Yesterday over dinner, my wife and I watched the latest episode of South Korean variety show, Omniscient Interfering View, and guess what? We heard Sezairi’s ‘Fire To The Floor’ used as background music. It was very brief, but we were thrilled that a Singapore musician’s hit song was used in a regionally popular programme. For those who haven’t heard the song, this is it:
This leads me to a story I want to highlight: Bandwagon did an illuminating piece on Singaporeans’ contributions to the K-pop world over the years. These are in the areas of performance, collabs, dance choreography, and music production and composition. As reported in the story, Singaporean Gen Neo appears to be a prominent name – he has produced music for Henry Lau, Amber Liu, 4 Minute, and Got7.
Tesla surge seems to know no bounds…
Over in the business world: OMG Tesla is just killing it. Its stock price has such to a new high of US$1,835.64 on Monday. The Straits Times ran a Bloomberg report (Paywall) that with the recent surge, Elon Musk is US$8 billion richer, driving up his net worth to US$84.8 billion.
This is just beyond rationality, as Tech Crunch explains how the automaker is “worth more than the combined market valuations of America’s Big Three automakers: GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler”. Retail and institutional investors are buying into Tesla’s future growth. The Fifth Person did an interesting breakdown of whether they would be buying Tesla. The consensus was a ‘no’ because the company’s stock is just way over-valued. Have a listen:
Content marketing by local financial news outlets
Content from personal finance/ investment-focused digital media outlets such as Fifth Person, Dr Wealth, Value Invest Asia, The Next Level, Piranha Investing and StashAway’s new podcast ‘In Your Best Interest’ are fantastic for retail investors. They provide so much more insights than the traditional media news outlets. But, they are in many ways, content marketing for these digital brands to get investors to sign up for their investing workshops and programmes. In StashAway’s case, it is to get customers to invest with the roboadvisor (Read: a breakdown of StashAway’s portfolio).
This is a score for the public and laypersons like myself who just want to learn more. The Internet is indeed a great leveller. In the past, these companies would likely need to proactively engage mainstream media to pitch their stories and buy ads. With the Internet, they can push out content themselves.
And then, there are other folks, primarily YouTubers, who want to earn a nice stream of money through the video platform’s partner scheme: Chicken Genius, Kelvin Learns Investing, and Josh Tan’s The Astute Parent. Read more about the local digital personal finance media ecosystem.
BT: Investors overlook South-east Asia indices
Still on business, The Business Times ran a story that investors are overlooking Asean indices because of a lack in tech stocks. The report says that the bourses here are “laden with so-called old-economy stocks such as those in the finance and real estate sectors”. But, there are outliers: Top Glove.
Another outlier, not listed in Asean though, is Sea Ltd. Find out how it is Singapore’s answer to Alibaba and Tencent.
The business of music
Music fans and entrepreneurs might want to find out this newly-listed stock: WMG (Warner Music Group). The Nasdaq-listed stock got a huge boost from Tencent, but with the Trump’s ‘crackdown’ on China tech, things may be bleak in the near future. The stock has recovered from a slight dip recent and it is priced at just over US$30 on Monday. Find out how Warner Music could be profitable via this Motley Fool story.
Another impending listing that might be of interest is Big Hit, the company behind the Kpop phenomenon, BTS. Although the boyband’s North American concerts were cancelled recently because of Covid-19, they were able to profit from their online concert.
That’s a wrap!
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