usdaed

They say the average American worker pulls in around sixty thousand dollars a year. Not a king’s ransom, but enough to get by, if a fella’s careful. The so-called experts, them Wall Street fellas with their fancy charts and complicated talk, will tell you to set aside ten or fifteen percent of your earnings for retirement. That’s six to nine thousand dollars a year, they say. Now, that’s all well and good for them livin’ in ivory towers, but for many, that’s just a dream.

The fear, of course, is not new. Every wave of innovation carries with it the undertow of displacement. The loom threatened the hand weaver, the assembly line the skilled craftsman. Now, it is the algorithm that looms, promising to automate not just labor, but thought itself. The logic is simple, brutally so: why pay for a service when a machine can approximate it, and at a fraction of the cost? The suits on Wall Street see only numbers; they do not see the hands that once guided the tools, now trembling with uncertainty.

Let us look closer at the yield of this quarter, and what may come.

MP Materials, based in the United States, operates the Mountain Pass mine in California. It’s one of the few large-scale rare earth mines in the country, which is rather surprising when you consider that the periodic table is full of elements we barely knew existed fifty years ago. They don’t just dig stuff up, though. They also have a facility in Fort Worth, Texas, called Independence, where they turn those raw materials into permanent magnets. Permanent magnets! It’s like alchemy, only with more paperwork and slightly less turning lead into gold.

Broadcom (AVGO 1.02%), you see, is not merely favored by the analysts. It is approved. Ninety-eight percent of these oracles, these interpreters of financial tea leaves, are singing its praises. One suspects a secret society, a pact made in some dimly lit gentlemen’s club, fueled by vintage port and a shared aversion to independent thought. Or perhaps, simply, they’ve all glimpsed something the rest of us have missed – a phantom profit, a spectral growth trajectory.

They claim leadership in a promising field, this SoundHound. They teach machines to speak our language, to decipher the chaos of human utterance. A noble pursuit, if one overlooks the fact that most humans struggle to understand each other. The market, they assure us, is enormous. One imagines a future where refrigerators negotiate the price of milk, and automobiles offer unsolicited life advice. A chilling thought, frankly.

The official parchment, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (a body whose acronym, SEC, is often mistaken for a particularly grumpy sea serpent), revealed that Oxbow reduced its holdings in VBIL by the aforementioned number of shares. The value, as previously noted, hovered around $25.83 million, a sum large enough to impress a dragon, but hardly enough to bankrupt one. The overall value of Oxbow’s VBIL stake, however, declined by $26.20 million – a curious discrepancy that suggests either a particularly aggressive accounting gnome, or that the shares simply decided to take a short holiday.

The Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF (VIG) is, on the surface, a sensible sort of fund. It seeks companies that have consistently increased their dividends for at least ten years. A noble goal, certainly. Though it then rather spoils the effect by discarding the highest yields. Why? Because apparently, a good dividend is one that doesn’t quite reward you as much as it could. It’s a bit like a wizard who insists on casting spells that are mostly harmless.²

Royal Bank of Canada, or RY as the ticker tape whispers, is a big bank. Two hundred and forty-six billion dollars big. It’s gained 46% in the last twelve months. That’s… something. They spread their bets around – wealth management, personal banking, capital markets, the usual. Diversification. A sensible idea, really. Especially for us Americans, who sometimes act as if the world ends at the border. They also happen to be based in Toronto. It’s a city. Like any other.