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On Sunday the climactic, and controversial, final round of the Formula One World Championship took place, with Max Verstappen beating Lewis Hamilton to the finish line on - literally - the last lap of the race.
Drive to survive, and thrive
That race will very likely go down in history as one of the most watched, if not the most watched, in the sport's 70-year history - and somewhere, a Netflix executive is very quietly rubbing their hands, preparing to translate the story of this season into season 4 of Drive To Survive, Netflix's documentary series about the sport.
The on-track drama of this season would always have created a buzz on its own, but it's also hard to understate the impact of Netflix. Like The Queen's Gambit - which revitalized interest in chess, Drive To Survive has created a new legion of F1 fans - particularly in the US.
People reading up on F1 on Wikipedia is up roughly 60% since the show came out, and ESPN has reported that the average race audience this year has been up more than 40% compared to 2019.
Few companies embody the U-S-A more than that of Harley-Davidson, the iconic motorcycle maker that's been producing "hogs" since 1903.
Cruising
25 years ago Harley-Davidson could do little wrong. Every time the company increased production, demand would rise to meet it. As a uniquely American brand the loyalty of its customer base, many of whom owned multiple Harley-Davidson's, drove revenue and profits higher and higher. The company hit a $10bn, then $15bn and eventually a $20bn valuation.
The financial crisis eventually took the fizz out of HOG's share price, but that overshadowed a more fundamental problem for the company: younger people just weren't interested in buying motorcycles, and Harley-Davidson's customers were getting older, and fewer in number.
Riding into the future
Recognizing this growing problem, Harley-Davidson announced an electric bike under the brand LiveWire. That was back in 2014, and LiveWire is now about to go public, after being spun out by Harley-Davidson as a separate company. Its valuation expected to be around $1.8bn (roughly a third of the main company).
Clearly, that launch has been a success, and yet it hasn't been enough. Even with one of the biggest electric bike brands, motorcycle sales at Harley-Davidson have declined steadily since 2014, and the company's valuation is back to where it was in the late 90s. Harley-Davidson needs another trick.
Back in March we wrote about "crypto art" — which turned out to be the early days of what would go on to be a breakthrough year for NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which beat out "metaverse", "pingdemic" and "cheugy" for Collins Dictionary’s word of the year.
If you've managed to avoid reading about NFTs until now, we'll catch you up. The short version of the explainer is that NFTs allow you to "own" a distinct piece of media such as an image or video, that is authenticated by a blockchain to be unique or original — no matter how many times it is copied or replicated across the internet. An in-depth explainer is here.
NFT-Mania
Many remain skeptical about NFTs. Why anyone would want to pay thousands of dollars for a .JPEG that anyone can theoretically copy, save, distribute or modify can be hard to get your head around — but the volumes traded in NFTs have been significant.
Data from DappRadar shows that trading volumes in NFTs hit $300m a day in August on marketplace OpenSea, with more than 9.5 million transactions taking place so far in 2021.
Those numbers are large, but the mania seems to have cooled slightly, with average daily volumes falling to $71m in December, and active users and transaction numbers also coming down modestly. Is this the beginning of the end for NFTs? Or still just the beginning?
1) Instagram has just hit 2 billion monthly active users, which means the app's user base has doubled since June 2018, when Facebook last reported that it had 1 billion active users.
2) Congress has voted to raise the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion, which should extend funding for the government beyond the 2022 midterms.
3) The Financial Modeling World Cup kicks off this weekend to find out who is actually the best at Microsoft Excel. Naturally, the world rankings live in a sortable spreadsheet.
4) Contemporary art prices have outpaced S&P 500 returns by 174% from 1995 through 2020, besting gold and real estate returns by nearly 2x. We've found an incredibly smart way for investors to diversify in fine art without breaking the bank. Masterworks.**
5) The new corporate buzzword is apparently "journey", which has seen its usage go up 70% this year, getting 3,091 mentions on S&P 500 company conference calls according to Bloomberg data.
6) Pickleball, which is some combination of about 4 different racquet sports, is the fastest growing sport in America, with participation growing 21% in 2020 and a professional circuit gaining traction (highlights of a recent competition here).
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