shares for an indefinite period.

3. Top Reads

  • Ten Economic questions for 2022 (CR)

  • The future of the movie industry (AWCS)

  • America would be more happy with more people (BB)

  • Top CEO worry for 2022: Job security (Axios)

  • Crypto donations hit records: Season of Generosity (Fox)

  • Deal or no deal, both work for broadcom (WSJ)

  • Starboard acquires stake worth $800 mln in GoDaddy (Reuters)

  • Holiday sales up 10.7% from pre-pandemic season (Axios)

  • Alphabet was the top Big Tech stock of the year — here’s why (CNBC)

A Message From Tal&Dev: Begin Your Career Happiness Journey

The time has come for employees everywhere to accept the reality that the company is not always looking out for you. You need to own your career and your development. We are moving from an era of lifelong employment to one of lifelong learning. It is time for talented individuals all over the world to take back their careers.

Tal&Dev is here to guide you through that potentially long and arduous career journey. Tal&Dev is a digital career compass built to help you attain happiness. Your journey will consist of a career fit assessment, countless development resources and, finally, the opportunity to get matched to employers looking for a profile exactly like yours.

4. Book of the Day: Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations

Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way, much of what we do can be defined as being “motivators.” From the boardroom to the living room, our role as motivators is complex, and the more we try to motivate partners and children, friends and coworkers, the clearer it becomes that the story of motivation is far more intricate and fascinating than we’ve assumed.

Payoff investigates the true nature of motivation, our partial blindness to the way it works, and how we can bridge this gap. With studies that range from Intel to a kindergarten classroom, Ariely digs deep to find the root of motivation—how it works and how we can use this knowledge to approach important choices in our own lives. Along the way, he explores intriguing questions such as: Can giving employees bonuses harm productivity? Why is trust so crucial for successful motivation? What are our misconceptions about how to value our work? How does your sense of your mortality impact your motivation?

“These results show that when we are acknowledged for our work, we are willing to work harder for less pay, and when we are not acknowledged, we lose much of our motivation.”

5. Short Squeez Picks

  • A Social Media Strategy on Steroids with Thomas Kopelman Podcast

  • Jenny Johnson - Seven Decades of Investing Expertise Podcast

  • Learning How to Think vs. What to Think Podcast

6. Daily Visual: Percentage Change in US Outbound Passenger Flights

Source: Axios

7. Daily Acumen: Best Behavior

“If we’re new to a situation, or feeling unsure, we pay careful attention. We’re closely examining how others feel, what the cultural norms are, and what impact we’re seeking to make.

On the other hand, sometimes we fail to be on our best behavior. That’s another way of describing impulsive selfishness.

The surprising thing isn’t that being on our best behavior makes things go more smoothly. No, for many of us, the surprise is that it actually makes the experience better for us, not just the other folks.”

Source: Seth's Blog

8. Crypto Corner

9. Memes of the Day

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