Trump tells Zelenskyy to stop hitting Russian diesel amid record high U.S. prices
Market Scorecard
US markets closed at record highs yesterday as investors cheered Friday's strong jobs report as well as President Biden's infrastructure plan. Local and international markets were closed on Friday in observance of Good Friday.
The US added 916 000 new jobs in March, beating the expected gain of 660 000 jobs, showing signs that the economy is beginning to fully reopen. They have seen multiple days of more than 4 million vaccines administered per day, something that will be very crucial in global economic recovery.
Yesterday we saw the Globe Life Field stadium in Arlington, Texas at capacity (40 300) as the Texas Rangers becomes the first team to allow 100% capacity since the pandemic began.
Yesterday the S&P 500 closed up 0.71%, and the Nasdaq closed up 0.81%.
Byron's Beats
I saw an article suggesting that Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) lose $6 billion per annum on password sharing. It was based on the premise that streaming services lose $25 billion a year on password sharing and Netflix owns 25% of the market. You may even find that because Netflix is more desirable, they lose more.
That is a lot of money that can be brought back into the coffers if they solve the problem. For reference sake, they made revenues of $25 billion last year. $6 billion is 24% of that. You would imagine that with smart artificial intelligence technology they will be able to limit devices that subscribers can use outside of their own devices. Either way, this a good upside story for Netflix.
Whilst researching for this piece I took a look at the Netflix share price graph. It must be one of the only companies out there where you cannot find the huge dip of March 2020 when the world went into lockdown. The reasons are obvious but there was barely a blip. See the red circle in the image below.
We still think Netflix is a fabulous business. They are starting to bring in enough profit to pay off their debt issued to create content. Soon the content will pay for itself and more. The space is competitive, but Netflix are first movers, have set the standard and should continue to dominate.
Bright's Banter
I've previously mentioned that Stripe bought a Lagos, Nigeria payments startup called Paystack for $200 million in October last year. When the deal happened, Paystack had over 60 000 customers which included the likes of Domino's Pizza, and our very own MTN (JO:MTNJ).
According to a report by McKinsey & Co, Nigerian fintech companies have attracted $600 million in funding between the years 2014 and 2019. Nigeria takes up a quarter of all funding for tech startups across Africa and they have over 200 fintech startups.
I came across a fascinating interview with Paystack's CEO Shola Akinlade, where he chatted to CNN's Eleni Giokos. In this interview, they talk about the company's scaling from being a small Nigerian startup to a fully-fledged tech business with Silicon Valley backing.
Signing Off
Asian markets are mostly lower this morning as investors worry about rising coronavirus cases (up 0.5% on average) which has seen an extension of lockdown restrictions around the globe. The Rand is at $/R 14.57.
