This week on Equity Mates

Hey there Equity Mate,

If you’re like Ren, today is going to be an unproductive work day. For fans of the NFL, the Superbowl kicks off at 10:30am AEST. For the rest of us, the Superbowl Half-Time Show kicks off around midday.

Whether or not you’re interested in the game, the business story behind the NFL is fascinating. On a per game basis, it is the most lucrative sports league in the world, with daylight second.

A big reason for this is just the volume of ads. Years ago, the Wall Street Journal ran the numbers:

• An average NFL game is 3 hours and 12 minutes

• If you tally up the time the ball is actually in play - just 11 minutes

In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, there’s more footage of replays than actual play.

What happens between plays? No prizes for guessing, ads.

The average NFL game includes 20 commercial breaks containing more than 100 ads. And the Wall Street Journal’s analysis found that commercials took up about an hour, or one-third, of the game.

So if you’re looking for some entertainment during the ad breaks, we’ve got you covered with another big week of content across Equity Mates and Get Started Investing.

• Equity Mates Investing (Apple | Spotify)

  • Will US fixed mortgage rates lead to a renovation boom? - Lowes

  • Selling car parts, buying back stock - Autozone

• Get Started Investing (Apple | Spotify)

  • FIRE: Financial Independence (!) Retire Early (?)

Tell us what you think of Equity Mates and you could win $500!

The Equity Mates Community Survey helps us to understand who is engaging with Equity Mates, and more importantly, how we can continue to improve our content to help you.

Win $500 in cash by completing the Equity Mates Media Community Survey & sharing your Bold Prediction for the year ahead. 

It shouldn’t take you more than 15 minutes to complete.

The survey is now open and closes on midnight on the 3rd March. T&Cs apply.

Your questions, answered

Ruby asked via email:

What are some key areas I can focus on to reduce cost of living pressures? How are you advising your clients about this?

We put Ruby’s question to Jane Mitchell, from AdviseWise:

With cost of living on the rise many people can agree it’s a painful time for the family.

It's natural to start being concerned about how to cover your monthly costs. Groceries, rent, mortgages are all going up, clients worry their wages aren't covering the increase and they don't have enough savings in the bank.

In times where your cashflow position becomes tight or you want to rein in spending, it is always a good idea to look at your cost of living.

Here are some ways, to help give you back control and reduce your money worries:

Review your current expenses

We all think we know where our money is going and what we spend, but the reality can be very different.

• How much are you spending on entertainment, dining out, food deliveries like Uber Eats?

• Are there costs, discretionary spending you can cut back on that will ease your cashflow? These add up and could be better put towards savings.

• How often are you shopping online?

• Review your subscriptions, energy, car insurance, internet and phone plans, check are there savings with better deals elsewhere.

• Make a budget and stick to it. You can do this!

Establish a budget for your current lifestyle, track your spending, reduce your overspending. Look at your bank account and credit card statements, put the expenses into the budget tool and you will easily see where the savings can be made.

• What are the direct debits you have coming out of your accounts?

• Set aside a fixed amount from each pay into a separate account to cover your bills, rent and essentials. Reduce the opportunity for overspending.

• By keeping a budget, you are holding yourself accountable and forcing yourself to improve your spending and savings habits, each week.

• Moneysmart.gov.au have a great budget tool, very easy to use.

• Saving for the unexpected and build a buffer

Once you have identified things you can cut from your spending, you can build a budget to gradually improve your financial position and build emergency funds for unexpected expenses.

The last thing you can do if you are still struggling is looking at changing your habits. If you routinely buy takeout, go to the movies, drive rather than take public transport, and partake in recreational activities that your budget simply can’t afford consider making changes that better align with where you want to go financially.

\If you have a question you’d like answered, hit us up at [email protected]

A word from our sponsor

We know it can be daunting to get started - the feeling of investing hard earned dollars can be scary. Starting small is a good way to ease the nerves and get going.

With CommSec you can get started with as little as $50 in the CommBank app, and set up regular investing to help build your portfolio over time.

Visit commsec.com.au for more.

CommSec T&Cs and other fees and charges apply.

What we’ve been reading

16 Top Stock Pitches (13th-30th Jan)

Who doesn’t like a stock pick?

When we came across this article we knew we had to share it. It features 16 stock pitches from around the internet published in January. It covers everything from an online auction business listed in London to a medical device business listed in Tokyo.

With all of the usual caveats around doing your own research and not taking financial advice from an article online, we find these stock pitches valuable for reasons outcome the stock pick itself.

A lot of investing is pattern matching. Identifying the traits of high quality companies and searching the world for other companies that exhibit similar traits. The more stock pitches we read, the better we get at identifying these traits and the more likely we are to recognise them in other businesses.

So whether or not you’re going to invest in a navigation technology business looking to overcome the shortcomings of GPS or the maker of instructional booklets, reading these pitches and learning how the authors approach building an investment thesis makes us all better investors.

TV channels are using AI-generated presenters to read the news. The question is, will we trust them?

As artificial intelligence becomes more and more a part of our lives, researchers are facing the challenge of climbing out of the uncanny valley.

The uncanny valley, for those unfamiliar, is the phenomenon where a digitally-generated image gets closer and closer to human-like, humans become more and more uneasy with it. Something that doesn’t look human at all, like Wall-E in the chart below, is completely comfortable for humans. But as it gets closer to human, we instantly get uncomfortable. That, in a nutshell, is the challenge with AI-generated images today.

A Los Angeles-based startup, Channel 1, is trying to overcome this challenge for news. Late last year they posted a video to Twitter (X) that showed how human-like their AI-generated hosts had become. 

Channel 1 is not alone. This article from the BBC profiles efforts around the world from Kuwait, Greece, South Korea, Taiwan and India.

The article also grapples with the bigger question. With trust in news at a low ebb - just 42% of people in the UK trust newsreaders, down 16 percentage points in one year - how will people trust AI-generated news readers.

Like it or not, this seems to be the future of news. The news business model is already straining under the weight of its cost base, with layoff-after-layoff in most traditional news outlets. Moving to AI-generated hosts will be a saving to tempting to ignore, at least for a percentage of media executives. What is harder to quantify, but ultimately more important, is whether these media organisations can maintain public trust. Otherwise the move to embrace AI will be the next step in the traditional media death spiral (lose viewers -> cut costs -> lose trust -> lose viewers -> cut costs etc.).

Want to pick up a free copy of the hottest summer read?

Start the new year off on the right foot with our latest book. We outline the absolute simplest way to invest, how you can automate it, and importantly, why it is enough.

To grab a free copy, just refer 4 people to this Equity Mates mailing list using your unique referral link below.