Metaverse The first place many people would have heard the term “metaverse” would have been the 1992 dystopian sci-fi novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. And when the concept went mainstream in 2021 following Facebook’s change of name to Meta, numerous articles linked it to ideas found in the virtual reality (VR)-focused novel-turned-movie Ready Player One. But in fact, the concept as it relates to technology today isn’t necessarily exclusively about VR. And hopefully doesn’t have to be dystopian! The fact is that no one yet knows exactly what the metaverse will look like, as it doesn't exist in its final form yet. Perhaps the best way of thinking about it is that it encapsulates a collection of somewhat ambiguous ideas about what the internet will evolve into next. Whatever it is, it’s likely to be more immersive, so VR, as well as related technologies like augmented reality (AR), could well play a role in it. However, many proto-metaverses and metaverse-related applications, s...
#10. Gold Miners, Escape from Hyper Correlations Gold miners had a very volatile year as well. Like gold and silver, the gold miners also had a downside overshoot due to severely poor market trading liquidity. All equities (not just gold equities) had a high level of intra-stock correlation due to the Fed tightening financial conditions (higher USD, higher real yields, lower liquidity). The 30-day rolling correlation between gold miners and the S&P 500 reached its highest level in 10 years, meaning broad market pricing flows dictated gold miners' price action, not fundamentals. Since the Fed signaled the aggressive portion of its interest rate hikes is over, there has been an unclenching of hyper-correlation across asset classes as fundamentals reassert themselves. Figure 7b is the Q4 2022 returns for various asset classes. It highlights the now diverging returns of the “better" asset classes (precious metals) that we believed were caught in the liquidity vortex versus f...
Fossil Fuel not dead yet “Old energy” will carry most of the load during the early years of the transition, as it guides “new energy” to the pinnacle of global power production. Producing an electric vehicle (EV), for example, requires about twice as much energy as producing an internal combustion engine vehicle. That’s because EVs are essentially batteries on wheels… and batteries are basically just hunks of metal. Mining and processing all of that metal demands a lot of energy. To unearth enough raw ore to produce a single midsize EV battery, for example, mining operators must excavate about 250 tons of terrain. After that, they must transport roughly 50 tons of ore to various facilities around the world that can extract the targeted metals and then refine them to battery-grade standards. With a few exceptions, every step of the process consumes some form of fossil fuel. Most other renewable technologies are even more energy-intensive than EVs. Therefore, far from replacin...
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