We’re excited to announce our second book: Don’t Stress, Just Invest

Money is stressful. And the more time you spend on your finances, the more questions that arise. Am I doing enough? Am I saving enough? Investing enough? Will I have enough?

Even after building Equity Mates for the past six years and interviewing hundreds of experts on the podcast, we still ask ourselves these questions all the time.

So we set out to write a book and answer these questions. What we ended up with was an outline of the absolute simplest way to invest and importantly, why we are confident that it was enough.

In Don’t Stress, Just Invest we step through the practical ways you can figure out how much you need to invest, set up an automated investment portfolio, and decide what assets you should invest in.

We’ve written this book for all those people in our lives that want the benefits of investing without dedicating the hours, days or even years it takes to become an investor. Once you’ve read this book and set up your automatic investments you can get on with your life confident that you won’t miss out on the awesome wealth creating power of the stock market.

Don’t Stress, Just Invest is available for pre-order wherever you buy books. And it will be hitting shelves around Australia on the 22nd of August.

Big Tech jockeys for position in scramble for health data primacy

Have you ever felt like you couldn’t live without your favourite piece of technology? Well, you’re not alone. A woman in Cincinnati (literally) couldn’t live without her Apple Watch after it woke her up and notified her of a blood clot. If her watch hadn’t woken her up, doctors think she wouldn’t have woken up from her nap.

Stories like that are just the tip of the iceberg. Over the past decade, Big Tech is making big investments in healthcare. Not all of them have been successful (Amazon’s partnership with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway to build a health insurer comes to mind) and many of them are still in development (Apple’s until recently secret 12-year-old project to build a noninvasive blood glucose monitor). But the trend is clear, Big Tech wants to disrupt healthcare.

These companies like to position this interest as altruistic. For example, Apple CEO Tim Cook believes Apple’s health projects could be the companies “greatest contribution to mankind”. But there is also a clear business interest, the U.S. healthcare industry is estimated to be worth ~$800 billion.

Research from RBC Capital Markets suggest that 30% of the world’s total data volume is generated by the healthcare industry. And Big Tech want to capture this data and help the world make sense of it. It has driven their decade-long push into wearable devices (Google buying FitBit and Apple launching the Apple Watch) and has recently driven the industry to agree on data interoperability standards to bring health systems together and allow patients and practitioners to better utilise all of this data being collected.

East 72 Dynasty Trust: Deep Dive on Bolloré (EPA: BOL)

Founded in 1822, Bolloré is a giant French conglomerate and one of the 500 largest companies in the world. It has an ownership stake in the French media giant Vivendi, international freight forwarding, oil pipelines and storage, solid state batteries, access control systems for buildings, palm oil and rubber plantations, olive groves and vineyards. It is a complex business controlled by the Bolloré family. And when it comes to these complex, family-controlled conglomerates there is one Australian investor that loves them above all others - Andrew Brown from East 72.

In his recent quarterly letter, Andrew has done a deep dive on the company which he claims every up and coming investment banker should study. As Andrew writes, “In its current form, Bolloré is a 40+ year history and playbook of every investment banking skill ever taught: cheap acquisitions, expensive sales, spin outs, squeeze outs, arguments with regulators, corporate raids and greenmail; buybacks, share swaps, buying then selling, selling then buying, and growth from the ground up.”

Even reading the explanation of Bolloré’s corporate structure can get confusing - 14 publicly listed companies that are all owned or part-owned by others in the corporate structure. This article starts to unpack the different components of the Bolloré empire and Andrew shares where he thinks there is opportunity and where there is not. It is also a great illustration of the work required to understand some of the more complex investment opportunities available on the stock market.

Electric flying vehicles are getting closer to takeoff

Two companies working on flying vehicles have recently been given regulatory approval to continue testing, making the reality of flying cars one step closer.

The first company is California-based air-taxi company Joby Aviation. It is hoping to build the ‘Uber of the skies’ and last week it received a Special Airworthiness Certificate from the US Federal Aviation Administration. This allows it to launch flight testing programs for its first prototype flying vehicle. Joby is building a quadcopter - a single person vehicle with 4 helicopter-like rotors.

The second company is Alef Aeronautics that also received a Special Airworthiness Certificate from the FAA. Unlike Joby, it is building a prototype that will be able to drive on the road and will also be capable of of vertical takeoff and flying.

Rather than trying to describe it, you can see Joby and Alef’s vehicles side-by-side below.

The big event to watch is the 2024 Paris Olympics. The Olympic organisers have already announced that they plan to launch the world’s first e-VTOL [vertical takeoff and landing] service. The company contracted to provide the service is Germany’s Volocopter, but a successful showing will create a tailwind for all of these flying vehicle makers, including Joby and Alef.

After “Barbie”, Mattel is raiding its entire toybox

If Barbie-owner Mattel has its way, the Barbie movie will be the start of a new era in the toy company’s history. After taking over the struggling toy company in 2018, new CEO Ynon Kreiz had a simple vision: do for toys, what Disney did for comic books over the past 10 years. He wanted to get Mattel toys in big Hollywood blockbusters and then use that buzz to sell all kinds of merchandise. For him, it was their opportunity to expand beyond the toy aisle.

Barbie, naturally, was the first cab off the rank. With a $100 billion budget, A-list celebrities like Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and Will Ferrell, an Oscar-nominated director in Greta Gerwig and a giant marketing budget - Ynon Kreiz’s new strategy for Mattel will be judged on this movie’s success.

If successful, Mattel has a whole lot of new movies in production. 14 in fact. Including a Hot Wheels movie being directed by J.J. Abrams and a Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots movie with Vin Diesel. But the most surprising of Mattel’s toys getting the Hollywood treatment - the Uno card game and the Magic 8 Ball.

The toy business is brutal. When Kreiz took over Mattel, it was in a world of hurt. The share price had fallen ~60% in the 5 years before he came in and Mattel actually lost money in 2017, 2018 and 2019. He has steadied the ship and returned the company to profits. Now the question is can he turn around Mattel’s fortunes with its Hollywood strategy? That question will start to be answered on 21 July when the Barbie movie is released.

If you want to learn more about Mattel’s turnaround strategy and the giant marketing campaign behind the Barbie movie, listen to our recent episode of The Dive (Website | Apple | Spotify).

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Pre-Order your copy of Don’t Stress, Just Invest today