investors

Tim Cook has been a wonderful CEO for Apple investors. For the United States, not so much

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Filling the void left by a myth like Steve Jobs seemed like an impossible mission, and although Tim Cook has been a radically different CEO than his predecessor, his career has been equally prodigious. At least in financial terms, because with it Apple has become a four trillion dollar titan. That’s one way to look at it. There is another. Financially impeccable. Over the past fifteen years, this logistics genius has refined operational efficiency and managed to turn every iPhone into a ticket printing machine. An amazing fact: With Tim Cook, Apple’s value has grown by 682 million dollars on average per day for every day of the last three decades. The business runs like clockwork, but behind that economically impeccable facade there is an uncomfortable paradox. The factories do not matter, but the processes. Cook’s management has shown that to achieve maximum profit margins it is not enough to create iconic products: you must master the supply chain. And to achieve this, Apple preferred to own processes rather than factories. She delegated all production risk to external suppliers while she developed new hardware products and especially services that expanded the ecosystem and maximized profit. China as a great ally. The pillar of this entire strategy was unusual. Since arriving at Apple as vice president of operations in 1998, Cook opted for the massive scale and cheap labor of mainland China. This allowed Apple to manufacture in massive volumes and at a very low cost, but in doing so signed a blood pact with Beijing. Educating your rival. By fully focusing the manufacturing process on China, Apple invested billions of dollars in training millions of workers. The transfer and transfer of technical knowledge has been of such magnitude that it has elevated China’s economic and technological status compared to the West. Flexible principles. This relationship with China has also been controversial due to how the company has been folded to the demands of the Chinese government in the geopolitical sphere. The App Store removed thousands of applications following direct orders from Beijing, but even more revealing has been the iCloud data transfer of Chinese users to servers operated by a Chinese state-owned company. There is a moral duality that inevitably raises suspicions. Remembering Jack Welch. In The New York Times they remembered to Jack Welch, a manager who was described as “manager of the century” after his management at the General Electric (GE) company. Like Cook, Welch was a manager with a spectacular financial record. He achieved staggering annual returns, but over time he was shown to have turned GE into an overleveraged company that was about to collapse in the 2008 crisis. Hero or villain. Cook has systematically ignored a great existential risk: if the tension of the trade war between the US and China ends up exploding, the impact could be terrible for the North American economy. The threat that China ends up attacking Taiwan could come true and in that case Cook would be remembered as the CEO who handed over the technological sovereignty of his company to his country’s biggest geopolitical rival. It is true that Cook takes time reducing Chinese dependence in the manufacturing processes at Apple, but it is also true that “the damage has been done” and the transfer of knowledge has been enormous. Ternus and a very heavy legacy. Cook’s successor will be John Ternusbut your room for maneuver will be very limited at the moment. Tim Cook in fact is not retiring completely and will become CEO and supervise the management of his successor. That makes it difficult to chart a new course for Apple if that is what Ternus is proposing, which also seems unlikely. The iPhone has changed all of China. The truth is that every step that Cook took to reinforce his commitment to China It made undeniable financial sense. and generated huge sums of money for all of the company’s investors. That does not reflect the other reality, because the iPhone has contributed definitively for China to become the giant it is today. In Xataka | Apple has been giving in to China for years, but this time the price to pay is much higher. Your AI is at stake

The massive flight of investors and millionaires suggests that he has achieved it

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For years, Dubai has been the promised land for millionaires from all over the planet who saw the United Arab Emirates as a idyllic place to live without paying taxes. The Iranian attacks with missiles and drones on different infrastructures in Dubai in recent weeks have changed that perception and the financial elite, especially Asian millionaires, are putting their feet (and fortunes) on the run. The city that seduced more than 81,000 millionaires Since 2014, it is now facing an unprecedented flight of capital and talent. The prestige that took decades to build is being tested in a matter of days. ​Explosions in the heart of the city. The last few weeks have left us images that few would have imagined in February. The Fairmont The Palm hotel, located in one of the artificial islands off the coast of Dubai, was hit for an explosion. Days later the remains of an Iranian drone demolished set fire to the iconic Burj Al Arab, the international airport has suffered damage from drone attacks and the american consulate has been the target of another drone attack. The city that boasted of being the safest in the world, in a matter of weeks, has become a scene of war. “The US-Israel war against Iran is undermining that crucial sense of security in Dubai. Dubai’s economic model relies on expatriate residents providing talent, muscle and investment capital. Stability and security are needed to attract skilled foreigners.”, assured to CNBC Jim Krane, researcher at the Baker Institute at Rice University. ​Asian money in retreat. However, the most visible impact is being felt among Asian investors, who had become one of the pillars of Dubai’s financial growth. According to data by Henley & Partners, Dubai is currently home to 237 centimillionaires (people with wealth of $100 million or more) and at least 20 billionaires Asia accounted for 47% of all multinational companies attracted to Dubai International Chamber in 2025, and around a quarter of the more than 2,270 foundations created in the Emirates have Asian ownership, according to data from the consulting firm BSA Law. Bloomberg published that the United Arab Emirates had attracted some 700 billion dollars from millionaires around the world, especially Asians. Singapore and Hong Kong, new chosen destinations. Grace Tang, CEO of Phillip Private Equity, pointed out to Reuters that between 10 and 20 of their customers, mostly Asian, are asking about how transfer your assets to Singapore to protect the value of its assets. Hong Kong also emerges as an alternative. For his part, Felix Lai, from the consulting firm JMS Group, counted to Bloomberg who had organized a private jet flight to transport 15 clients from Oman to Hong Kong at a cost of approximately $300,000. “They didn’t even care about the price,” Lai explained. “They just wanted to leave.” An advisor in Singapore who declined to be identified added that more than half of his 13 clients in the Emirates are seriously considering moving their assets: “Flying back and forth will be complicated even if the conflict ends tomorrow. It’s about trust.” Dubai’s economic model faces its biggest test. Dubai does not depend as directly on the oil industry as its neighbors, but its economy is based on its ability to attract expatriates, your investments and his talent. At the beginning of the year, the Dubai International Finance Center housed 1,289 entities linked to family offices (61% more than the previous year), and the 120 main families in the center jointly managed more than 1.2 billion dollars, according to CNBC. Although stock markets around the world have felt the earthquake resulting from the attacks in an area of ​​strategic resources for trade and energy, the impact of the conflict with Iran has been much more severe and direct for the Gulf markets. The Dubai Stock Exchange (DFM) has fallen more than 16.6% since the start of the war between the US and Israel against Iran. Fitch Ratings had already predicted before the war a real estate correction of up to 15% in 2025 and 2026. Everything indicates that they have fallen short the worst estimates of the financial consequences. Passing panic or structural change? Not all actors in the sector believe that this will lead to a permanent mass flight. Dhruba Jyoti Sengupta, CEO of Wrise Private Middle East in Dubai, pointed out to Reuters that his firm had not observed “serious conversations about capital flight” as its clients remain confident in the country’s long-term resilience. ​Nirbhay Handa, CEO of migration agency for millionaires Multipolitanpointed in Bloomberg “If uncertainty lasts a few weeks, some companies may pause their expansion, but stability will likely return quickly to Dubai as the situation improves.” What does seem clear is that the city will have to rebuild something much more difficult to build than its skyscrapers for millionaires: trust of those who chose it as a home for their money. In Xataka | A company wants to build a €4 billion megacasino in Dubai. The problem is that Dubai prohibits gambling Image | Unsplash (Wael Hneini)

investors are panicking about AI

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Last February 23 was a disastrous day for some software giants. Companies like CrowdStrike, Expedia, AppLovin, Adobe or Datadog were prominent names on the list of S&P 500. Something they have in common is that they are software companies at a time when AI has eaten the technological news. They contrast with hardware companies, which are going like a rocket in full RAM memory crisis. And it all has to do with two things. Stock market volatility and panic that AI eats software. In short. These last few weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have been very active. Apart from being in center of war to see what AI will be the one that powers the systems of the United States Department of Defense –that of OpenAI behind him Pentagon’s monumental mess with Anthropic-, they have presented models. And when these companies make a move, the software companies are shaking. Not so much because AI is going to eat up their market, since they are companies that are integrating their models or those of third parties into their systems, but because they are companies that have something in common: they are public and investors are extremely volatile. The WSJ pointed: February 23 was a disastrous date for software on the stock market. Panic. The situation has been normalizing since that day and many are recovering the price they had before rushing, but there is still something in the atmosphere. Investors believe, or can see, that those AI tools can cannibalize entire software suites of all kinds. What a human used to donow an AI can do it. And with agents knocking on the door, these investors no longer know how the companies in which they have money invested can respond. Therefore, those mentioned and others such as IBM or Blue Owl have become psychological victims in a scenario in which there are three specific fears: Companies that live on classic licenses and subscriptions must decide how much AI they put in to be in the conversation, but without destroying their business. Fear that agents can replicate actions at low cost, narrowing the sources of profit for investors. Fear of an AI cannibalizing a software suite. If OpenAI releases something tomorrow that ‘loads’ legal software, the company that makes that software will suffer the consequences, for example. Counterpanic. As always with the stock market, the aforementioned volatility comes into play and investors who bet their money do not have to know anything about the subject. They simply see bells and start to tremble. In the world of video games, a lot also happens with investors who do not know about the world, and we saw this precisely with Google’s AI that “”creates”” (and I’m missing quotes) video games. When Google introduced Genie 3the actions of a good part of the industry they fell plummeting. But, despite the falls, there are those who think that it won’t be that bad and that the market is exaggerating. The position of analysts at the Goldman Sachs firm is curious. On the one hand, they have been one of the catalysts for this fear of AI in the software segment, pointing out that there is an “existential” risk and certain jobs that can be carried by agents instead of by humans. However, the company’s own CEO has already pointed that things are being exaggerated and that these companies have plenty of capacity to pivot and adapt. Come on, as we pointed out, the movements of many investors are the result more of emotions than of realities. But of course, that implies something else: as point the firm, short positions have skyrocketed and long positions are falling, which indicates that fear of what will happen in the future is something that is the protagonist of the stock market conversation. Hardware holds up better. On the other side of the coin we see hardware companies. If there is fear of an AI that replaces software packages, those who have the power to create the components that are used to train and operate that AI see green numbers. TSMC either NVIDIA as a chip supplier. Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron or Phison as suppliers of memory and controllers. EITHER Western Digital and Seagate as storage providers. They are the same companies that are causing an unprecedented component crisis because they have allocated all of their production to the hardware that powers the data centers to train these AIs. How different the dynamics of hardware ones are compared to software ones. The agentic future. And you don’t have to go far from NVIDIA to sow more panic among investors. ITS CEO, Jensen Huang, commented recently that AI agents will reshape software companies. According to him, these companies will change the well-established models of subscriptions for absolutely everything with other models based on ‘rental’ of AI agents and specialized tokens. Huang isn’t saying those companies will suffer, but rather that they will have to rethink things if they want to become a much larger market than they currently are. Basically, he noted that “there will be no software that is not an agent” because companies will not be able to have software that is “dumb.” He is not the first to point out that direction and, although as we said, software companies have that necessary resilience, another thing is how the market responds and some investors who may choose to bet on something more “earthly”: infrastructure such as data centers. Images | Bear Bull Traders, Chad Davis In Xataka | Big Tech doesn’t stop firing its engineers. At the same time, they have stepped on the accelerator in hiring

companies prefer investors

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For 99% of the world’s population, salary is the main source of wealth since it is their only way of income main. However, the data collected by one of the largest fixed income managers, point out that the weight of salaries in global wealth is at its historic lows, while that of financial capital takes the largest share. This imbalance is not accidental and explains why the economy can show growth while many employees suffer to make ends meet. The disconnection between productivity and wages. A good example of this phenomenon is we see in the data of the Economic Policy Institute Updated to January 2026, between the fourth quarter of 1979 and the third quarter of 2025, productivity in the US increased by 90.2%, while hourly wage compensation only increased by 33.0% during this period. This means that the financial productivity has grown 2.7 times more than salaries, generating a gap that benefits companies, senior executives and shareholders, but not the employees of those same companies. He historical of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis leaves another illustrative example of this phenomenon. Since the late 1970s, the relationship between wages and GDP in the United States has been progressively sinking, except when serious global crises have occurred: in the 2000s with the dotcom crisis, and in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. That is to say, salaries have been losing weight in the wealth of countries for decades. History of the relationship of salaries with respect to GDP in the US The historical minimum of the salary weight. The share of income from work has gone from representing approximately two-thirds of global GDP in the early 1980s to 52.4% of global GDP today, the rate lowest in the historical series according to the International Labor Organization. According to this organization, if employees received the same proportion of salaries to GDP as in 2004, global salaries would increase by an additional 2.4 trillion. This imbalance is mainly due to the fact that the economy rewards more capital returns than the human effort of work (salaries), with companies focused on obtaining quick returns for shareholders instead of raising payrolls. Increase in productivity and wages The impact of AI on salaries. In recent years, the development of artificial intelligence is beginning to increase this gap by automating tasks. at entry points. Research from the University of Navarra determined that the arrival of ChatGPT (and other LLM models) drove down wages of companies most exposed to AI by up to 4.5% on average, compared to companies less exposed to automation. ​The salary impact was greater among junior workers, that they lost 6.3% in starting salaries and a 4% drop in job offers, while senior workers lost an average of 5.9% in their salary level. Causes behind the turn towards capital. From PIMCO they explain that companies use intangible capital such as software and data (AI, in short), to scale profits without using more labor in the process. That decoupling of the hand work would be reducing the bargaining power of employees, while AI encourages companies to contain payroll expenses to maximize dividends. Since the 1990s, factors such as globalization, loss of bargaining power of unions, and concentration of capital in large firms have eroded the labor portion of income. Tiffany Wilding, an economist at PIMCO, said: “Starting with computers and software, and now adding automation and artificial intelligence, technological tools are easily replacing mid-level and increasingly skilled labor.” In Xataka | We believed that AI was going to retire an entire generation of workers early. The opposite is happening Image | Unsplash (Marcus Locke)

if there are Chinese investors behind

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For years, SpaceX has ceased to be simply a rocket company to become one of the most decisive players in the technological and strategic ecosystem of the United States. Its launch capacity, its role in satellite communications and its links with the defense field place it in a position of enormous relevance, especially striking in a company that is still privately owned. In this context, questions about who may be investing in your structure take on a different, much more sensitive meaning. What is at stake is no longer just business, but influence on infrastructures considered critical. The question. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Democratic Senator Andy Kim sent a letter to the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, in which they ask for an immediate review of SpaceX in the face of information that points to possible hidden Chinese investments in its capital, according to Reuters. In the United States, this type of communication does not imply that there is an open investigation or a prior conclusion, but it does activate political supervision mechanisms and sets specific response deadlines. Private equity and side doors. To understand why this political request is so sensitive, it is worth stopping at the very nature of SpaceX. The company is not listed on the stock exchange nor does it have a public stock symbol, as it operates as a privately held company, which limits the financial information available and restricts the purchase of shares to the general public. Its financing comes mainly through private investment rounds and secondary sales between existing investors. This model, perfectly legal, also makes it more complex to track precisely who participates in the capital at any given time. The money trail. In their letter, the senators cite journalistic information and court testimony that point to a possible indirect route of entry of capital linked to China into SpaceX. These funds would have been channeled through entities registered in jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands or the British Virgin Islands to mask the purchase of shares. The debate does not revolve so much around the legality of these financial vehicles, common in international markets, but rather the difficulty of determining who is really behind the money. The aforementioned news agency adds a precedent in Delaware: A judge backed the decision to remove a Chinese investor from a vehicle created to buy SpaceX shares and return $50 million. Additional concern. In their letter, Warren and Kim warn that Chinese involvement in SpaceX could constitute “a threat to national security, potentially putting key military, intelligence and civilian infrastructure at risk.” That scenario would activate the rules known as FOCIfocused on foreign ownership, control or influence in companies with sensitive contracts, and could open the door to a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. For now, everything is in the field of the preventive evaluation requested from the Pentagon. Who’s in charge when you don’t contribute? The perception that SpaceX belongs entirely to Elon Musk simplifies a more nuanced reality. According to The Guardian, Their participation is estimated at around 42%, which leaves room for external shareholders who also assume risks and expectations about the direction of the company. Some of those institutional investors have made SpaceX one of their top holdings. In a private company, where public control mechanisms are fewer, this balance between personal leadership and distributed capital takes on special relevance. A more integrated empire. The discussion on foreign investment also comes at a time when SpaceX’s technological perimeter is expanding. SpaceX has announced the purchase of xAI, bringing together artificial intelligence, communications and space access capabilities under the same umbrella. That movement, as our colleague Javier Lacort describescombines critical infrastructure and media speakers, a combination that makes the idea of ​​regulating such a conglomerate complex. Date on the calendar. The senators have asked the Department of Defense for a response before February 20, a deadline that should provide a first clarification on the scope of the matter and the steps contemplated by the Pentagon. Until then it is not possible to draw conclusions. But the episode leaves a broader signal: when a private company concentrates so much capacity, any doubt about its financing transcends the corporate sphere and enters fully into the strategic sphere. Images | SpaceX In Xataka | Elon Musk’s plan: turn his companies into a 21st century “India Company” that exceeds the power of the State

Alphabet avoids going into details even with its investors

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At the beginning of this year an agreement between Apple and Google became visible that points straight to the heart of Apple Intelligence and to the future evolution of Siri towards a more personalized experience. Now, most of the details of the pact remain in the shadows, from its specific conditions to its economic impact for both companies. This imbalance between what is announced and what is explained may be insufficient for some actors, such as investors of both companies. Where the agreement appears says as much as it counts. Public formalization, let us remember, materializes in a statement presented as a wholealthough its visible trace is found only in Google’s information channels. In Apple equivalent spaces There is no parallel piece that replicates that advertisement. This asymmetry does not alter the existence of the agreement, but it makes it clear that the public access point is concentrated in a single showcase. The question that puts the agreement in the foreground. In the last conference with Alphabet investorsWells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski asked directly about the relationship with Apple. His intervention did not focus only on the monetization of search with AI, but on a very specific point: how these types of agreements with partners are aligned when the value can increasingly depend on the utility within the platform itself and not so much on the traditional business of clicks. In that logic he included “Apple’s new partnership with Siri.” A carefully constructed escape. The person who responded on behalf of Alphabet was Philipp SchindlerSVP and chief commercial officer at Google, and did so by shifting the conversation toward the search engine’s overall performance and the growing role of AI in its monetization. The speech addressed topics such as AI Overviews either AI Modewith references to Gemini’s impact on that ecosystem. But, curiously, he did not stop at the specific collaboration with Apple nor did he answer a specific part related to how to align incentives in that direction. The question received a formal answer, but no clarification on the agreement itself. Cook’s ‘tactical’ response. At the conference with Apple investorsTim Cook offered a more direct answer when asked about the collaboration with Google and defended its technological logic by stating that the company’s AI provides “the most capable basis for Apple Foundation Models”, which will allow “unlocking many experiences and innovating in key ways thanks to collaboration.” The CEO further insisted that Apple will keep on-device processing and in its private computing environment as pillars of its privacy approach. But this greater clarity did not extend to the terms of the pact, about which he was blunt: “we will not reveal details of the agreement.” When those who put money in want answers. As we can see, presentations of financial results offer another type of window, very different from traditional corporate communication. In these calls with investors and analysts, it is common for nuances to emerge that do not appear in the statements, especially when agreements with potential impact on product, strategy or income are at stake. Therefore, beyond what is officially published, this type of meeting becomes a key area to verify how far companies are willing to go in their public explanations. Images | Google | Apple In Xataka | Apple Lets Google Spend Billions on AI While It Becomes the Distributor: The Fancy Wrapping Strategy

investors are in “total caution” mode

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In June 2025 everything was joy in the crypto world. one bitcoin reached the record value of $124,752 (according to CoinMarketCap) and marked a new historical record. From that moment, falls and more falls that have been done especially in recent days. And it’s not just bitcoin of course: it’s all cryptos. Bitcoin at $70,000. In the last 24 hours we have seen how bitcoin has barely managed to stay at the $70,000 barrier, and on some platforms it has even traded below that level. Right now it is around $71,600, but even with that data the conclusion is clear: in eight months bitcoin has lost more than 40% of its value. Risk aversion. We are seeing how the technology stock markets are falling quite generally in recent days because the results of the last quarter of the year have not been as good as expected. Even the gold, which was rising like foamhas also regressed. Investors are reducing risk overall, taking profits (and minimizing losses) and adopting much more cautious stances. In this scenario, BTC behaves as a risk asset, not as a safe haven, so divestment is the strategy that is being extended. what has happened. The macroeconomic situation is especially complex right now. Analyst Joe DiPasquale explained in Forbes how there is no internal problem in cryptocurrencies, but rather it is the global economic context that has caused the collapse: There are assets that are very sensitive to market movements: if the market rises a little, they rise a lot, but if it falls, they collapse. This is what we are seeing with cryptocurrencies, which are, in their opinion, these types of “high-beta” assets. Bitcoin and cryptos act as a kind of augmented “mirror” of how much money is left over in the economy. When there is a lot of money circulating (liquidity), bitcoin rises quickly, but if it is scarce, bitcoin is the first asset to be sold. The real economy weighs, and a lot. Government bonds are up and paying more interest right now, so investors prefer that security. The dollar also rose in value and strengthened, and since it is “more expensive”, you need fewer dollars to buy the same amount of bitcoin, which pushes the price down. But above all, as we said, investors have gone into total caution (“risk-off”) mode and have been selling volatile assets to protect their money in cash or gold. If the stock market falls, cryptos fall (more). CoinDesk also highlights that the 7.5% drop in bitcoin value In the last 24 hours it precisely followed large falls in Asian assets. There is concern about excessive spending on AI – fear of the bubble bursting again –, exaggerated valuations and lack of that increase in income that everyone promises. Google, Qualcomm and AMD—which fell a spectacular 17% yesterday, Wednesday—are some of the examples of these technological falls. Source: Alternative From greed to fear. The situation is very clear if we look at the Greed and Fear Index (Fear & Greed Index) from firms such as Alternative, which place it at a value of 12, or what is the same, “Extreme fear”. This index studies market movements and analysis to give that number, which is a great summary of the scenario we are experiencing. For much of 2025 that level was above 50 and reached 80 (extreme greed), but the current drop is evident. Bad time for cryptos. Of course, the collapse of bitcoin is as contagious as ever, and practically all cryptocurrencies have registered notable falls in recent weeks. Ethereum, which in August reached close to $4,800, is now in just 2,100. XRP has gone from 3.5 to 1.4 in that same period, and Solana from 247 to 91. Crypto believers are once again seeing their patience tested, but the maxim for them remains clear: HODL. In Xataka | In 2011 a group of investors bought 80,000 bitcoins. They just sold them 17,000,000% more expensive

Investors are beginning to bet more and more on Chinese firms

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Things would have to be twisted a lot for The United States does not end up winning the AI ​​race. Has the most capable models and the most powerful chipsand has also prevented China, its biggest rival, from having access to its technologies. So how is it possible that more and more investors are putting their money in Chinese companies? what’s happening. They count in Reuters that many international investors are beginning to diversify their bets in artificial intelligence companies towards Chinese companies. Shares of Chinese companies listed abroad such as Alibaba, Tencent either Baidu have grown significantly in recent months. It’s not that investors have stopped believing in big tech Americans, they are covering their backs. Why is it important. He fear of the AI ​​bubble has been taken seriously by many investors and firms are recommending reducing exposure to a possible blowout. Furthermore, China’s efforts to create your own chips and be self-sufficient have caused a change in perception: one in which China is closing the technological distance with the US. This is what the British financial company Ruffer says: “the gap may not be as wide or as deep as many think. The competitive landscape is changing.” A smaller, but safer bet. The Swiss firm UBS Global Wealth Management recently published a report titled “look for opportunities in China” in which they highlight that “China’s domestic technological innovation is accelerating.” AI in China receives more political supportis cheaper and they are managing to monetize it much faster than the American one. Perhaps it is not presented as such a lucrative bet, but it is more reliable. National chips. The US blockade left China unable to use its chips for AI and Beijing’s response was to make it technological self-sufficiency was a national priority. The push to manufacture our own chips is bearing fruit and recently two companies dedicated to the task have had a spectacular debut on the stock market. One of them was Moore Threads, known as Chinese NVIDIA, which had a growth of 500%. Shortly after I followed in his footsteps MetaX and increased its shares by 688%. They are not the only companies looking for the holy grail of chips, there is also Cambricon, Biren Technology and of course Huawei and SMIC, which are also squeezing all the possibilities to get the best chips with the technology they have. At the moment China is still behind when it comes to technology, but the prudent bet for an investor in the face of uncertainty is to diversify. Image | Karola G, Pexels In Xataka | Thousands of trucks saturate the Vietnam border: it is the back door through which China avoids US tariffs

El Corte Inglés has just placed 808 million among investors

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Santander and El Corte Inglés have sold 808 million euros in loans from their clients to institutional investors, as published The Confidential. Instead of keeping those loans on their books, they have packaged them and transferred them to investment funds. Why is it important. The department store doesn’t just sell washing machines or sofas: it finances its customers’ purchases for months or years without charging interest. These debts are converted into a financial asset that is then sold to investors in exchange for periodic payments. If someone doesn’t pay their loan, the problem is no longer yours. It is financial engineering applied in a very ingenious way to retail. How the business works. A brushstroke to understand it: El Corte Inglés sells you a TV for 1,000 euros and lets you pay for it in 10 months without interest. Instead of waiting 10 months to collect that 1,000 euros, package your debt with thousands of others and sell it to investors for, say, 950 euros. He collects the money immediately, eliminates the risk of you not paying, and can use that capital to finance more purchases. Investors pay 950 euros today and will collect 1,000 in 10 months. You still don’t pay interest. Everyone wins. What has happened. The operation was closed in the Dublin market and includes all types of credits: Interest-free financing for up to five years. Credit card debts. And small loans of 300 to 900 euros. Investors who buy these packages charge different interest rates depending on the risk they assume. In the largest section (664 million), they charge 0.87% above the Euribor. In the highest risk sections, the differential rises to 6.2%. Between the lines. By selling these credits, the financial company removes the risk from its balance sheet and frees up space to continue lending money. Banking regulators approve this type of operation because it spreads the risk throughout the financial system instead of concentrating it in a single entity. For Santander and El Corte Inglés, it is a way to grow without accumulating all the danger of defaults. The background. Santander bought 51% of the financial company of El Corte Inglés in 2013paying 140 million for control and another 140 million as an immediate dividend. The bank saw the potential clearly: the margins on consumer credit are much higher than those of traditional banking. El Corte Inglés maintains 49% without managing anything. A perfect capitalist partner. Yes, but. Financiera El Corte Inglés is not marginal: it handles nearly a third of the consumer banking business in Spain and Portugal. His loyalty card It has 11.7 million members who last year made purchases worth 3,778 million, both in department stores and in supermarkets and other subsidiaries. That customer base is a gold mine. The context. These operations have become increasingly popular in the Spanish financial sector. Santander has been the most active European bank packaging and selling loan portfolios. For an entity like Financiera El Corte Inglés, this mechanism not only frees capital: it also makes it possible to avoid regulatory limits on risk concentration. behind the scenes. The model reveals how the retail Spanish. The real margin is no longer just in selling a product, but in financing its purchase and then monetizing that debt by selling it to investment funds. El Corte Inglés sells televisions, but above all it sells credits. And then it sells the risk of those credits. Squaring the circle. Featured image | The English Court In Xataka | The two largest travel agencies in Spain fight to sell trips to Disney. This is the business of children’s dreams

Some investors are already boasting about the fortunes they lost

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The digital age has given us few genuinely pure pleasures, but one of the indisputable ones has been watching that train wreck in slow motion (well, not very slow) that was the fall from grace of NFTs. First, international cryptobrokers They tried to convince us that paying millions for a certified jpg was a safe investment. Just a few months later, those images were worth just a few dollars. The fall has been so precipitous that now, many of those same investors laugh at their own financial misfortune. It is the definitive death certificate of NFTs. What happened then? The NFT phenomenon began with early experiments as early as 2012 with the so-called Colored Coinsbut the real boom started in 2017 with CryptoKitties on Ethereumwhich showed the potential of NFTs: basically, they are unique digital assets that “represent” the ownership of a digital or physical object, certified using blockchain technology to guarantee its authenticity and uniqueness. Unlike cryptocurrencies, which are interchangeable with each other, each NFT is unrepeatable and cannot be replaced by another identical one, functioning as a digital certificate of ownership and authenticity.​ In 2021, NFTs reached their peak of popularity with multi-million dollar sales such as Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” at Christie’s for 69 million dollarsand iconic collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club They generated great attention and million-dollar valuations. However, after a spectacular boom, the market began to decline in 2022 due to oversupply, extreme speculation and concerns about scams, resulting in an abrupt drop in sales. Eat the rich. After the collapse of 2022a certain tendency was generated on the internet to mock the speculative bubble that enveloped NFTs in 2021 and the enormous losses suffered by many investors: around 95% of NFTs had lost all value. Already then the practice of sharing screenshots of NFTs at a loss became fashionable. In part it was a recurring joke from the very origin of the phenomenon, in which people shared the capture of an NFT, showing that there was no essential difference between an NFT and the copy of an NFT, beyond a document that certified which was the “original” and which was the copy. Famous people in disgrace. The internet likes nothing more than laughing at a celebrity or a millionaire, and even more so when they fall into the clutches of a pyramid scheme with planetary reach. For example, much was said about Justin Bieber, who bought a Bored Ape NFT for $1.3 million in 2022 and fell 95% in value in 2023. Another classic example: the NFT that was a screenshot of the first tweet of Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter. It was sold in 2021 for $2.9 million and less than a year later its owner tried to resell it, reaching an offer of a few thousand dollars, that is, a loss of value of more than 99%. In July 2023, it was worth $3.77. In general, NFTs and their physical volatility gave rise to a good amount of scandals and scams in which celebrities such as Seth Green, Jay Choy and Melania Trump were involved. From lost to the river. Curiously, many of those who lost millionaire amounts with NFTs are showing their shame on social networks, and describing how much they spent and how much their investment is now worth: a mix of collective warning and taking misfortunes with humor (because they can) which, of course, is spread to the derision of the influencers who tried to sell the motorcycle to their followers. A tweeter He bought this monster for 17,000 and now it’s worth ten dollars. The user @NFTsAreNice (lol) bought this for 31,000 and now it’s worthless. Another investor spent three fucking million in thiswhich is now worth 25,000. It has gone even worse for this other one, who invested 1.8 million and now it’s worth 450. They all use the formula “I bought this NFT in 2022 for…”, and the curious thing is that many of them are still in the cryptocurrency or NFT business, and have profiles as supposedly reliable investors. Significantly, some of them have received in response to their laments messages of “You don’t cry in the casino”, a typical phrase that cryptobrokers utter when they fall into heavy losses after heavy investments. Come on, the “who wants a bag” of a lifetime. In Xataka | The first trial on NFTs and copyright in Spain confirms it: everything always revolved around profits

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