Hey Snackers,
The most cautionary headline of September: "Man blows up part of house while trying to swat fly." The man is okay. "It is unknown what happened to the fly."
Stocks inched up, helped by Big Tech gains. Investors were also hopeful that low interest rates will continue ahead of the Fed's policy announcement today.
You know things are bad when... Business Insider comes out with an article titled: "You can buy a retired Carnival cruise ship and have it all to yourself." Since Carnival anchored a record $4.4B quarterly loss back in June, the tide hasn't turned much for the world's largest cruise company:
Endless shrimp cocktails never end well... Carnival's stock sale didn't either. But Carnival is desperate: it's losing $770M a month and only has $8B in cash left. US cruises aren't expected to resume until the end of October (ambitious) and virus fears are still high. Desperate times call for desperate cash-raising measures:
Markets reacted rationally... They do that sometimes. Carnival is selling $1B worth of new stock, which represented ~7% of its market value before the announcement. The stock dropped 8% on Tuesday morning after the announcement — that's very close to the percentage Carnival got diluted by. In this case, investors' reaction made total sense.
No crowd, no turtleneck... Apple unveiled a bunch of new hardware at its big product event yesterday. The TLDR: a new fancy iPad, a new basic iPad, and two new watches. On the software side, the iOS 14 iPhone update drops today (so we can finally understand App Clips and reply to iMessages in threads). But the announcement that really interested us might have Peloton sweating:
Club Apple is here... Yesterday, Apple also officially announced its "Apple One" services bundles — they'd been rumored since August. The $15/month tier bundles Apple: Music, TV+, Arcade, and iCloud storage. The $30/month tier has those, plus Apple News+ and Fitness+ (plus plus plus).
Apple wants you more connected than ever... Including Fitness+ in the bundle could be key to that, since Apple TV+, News+ and Arcade aren't exactly hits. For customers, bundles cost less than subscribing to each service individually. For Apple, bundling helps score more subscribers and ensure that you're interacting with its products every waking hour. The goal is that you never leave the Apple ecosystem. Apple anchored you with iPhone and Apple Watch — now it's leveling up its lifestyle control with services.
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Disclosure: Authors of this Snacks own shares of Apple and Amazon
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