Amazon Makes Inroads Into Electrofuel-Powered Trucks

MARKET MOVERS

• Amazon makes inroads into Electrofuel-powered trucks. The company signed a deal with a relatively obscure start-up to supply electrofuels to power some of its trucks. The start-up, Sacramento, Calif.–based Infinium, was founded in 2020 and got funding from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund. Infinium calls electrofuels an “ultra-low carbon alternative to traditional petroleum-based fuels.”
  
  
• Oil prices crashed two days after the recent Federal Reserve meeting. Investors and speculators appear to have concluded we will have a recession and are thus selling oil and gas stocks en masse. All of these oil and gas-related stocks seem to be following the plunge in oil prices, as November oil futures fell 5.5% at that time to $78.90 as of this writing, similar to the first two stocks. Read more here.
  
  
• Amazon declares victory with Thursday Night Football. The company announced that Amazon Prime averaged 13 million viewers for its debut Livestream of Thursday Night Football. The head of Amazon's sports division called it a resounding success. This was the most watched program of the night across broadcast and cable. It out delivered the number to the program by 271%. Source(14:34)
  
  
• Netflix reduces payments for comedy specials in some new deals. In recent months Netflix has started licensing new specials from some comedians for two years for about $200,000, rather than buying them outright, which is more expensive. The streaming giant is changing how it compensates some of the comics it features, a move that could trim its costs and shift some financial burden to the artists.
  
  
• Apple Music takes over Pepsi as presenter of the Super Bowl halftime show. Apple Inc.’s sponsorship begins this season with Super Bowl LVII, which will be played in Arizona in February. The $2.5 trillion tech company may have paid as much as $50 million a year for the five-year deal, Sportico reported, without saying where it got the information.

• Boeing settles with SEC for $200 million over 737 MAX. Boeing is still working to put the 737 MAX tragedies behind it. A recent settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission is one step in that process. There are many layers to this. For the SEC, the MAX situation was about how Boeing communicated to the public, and investors, following two deadly MAX crashes.
  

WHAT TO WATCH

• The bond market plunge means the low for stocks is not in yet, Bank of America’s Hartnett says. He thinks that inflation/rates/recession shocks are not over, plus the bond crash in recent weeks, means highs in credit spreads, and lows in stocks are not yet in. The new regime of higher inflation means a secular view remains on cash, commodities, and volatility to outperform bonds & stocks.
  
  
• Amazon, Microsoft, and Google face cloud-services examination in the U.K. The regulator said that the three firms account for around 81% of the revenue generated in the U.K.’s public cloud-infrastructure market and that its study would formally assess how well the market is working. The study is the latest move by the U.K. regulators and policymakers to attempt to carve out a bigger role for the country as a global tech regulator. Read more here.

• Inventory is piling up as consumer demand slows. Inventory levels are becoming the key performance indicator for equities as companies continue to deal with global supply chain issues made worse by the pandemic, according to a research note from Trivariate. Inventory levels are a growing problem: For large-cap stocks, inventory-to-sales is near all-time highs. Read more here.
  
  
• Fidelity will merge its Robo-Advisor offerings. The brokerage firm will transition client accounts in the hybrid offering, known as Fidelity Personalized Planning & Advice, into Fidelity Go accounts on or shortly after Nov. 1. But that doesn’t mean those clients will lose access to human advice. Instead, they—along with other Fidelity Go account holders with more than $25,000—will have access to the coaching and planning services.