- I have a supreme conviction around the Oil markets and am conducting my own operations and only on a need to know basis
- And this is an inflection point just like the one I am signalling in the Oil markets. Netflix is not a US business, it is a global business
Last week I wrote about the Oil Markets and it was this comment by the Houthi Spokesman referencing Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
"If you want peace and security for your facilities and towers made of glass that cannot withstand one drone, then leave Yemen alone’’ which streamed into my consciousness. And I was thinking to myself about what sort of discount should be applied to the Burj Khalifa because frankly, I place more credibility on the utterances of the Houthis than their adversaries.
And then in some major non-linear jujitsu move, William Goldings' 1964 novel ''The Spire'' started to spin in my mind. I studied ''The Spire'' at ''A'' level and it made a big impression on me. The Spire is a 1964 novel by the English author William Golding. "A dark and powerful portrait of one man's will". It deals with the construction of the 404-foot high spire loosely based on Salisbury Cathedral; the vision of the fictional Dean Jocelin. Do you remember those twin statues of the Buddha that I told you about? Carved out of a mountain in Afghanistan that got dynamited by the Taliban back in the spring? Notice anything familiar?"
"Twin Buddhas, twin towers, interesting coincidence, so what."
"The Trade Center towers were religious too. They stood for what this country worships above everything else, the market, always the holy fuxxing market." [Thomas Pynchon]
And by the way, my conclusion remains we are at a Peacock Throne Moment for the House of Saudi and that markets and folks tend to miss inflection points and therefore I have a supreme conviction around the Oil markets and am conducting my own operations and only on a need to know basis. The Shah of Shahs ended up in Panama all on his lonesome looking out to sea and there is another fellow not unlike the fictional Dean Jocelin with a $500m Yacht called the Serene who will most likely be looking out to Sea in the not too distant future.
I stuck ''non-linearity'' in my headline for good reason and you will need to indulge me. My Mind kept to an Article I read in 2012 ''Annals of Technology Streaming Dreams'' by John Seabrook January 16, 2012. “This world of online video is the future, and for an artist you want to be first in, to be a pioneer. With YouTube, I will have a very small crew, and we are trying to keep focused on a single voice. There aren’t any rules. There’s just the artist, the content, and the audience.”
“People went from broad to narrow,” he said, “and we think they will continue to go that way—spend more and more time in the niches—because now the distribution landscape allows for more narrowness''.
And this brought me to Netflix. Netflix spearheaded a streaming revolution that changed the way we watch TV and films. As cable TV lost subscribers, Netflix gained them, putting it in a category with Facebook, Amazon, and Google as one of the adored US tech stocks that led a historic bull market [FT]. Netflix faces an onslaught of competition in the market it invented. After years of false starts, Apple is planning to launch a streaming service in November, as is Disney — with AT&T’s WarnerMedia and Comcast’s NBCUniversal to follow early next year. Netflix has corrected brutally and lots of folks are bailing big time especially after Netflix lost US subscribers in the last quarter. Even after the loss of subscribers in the second quarter, Ben Swinburne, head of media research at Morgan Stanley, says Netflix is still on course for a record year of subscriber additions. Optimists point to the group’s global reach. It is betting its future on expansion outside the US, where it has already attracted 60m subscribers. And this is an inflection point just like the one I am signaling in the Oil markets. Netflix is not a US business, it is a global business. The Majority of Analysts are in the US and in my opinion, these same Analysts have an international ''blind spot'' Once Investors appreciate that the Story is an international one and not a US one anymore, we will see the price ramp to fresh all-time highs. I, therefore, am putting out a ''conviction'' Buy on Netflix at Friday's closing price of $270.75. We started with the Hydrocarbon Economy and arrived at the Information Economy and therefore allow me to conclude with the Digital Economy and an excellent report via UNCTAD with pronounced The digital economy continues to evolve at breakneck speed, driven by the ability to collect, use and analyse massive amounts of machine-readable information (digital data) about practically everything. Global Internet Protocol (IP) traffic, a proxy for data flows, grew from about 100 gigabytes (GB) per day in 1992 to more than 45,000 GB per second in 2017. And yet the world is only in the early days of the data-driven economy; by 2022 global IP traffic is projected to reach 150,700 GB per second, fuelled by more and more people coming online for the first time and by the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT). The power of platforms is reflected in the fact that seven of the world’s top eight companies by market capitalization use platform-based business models. The economic geography of the digital economy does not display a traditional North-South divide. One developed and one developing country are consistently leading it: the United States and China. For example, these two countries most strikingly, account for 90 per cent of the market capitalization value of the world’s 70 largest digital platforms. Europe’s share is 4 per cent and Africa and Latin America’s together is only 1 per cent. Seven “super platforms” – Microsoft, followed by Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, and Alibaba − account for two-thirds of the total market value. Countries at all levels of development risk becoming mere providers of raw data to those digital platforms while having to pay for the digital intelligence produced with those data by the platform owners.