(Seattle)

Microsoft might have a big edge that no one is giving them credit for. That edge? It is the fact that money is pouring into ESG funds, and Microsoft is largely included in that category. Almost all of the top five ESG ETFs are overweight Microsoft, and as ESG continues to draw in more and more capital, that will become an increasingly important advantage for MSFT and other big tech names as well. In fact, many large tech companies are seen as ESG-friendly, so this is a hidden tailwind for several companies, including Google.

FINSUM: ESG ETFs are only going to grow in strength, so this is a nice little bit of momentum that will be pushing tech names higher.

(San Francisco)

It is getting ugly on the left. While big tech companies have always been fairly far-left politically, a new line has just been drawn. In new transcripts just released, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, says he will “go to the mat and fight” with presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren to stop her plan to break up big tech companies. “If she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government … But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight”, said Zuckerberg. Warren retorted “What would really ‘suck’ is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anti-competitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy”.

FINSUM: Warren is still a long way from office, but this is a glimpse of what the future would look like should the far-left win the election. Instead of probes and whistleblowers, we would have major courtroom dramas over anti-monopoly measures.

(New York)

Is New York a bellwether of US real estate performance or is it an isolated enclave with no real relevance to the majority of the country? Hard to know, but if the former, then there is a lot to worry about. NY home sales are plummeting and just showed their worst decline since the Financial Crisis. Median sales prices in Q3 dropped 12% from the previous year, the sharpest drop since 2009. Average home value fell below $1m for the first time in four years.

FINSUM: In our opinion, this is idiosyncratic to New York. The city is seeing a huge flux of newly built apartments that are boosting inventory, and at the same time there is a new progressive mansion tax hurting demand.

(New York)

Well they might not have exactly said what is in this headline, but they might as well have. The bank is urging investors to rotate into European equities and out of US stocks, shifting the former to “overweight” and the latter to “neutral”. The bank argues that European stocks represent a much better value after their underperformance over the last year. They believe European stocks have a great deal of upside and look close to “outright cheap”.

FINSUM: European stocks do seem to have a lot more room to move higher, but they also have a giant morass staring them in the eye called Brexit.

(San Francisco)

2019’s IPOs could hardly have gone worse. If you take the average performance of the top IPOs this year—Lyft, Uber, Pinterest, and Chewy—you see a loss of 30%. That is phenomenally poor considering the hype of these companies coming into their IPOs. And what’s worse, that figure doesn’t even count the worst one of all—the failed WeWork IPO. However, one company which looks like it has suffered unnecessarily and deserves a long-term bet is Slack, the office communications technology. It has a highly sticky user base and is not burning cash at anything close to the rate of the others. Users report that it is almost impossible to stop using Slack’s service once your office has converted to it.

FINSUM: Slack is essentially trying to replace internal office email. That is a long road but there has been a lot of early success. It seems like it is worth of a long term bet, especially after selling off by 43% this year.