Under these circumstances, Alphabet has more in common with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A) than a traditional tech company. Like Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.B) Alphabet owns many subsidiaries, decentralizes management, and makes a lot of money.
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I believe consumer brands are moving ads to Amazon because the Everything Store is where Americans do their shopping.
In particular, many consumers look on Amazon first. In fact, 49% of product searches begin on Amazon, CNBC estimates.
Given these points, speculators should watch closely to see how central banks react to Ripple. Ultimately, Ripple’s fate is in the central banks’ hands. If central banks accept it; Ripple can become the most valuable cryptocurrency around.
Consequently, a central bank could increase Ripple’s value by using it. Conversely, a central bank could destroy Ripple (XRP) by banning or suppressing it.
Ripple is interested in remittances because they are big business. The World Bank calculates that people sent $613 worth of remittances in 2017. Significantly, the volume of remittances grew from $573 billion in 2016 to $613 billion in 2017.
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The Tez rebranding is likely to convince Walmart not to accept NFC payments. Instead, Walmart will demand that Alphabet and Apple adopt QR Code.
Google Pay is likely to roll out QR Code in the United States. That will force Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) to add QR code to Apple Pay. A natural consequence of Google Pay QR Code is PayPal adopting QR Code. The addition of QR Code to Venmo is inevitable too.
The tech giants will have to go along because Walmart is on track to generate $500.34 billion (half a trillion dollars) in revenues in 2018, Statista forecast. Access to that revenue is probably what convinced Alphabet to add QR Code to Google Pay.
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By acquiring Great Call, Best Buy is competing directly with Apple, Amazon, and indirectly with Alphabet. I cannot see how Best Buy can win that battle.
I see two big problems with Great Call that can make it a drain on Best Buy’s bottom line.
Great Call is a direct marketing company. It sells specific products directly through various channels. Best Buy is a general-purpose retailer that sells a wide variety of products and services through brick and mortar stores. I do not see the synergy there.
You can think the NAMPOF of as a FANG for value investors. Holdings in NAMPOF are more diversified than FANG and some of them generate dividend income.
It diversifies NAMPOF because NVIDIA and Apple are hardware makers and PayPal is in finance. FANG scares me because it is almost all software based. Something I dislike about FANG is the lack of a financial stock.
Containing six stocks further diversifies. Four NAMPOF stocks; Apple, NVIDIA, Oracle, and Microsoft, are proven moneymakers.
I consider PayPal and Facebook speculative because they base their businesses on growth. However, both companies have showed the capability to generate vast amounts of cash.
I designed the NAMPOF to offer a little more than safety and income than FANG at a comparable rate of growth.
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Other features in the new and improved Google Pay include access to loyalty cards. The new Google Pay is supposed to be in sync with your Google Account. That should make it easier to add banking and credit card information.
Movie, concert, sports, theater, train, bus, and plane tickets will be accessible through the passes tab in Google Pay. That will enable people to use their Google Account as a digital ticket for travel or entertainment.
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Uber is now a classic value investment because it is a good company with a good product that has been having serious problems. There’s nothing wrong with Uber’s basic service or business model just its corporate culture.
Now that Khosrowshahi is cleaning that mess up, Uber stands to greatly improve. Buffett called himself “a great admirer of Dara” in a chat with CNBC. The sage of Omaha pointed out that some of the details in the Bloomberg story were wrong.
Such a deal will give Avis-Budget experience maintaining and deploying self-driving vehicles. It also puts it in a position to provide autonomous vehicles for ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft, and delivery services like GrubHub (NYSE: GRUB), Instacart, Parcel, and Shipt.
Delivery is going to be a huge market for self-driving vehicles because of the involvement of big retail. Walmart (NYSE: WMT) is planning to offer grocery delivery to 40% of the US population through services like Uber, Deliv, and Lyft. Target (NYSE: TGT) has bought the grocery delivery solution Shipt, and Kroger (NYSE: KR) is partnering with Instacart.
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The biggest current threat to Alphabet might be the trade war that U.S. President Donald J. Trump (R-New York) has declared against the European Union (EU).
The greatest long-term threat to Alphabet is all the competition it is receiving in advertising. Menaces there include social media such as Facebook’s (NASDAQ: FB) and its WhatsApp solution. WhatsApp had 1.5 billion users in December 2017, Statista calculated.
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