Wage Data

  • Paychex small business wage growth data is soggy.
  • Hourly earnings growth slowed to 3.13% in May, recording the lowest level since June 2021 (2.90%).
  • One-month annualized hourly earnings growth was 2.11%, more than one percent below the year-over-year rate and the lowest level since November 2020 (1.74%).

GPU Semiconductor Content

  • Nice slide from KLA.
  • So I tried just to put together this chart to show how different the GPU package is between 2015 & 2024. So of course, the B100 chip, the GPU introduced a few months ago, and this is not enough because Jensen has already introduced the next generation of GPU last week” (h/t The Transcript).

Remote Jobs

  • Two things on remote jobs is really fascinating right now. So pre-pandemic, there’s — at any given time, there’s 15 million, 20 million jobs that are posted on LinkedIn actively. And pre-pandemic, it was roughly 2% of all jobs on the platform were remote jobs. If you go back 2.5 years ago, it peaked. 20%, 21% of all jobs on LinkedIn were remote jobs, which is pretty insane to see that jump from 2% to 21%. And now that number is back to 8%, so it kind of peaked up and now it’s starting to come back down again. So we pay a lot of attention to kind of how the labor market is shifting through remote work, and it seems like that trend is coming down” Linkedin CEO.
  • Source: The Transcript.

PE Dry Powder

  • Many people talk about the absolute value of PE dry powder. Indeed this hit a record last year of $2.2 trillion – fundraising continued (at a slower pace) against a dramatic slowdown in dealmaking.
  • However “Dry-powder inventory (the amount of capital available to GPs expressed as a multiple of annual deployment) increased from 1.1 years in 2022 to 1.6 years in 2023 but remains within the metric’s normal historical range“.
  • Source.

95 Theses on AI

  • Interesting list.
  • Decisions made in the next decade are more highly levered to shape the future of humanity than at any point in human history.
  • Technological transitions are packaged deals, e.g. free markets and the industrial revolution went hand-in-hand with the rise of “big government” (see Tyler Cowen on The Paradox of Libertarianism).
  • Natural constraints are often better than man-made ones because there’s no one to hold responsible.

Sports League Investing

  • A nice report on investing in sports teams, leagues, and related businesses from JPMAM.
  • Why now? Historically ownership of sports teams in the US was for the ultra-wealthy, but this is about to change.
  • Forbes also constructs a valuation index for each league. As shown below on the left, these indexes have substantially eclipsed the S&P 500 since 2005. To be clear, sports teams are much more expensive than equities: most teams are now valued at 5x-12x sales compared to ~3x sales for the S&P 500.
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