- The difference between a loyal customer and a fanboy
- Apple needs a “next big thing”… and we think we know what it is
- Foreign buyers can’t get enough of Uncle Sam’s $19 trillion debt
- When CNBC talks up gold, is it cause for concern?
- A shipwreck in the desert… a skeptical inquiry about wireless power… a tapir for old times’ sake… and more!
It’s that time of late spring/early summer when the subsection of humanity known as “Apple fanboys” get just a little too excited.
“‘Apple fanboy,’” Wikipedia informs us in all earnestness, “is a pejorative epithet used to describe a person who is loyal to the brand of Apple Inc., typically in an extreme manner.”
There’s even a YouTube video that aims to help you spot such an individual. Although this single illustration makes the point…
Your editor says all this, by the way, as a loyal Apple customer of 20 years standing — but not a fanboy.
On a friend’s recommendation, my first computer purchase in 1996 was a Mac. Back then, that was a radical thing to do. Risky too, as Apple was widely thought to be circling the bowl. Steve Jobs’ storied return as CEO was still a year in the future. But even in those dark and uncertain days, Macs were easier to use, and more elegant.
I’ve been a Mac guy since. Had an iPod or three along the way. More recently, an iPad has been an essential work tool for nearly the entire time I’ve labored over The 5 Min. Forecast — for everything from news alerts to reading PDFs.
But a fanboy? No. For the life of me, I can’t see spending even $400 for a base-model iPhone — much less the $650 many people drop on more souped-up models. And an Apple Watch? Uh, no thanks.
Nor do I own any Apple apparel, nor have I ever camped outside an Apple Store awaiting first crack at a new product.
But even I keep an ear to the ground with Apple’s new product releases and software updates. They come around roughly three times a year.
The next big one starts Monday — the annual Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Rumors abound about what will be announced.
Some possibilities can be easily ruled out. The iPhone 7? Very unlikely. The newest high-end iPhone models are usually a September thing. A next-generation iPad? Also unlikely, since the latest iteration was released in March. Much of the chatter surrounds a refreshed line of MacBook Pro laptops.
Yawn… stretch.
What can Apple do that would really shake things up? What might have the same impact as the first Macintosh in 1984… or the advent of the iPod in 2001… or the arrival of the iPhone in 2007?
You already know if you’ve been reading this week — an entire line of laptops, tablets and phones with wireless charging capability.
Our Ray Blanco has been eyeing a tiny company that’s making it possible to charge your devices as far as 15 feet away from the power source, no wires necessary. The company is armed with 250 patent applications, five patents granted and an independent report from Underwriters Laboratories vouching that the technology is for real.
The company also says it has an unnamed “key strategic partner.” It would make all the sense in the world for a partnership with Apple to be made public when the Worldwide Developers Conference opens on Monday.
“I can’t say for certain that Apple will announce a partnership with this firm,” Ray cautions, “or that the company will enjoy such tremendous success in such a short time. But all the signs are there. Even if I’m wrong, the company still has a lot going for it.”
But if Ray’s right, this is a name you want to be in before Apple CEO Tim Cook strides aboard the stage at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Monday.
We’ll send you an email reminder on Sunday. But if you want to check out the opportunity in greater detail right now — no long video to watch, we promise — here’s where to go.
Barring a dramatic development before day’s end, this won’t be the week the major U.S. stock indexes set record highs.
Indeed, they’re down nearly 1% as we write, the S&P 500 back below 2,100. Yet again, the stocks-oil sympathy trade is in play, crude tumbling nearly 1% and back below $50.
Gold is holding its own, the bid up six bucks, to $1,276.
But the big rally of the day is in Treasuries, rising prices pushing the yield on a 10-year note down to 1.63% at last check.
In other words, the 10-year yield is testing a low that’s held for more than three years…
If the 1.6% barrier breaks, the next stop is the record low in summer 2012 of 1.4%.
We see The Wall Street Journal is catching on this morning to something we noticed last month: Even though foreign central banks are dumping Treasury holdings at a furious pace, other foreigners are eager buyers.
An auction yesterday of 30-year bonds attracted near-record overseas interest — pushing the yield to 2.475%, an 18-month low.
Chalk up the phenomenon to the negative interest rates that plague Europe and Japan. If a global investor wants a safe return, however paltry, America’s where to find it. Or as one wag put it to the Journal, Treasuries are the “one-eyed king.”
Jim Rickards’ favorite way to play it remains the Wasatch-Hoisington U.S. Treasury Fund (WHOSX). Here’s his thinking: As long as the Fed keeps pushing back the next rate increase, people who’ve sold Treasuries on fears of higher short-term rates will return to the market. And in the unlikely event the Fed raises rates as the economy keeps weakening, that’ll set off a market panic — boosting safe-haven demand for Treasuries. Win-win…
Our contrarian hackles can’t help but be raised when CNBC puts up a headline on its website like “Why Big Investors Think It’s Time to Hoard Gold.”
Most of the article rehashes things we’ve already mentioned in The 5: George Soros diving back into a gold position during the first quarter of this year, one-time Soros acolyte Stanley Druckenmiller doing likewise, calling it “our largest currency allocation.”
The article does point out a driver of safe-haven demand right now is uncertainty going into the “Brexit” referendum on British membership in the European Union, now less than two weeks away. Reports from London point to increasing purchases of physical metal.
“I think that you’ve got ‘Brexit’ coming at you. You have a Spanish election coming at you in a week and a half, and that is terribly confusing. It looks like the left is going to win. You have rising nationalism in France. You have the strike in France. You have one thing after another,” says Dennis Gartman of The Gartman Letter — a bête noire among many gold bugs.
We’re looking high and low for reasons to doubt CNBC’s headline, but we’re coming up short. As Jim Rickards said here on Wednesday, markets are only starting to adjust to the reality that the Fed won’t raise rates this summer. In the past week, that’s been good for a $60 rally. “This rally is just getting started. There’s plenty of time to realize profits from this improved monetary environment for gold.”
[Ed. note: Only four days from now, Jim’s high-level contact in the precious metals world — a man known to us only as “Goldfinger” — will join him for an emergency briefing on the following topics…
- Why gold is in line for a “super spike” sometime in the next six months
- Why many gold holders won’t profit from the move
- A once-in-a-lifetime chance to make 600% or more from the move without the risk of options.
This event is set for 7:00 p.m. EST this coming Tuesday. It’s free to watch, and you can submit questions in advance… but we do ask that you RSVP so we can set aside enough room on our computer servers. Click here to reserve your spot.]
One other gold note before the weekend… although you’ll have to wrap your mind around the notion of a shipwreck in the desert…
The Bom Jesus set sail from Lisbon, Portugal, in 1533, bound for India. But the ship went down off the coast of present-day Namibia, in southwest Africa. The whole crew was lost.
The ship turned up in the pit of a drained lagoon in 2008; there’s your desert explanation. Only now are diggers from De Beers getting around to looking inside. So far, they’ve found about $13 million in gold coins.
Archaeologists are even more interested in pottery and other items. “Portuguese sailors were on the cusp of opening up the known world around 1533, but historical sources have been limited in describing everyday life,” Manchester University’s Timothy Insoll tells The Independent. “The mix of discoveries is particularly impressive — and the bones can give archaeologists an idea of the sailors’ typical diet, for example.”
The Portuguese government has waived any claim to the gold, so the rights pass to the government of Namibia.
“While remote charging of batteries is technically possible, there are severe problems of physical limitations,” a reader writes skeptically of Ray Blanco’s wireless charging play.
“The laws of physics state that the strength of a field decreases with the square of the distance — twice as far, a quarter the field strength. So to charge a phone in the next room would require a very big ‘transmitter’ to get enough power to the phone, and that will make the meter go ’round! Think 100,000 times the power needed in a contact pad charger.
“However, there is a way to make a beam of energy, like a radar, that would have some decent power inside the beam in the next room. But that needs to be a high-frequency radio beam, and that will cause problems. Like rattle your brain. Since you would only get charging taking place in the beam, you may as well use a mat, using a fraction of the power and cost.
“Remote chargers will use so much power only the rich could afford to be so wasteful. I do not see any great market after the novelty wears off. We may see chargers that work up to a foot or so, but even those will chew a lot more power than a contact pad.
“The problem of charging newer phones would not be such a nuisance if the batteries had a life of better than one day (when new). After not very long, the battery does not last the day, and boosts to keep it going ruin the battery even more. If the battery is not replaceable, throw it all away.
“Keep up the good work. The sky is about to fall down!”
The 5: “We know how to transmit data over very long distances and have done so for well over a century,” Ray Blanco replies.
“We use radio frequencies to do the job. A transmitter converts an electrical signal into a radio wave. When it reaches a receiver, the radio signal gets turned back into an electrical one and amplified.
“With the right technology, this idea can also be extended to the transmission of power over the air. The problem is if a transmitter beams RF (radio frequency) energy in all directions, a lot of power is wasted.”
The technology Ray’s watching takes that wasted energy and puts it to use. “It uses an intelligent antenna array that can direct beams operating in the same range as Wi-Fi to a device with the appropriate receiver.”
And yes, the power decreases with distance from the transmitter. But even 1 watt at a 15-foot distance is sufficient to charge up a device.
That’s just a hint at the “game changing” potential of the technology… and why Apple might want a piece of it. Much more from Ray right here.
“I wish The 5 Min. Forecast took a half-hour to read,” a reader writes as our every-six-months-or-so thread on the length of this e-letter starts winding down.
“That means I would get to enjoy even more incorrectly used ellipses, not-safe-for-work video clips, cute photos of tapirs at work and play… and… oh, yes, I almost forgot… tons of totally interesting and useful information!”
The 5: Ah, the tapir. Been a while. Just for old times’ sake…
Tapir expressing his frustration at Janet Yellen’s latest speech…
[Photo by Wikimedia Commons user Sepht]
Have a good weekend,
Dave Gonigam
The 5 Min. Forecast
P.S. “Most gold investors will get killed by gold’s price skyrocketing,” says Jim Rickards, anticipating a gold super-spike. “There’s a technical but all-important reason why.”
What’s that reason? And what can you do to take advantage of the move?
Jim has lined up one of the precious metals world’s most connected (and low-profile) figures for an exclusive online briefing from Zurich, Switzerland — next Tuesday, June 14, at 7:00 p.m. EDT.
You can watch this event for free; all we ask is that you sign up in advance, because spots are limited. Reserve yours here right now.
