Okay, very good morning to you. It's Tuesday the 25th of August. Hope you're doing well. I'm going to talk about U.S. China, vaccine, storms and the Dow changed, which happened last night. That's what's on the agenda for the session ahead. So I'm going to get you up to speed with the major market fundamentals. They're in focus. I'll have a quick glimpse to start with of the U.S. equity market. And as you can see this morning, Europe just taking on from the baton from the higher close on Wall Street. Asia pushed things up again in the overnight session. The main reasoning behind this is a combination of optimism about treatments for the coronavirus and signs of progression on trade dialogue between the U.S. and China. So nice move seen overnight in the S&P. A bit of a breakout you can see here in some of the price activity that saw us just squeeze up into the close on Wall Street. That was the final half an hour of trade, that big solid green bar restricted a little bit in the overnight session, then a break higher and a nice run actually.  Again, on the longer picture here, these are uncharted territories in terms of the S&P and the NASDAQ is concerned. We know the Dow will be changed, but a little bit deficient on the tech side still lagging somewhat, the NASDAQ and the S&P overall. But after we've now broken through with more conviction, that 33.97 and a half, which was the pre-pandemic high that we had back in late February, mid-February of this year, just continue to soldier on to the upside. So quite impressive stuff. And if you're looking at the S&P today, interesting when we have this type of breakout move, I mean, if you think about it, we've gone from a price point of around 3417-18s, squeeze up into the close, as I said. And so we've added a decent amount over a fairly short period. And yes, there's been some fundamental catalysts, the last one being these updates in the trade dialogue side to accompany some of the positive vaccine and fast-tracking news that we saw from Trump yesterday. But yeah, a little bit of profit-taking perhaps before then, another squeeze higher wouldn't be unusual. That tends to be a pattern that we've seen. And so generally what I like to do on these types of mornings is just look for areas of where, if we did get a pullback, there might be a meaningful area of support where the market might respond. And then, like what we saw with the NASDAQ yesterday, we'll bring that up in a second. But early selling out the gate at the opening bell and then a really solid recovery by the close of the session. So here then, I guess, if I was looking at the S&P, I'd look at the R1 on the daily pivots. You've also got the pullback low in the late Asia session, and what was initially a support point after the initial push-up we saw earlier during that overnight session. Any further pullback that's more aggressive than probably be looking at 34, 29 and a half, and then back down to 24 and a quarter, which will encapsulate those previous highs that were seen just prior to the opening yesterday. And again, provided a bit of a footing after the initial surge that was seen into closing bell on Wall Street. The thinking here being that any decline that might occur is not necessarily negative. It's just in case any of these more short focus traders look to just books and profits on this latest push-up. And then more buyers come in if we start to pull back lower again. Again, another good level is down here at 34.10. And then obviously below their 34.100 encapsulates that previous more significant longer term area of what now will be a strong area of support. Nasdaq wise, yeah, really interesting day yesterday, obviously quite seesaw in that fashion of, you know, we initially pops up at the open and then quite a dramatic sell-off and recovered all the way during the Asia Pacific session. And we're pretty much at a scratch now from that move yesterday all in all. So yeah, higher from the overnight session. So just keeping an eye on that near term range that's held first thing early this morning, then pivot probably the next bigger level on the downside, which would be around the Asia Pacific kind of session low at a similar price point on the longer data chart. Obviously, it's looking fairly extreme here now. I mean, really big level further down 11283, which would be that previous rejection on all time highs a couple times before found a nice footing on the 18th. And then it despite brief momentary break held above that point on the 20th. And then it's just accelerated ever since. And one stock yesterday I did see was Apple. A lot of people, obviously talking about, you know, this is a $2 trillion or now $2.1 trillion company in terms of its market valuation. How far can it go? And I did see a research note that came out on Monday from Morgan Stanley and was talking about Apple. And on their ball case scenario, it's not their base case, their base case, they see a potential upside encompassing yesterday's around a percent or so gain, another 5% appreciation of the stock price. But in a ball case scenario, they see 681 bucks over the next year. This would be underpinned by iPhone upgrades, accelerating, don't forget the iPhone 12 obviously on its way. And the refreshing of this model then tends to be a little bit more delayed and generally now people recycling their contracts into the new phone. So when that comes due generally is it has a meaningful impact. And then further services growth, which is obviously key to the company's long term continuation of its trajectory. And they're basically saying then on their ball case scenario, such stock gains would mark roughly a 37% move from where we climbed or where we finished at the end of last week. And that would push then Apple's market cap to near on $3 trillion. So an interesting stat, I did see someone, I can't remember the natural numbers. Someone tweeted me when we talked about Apple last week, and it was like the amount of years it took for us to go from zero to one trillion and the amount of days it took to go from basically one to two trillion. So you're interested to see whether or not the three trillion continues that trade or trend, I should say. So yeah, equity markets positive in overnight session. DAX then quite positive as well this morning up around 100 points, but finding a bit of resistance around the initial R1 in the futures elsewhere, though, things relatively quiet. And we are continuing to track and monitor and we'll look at the storm situation potentially impacting the Gulf of Mexico further beyond what it already is doing so, and crude is pretty much flatlining at the moment. Elsewhere in the FX markets, the Dixie slight negative is down about one tenth of a percent. So very marginal gain seen in the currency pairs. I say marginal, I'd say moderate. It's probably a better description. You're a dollar up about 18 pips, finding a continuation of a bit of a bounce in the futures from around 1789, which was a nice solid level from yesterday and in the overnight Asia session. And then cable up a little bit further just following some of the dollar decline seen overnight with some of the general risk on activity from emerging from the progress on trade negotiations between the US and China. Gold markets pretty much stuck within what I kind of classify as a period of consolidation for the time being within a rough $30 range of really 1930 to 1960. A lot of that sort of gold movement, FX movement, I would say now likely to be derived from markets in high anticipation and in waiting mode now for Jerome Powell. Obviously, we are looking for him for more clear guidance on some of these key monetary policy review updates, particularly on that idea about average inflation targeting. And so it could well start to get a little bit quiet on that front in terms of the overall potential movement in those assets. But for the moment, the one that could be quite interesting would be equities, whether or not we see that kind of familiar pattern of a little bit of profit taking perhaps on the push up that we've had. And then it just backs up, backs up to go long again in that perspective, because ultimately underline that things haven't changed fundamentally. So let's get stuck into some of the headlines. So first of all, starting with US-China, they spoke yesterday, so Mnuchin Lighthizer, Treasury Secretary, Trade Secretary talked with the Vice Premier of China, and both sides see progress and are committed to the success of the agreement. Now, timing is a fine thing. Obviously, just seeing through the veil, this is absolutely was planned, you would say, by the administration and Donald Trump. Obviously, this call comes after what had been a period of escalation, the most recent kind of catalyst, if you like, being the change in your autonomy of Hong Kong through that change in national security law. Then you had the consulate, the unwinding of several diplomatic ties. You've had the technology situation with TikTok and WeChat, or Tencent. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, just coinciding, of course, with the first day of the Republican National Convention, they have a phone call and markets respond and we hit fresh all-time highs. So politics is certainly a fine thing. And it just reminds me so much of that trade war cycle, which we often refer to. And the administration, the timing is just too suspect for this type of activity. And it says a lot, I think, for me about the real tangible risk that the trade war has on markets, which overall I think is small, because ultimately, Trump is in the White House for the time being and he is calling the shots with his team. And as much as there's going to be lots of assertive comments, the way of China from Trump, I think underlying this in the end is the idea of, look, I do buy into this notion a little bit that perhaps as strange as it sounds, does the market or does China actually prefer a second term with Trump than Biden? And underlying that potential angle being that it's better to just tackle US in isolation, irrespective of this tit-for-tat, which you would imagine the aggressiveness between the two would dissipate when the election passes, if Trump wins, he's kind of secured then this next period of years ahead. And so therefore, he doesn't need to be so aggressive on that front. And then at the same point, there's a deal in place where China now would look to a dear, certainly in the second half this year and likely beyond, to commit to large-scale purchasing of these various US goods and imports. And this would be counter then to Joe Biden, which if anything on the geopolitical front would look to kind of reestablish relationships with other global partners in the Western world, like the UK and the Eurozone. And if China then finds itself, you know, not just against the US, but against multiple other big trading forces globally, is that more of a frightening prospect than just dealing with Trump in isolation. And so yeah, it's just so interesting how this politically is playing out. You know, China obviously playing ball at this specific timing that has the biggest payoff for the Republicans at this point in time, where Trump can again look at the stock market, he can look at how he can speak out about China, but then China are buying his goods and so on and so forth. So yeah, definitely this was a driving factor in the overnight session. The other thing of course was that of the vaccine side of things. Yesterday we were talking a lot about AstraZeneca and about the FDA approval and the fast tracking that Trump was trying to push on with. Moderna Inc. have said that it's near a deal to supply at least 18 million vaccine doses to the European Union. This of course then comes after Trump said treatment based on blood plasma donated by people recovered from COVID-19 will aim to be expanded. Elsewhere then, the other thing that is coming up this morning has been the ongoing situation in the Gulf of Mexico. We've got like a double header if you like of storm activity. First of all, Marco, which has actually weakened the status of that now it's made landfall is a tropical depression and so one notch down from a tropical storm in that respect, which is currently the status of Laura. Now Laura is actually further out, but looking at the timing of making landfall in the Gulf Coast, Laura is expected to reach northwestern Gulf Coast as a hurricane, so it is forming and anticipated to intensify according to latest predictions from the NHC and make landfall late Wednesday, early Thursday. Now on the back of this then, as of yesterday, upstream operators had shut in just over 1.5 million boughs per day of oil. That equates to around 82.4% of offshore production and also 56.9% of offshore production of natural gas as well. To give you an idea in terms of the refining capacity of the overall Gulf Coast, over 50% of all US refining capacity sits within that specific geographic region, but the potential loss of supply in the Gulf of Mexico is seen at about 2% of overall US production, so it is relatively small on that particular figure. If I flip over though, this is perhaps a slightly more detailed chart, I did tweet it if you did want to look at it in a bit more detail, but what is quite useful to look at in order to quantify the actual impact that this could particularly have is, yes for one here you can see the projected paths of tropical storm Laura and depression Marco. When Laura comes in though, you can see it does, it is anticipated to hit a cluster of very key facilities. Refinery closures from companies like Mateva Enterprises and Vallejo, Valero, excuse me, Energy could potentially shut in more than 1 million boughs per day capacity before the storm threat passes, so it's always quite nice to see and get familiar with the general infrastructure of the coastline in the Gulf of Mexico because then you can start to anticipate a little better than the trajectory of these particular paths of these weather systems and how disruptive perhaps that they might be. At the moment though, the oil market relatively calm about the proceedings as they are unfolding at the moment, as I mentioned the oil here is flat, it's just hugging really and found some support around pivot 4250 and then also underpinned a little bit by just general renewed risk appetite if that US China tone starts to become more conciliatory, well then that should be an underlying support as well for price going forward if all things remain equal on that front. So keep an eye on that situation on the weather patterns, I'll keep you informed as well. And then the other thing just quickly to mention was a bit of a change in composition of the Dow. This wasn't unexpected in regard to the whole reasoning behind this change has been prompted by the fact that Apple has of course announced their stock split and therefore then that's going to impact the value of their share price and then alter then the composition of the actual Dow Jones-Dutchwell average. It's been the biggest reshuffle though as a consequence that we've seen in about seven years. ExxonMobil which I think is actually the oldest company within the Dow not anymore. So Exxon, Pfizer and Raytheon technologies have been booted out of the Dow making way for basically Salesforce, Amgen and Honeywell International. So it's always interesting to see the change in what sectors generally get represented. Obviously coming in a company like Salesforce is quite a distinct change from the historical type of company that would be present within the Dow. But again without tech, Dow has really suffered given the fact that it's the Dow that's really dragged this tech that's really dragged this market higher. Companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook and so on obviously do not appear within this index. There are various different rules of why that happens given the value of the actual share price but worth having a look. Founded in 1999, Salesforce has been one of the best performing stops of the bull market following the global financial crisis. Being up very sharply and Amgen is one of the world's biggest biotech companies. Its market value is about 137 billion. So Amgen actually considerably larger than Pfizer irrespective of how much of a familiar name Pfizer is. It is somewhat dwarfed now by some of its competition. Shares in aftermarket, Exxon then following this news with down about 2%, Raytheon down about three on the flip side. Salesforce, Honeywell up about three and a half four percent. Amgen up a similar margin as well. All right looking at the day ahead what have we got? We've already had the German GDP come out. Very minor revisions on this front for the second quarter. Just to bring you up to speed there. The quarter on quarter minus 9.7% versus expected minus 10.1%. So as you can see the Euro DAX not really moving too much on the back of that if anything at all. Looking at the German iPhone number coming out nine o'clock. So again as a refresher this is the company's questioned with a soft survey if you like sentiment based about what is their view on current economic conditions and their six month forward-looking outlook used to then obtain and get an idea of how optimistic or pessimistic companies are whether that's improving or decreasing over time. So typically is quite an interesting figure to keep an eye on. The actual headline business climate is expected to improve to 92 spot one from 90.5. As I guess generally although we monitor the COVID situation we've had a degree of stabilisation somewhat and commonly continue to recover to a certain degree. Otherwise the rest of the morning is pretty quiet so again as usual a fairly US centric session but defunct of any 130 major US data we do have the US consumer confidence coming out at 3 p.m. You've got the Fed discount rate minutes so for anyone new to markets don't be confused. We've already had the FOMC minutes of course last week the discount rate minutes so what is the discount rate? Well the discount rate is what the Fed charges commercial banks for very short-term loans so basically short-term being 24 hours or less. Now the only time really that a bank a commercial bank would tap the discount loan is in the real emergency they would rather then deal in the interbank market with other banks where typically they can access lower rates with lower collateral so going direct to the Fed comes at a price and also from a market point of view in terms of the optics around that type of request of liquidity it would be seen as negative and fairly desperate that you have to actually pay almost like a penalty fee if you like going through a more expensive rather than traditional route to access short-term funding would be surefire signs that there's probably something wrong with your bank. This was very common during the financial crisis in particular back in 2008-2009 less or so to the current day and I would not expect the FOMC discount rate minutes to be a market mover tonight. You've got the oil inventories of course coming out later these infantry numbers of course going forward now could be particularly interesting given the disruptions from Marker and Laura these storms that have been impacting the Gulf and then from a speaker's point of view Fed's daily and non-voter and we'll be speaking much later in the evening so towards the close on Wall Street and then quite a bit of supply coming out mainly out of the UK the German Shats auction and then a two-year note 50 billion US auction as well so kicking off the supply side coming out of the States all right that is it from me I'm going to wish you a good day ahead any questions at all feel free to leave a comment I know actually we've had a number of interns finish with us last Friday and throughout summer and for you guys of course anything I can do to help to continue the learning process and this goes out to everyone just make use of the comment section I always try to reply throughout the day absolutely happy to help okay guys good luck for the session ahead and I'll see you same time tomorrow


All right. Well, we got a letter from Corey this week, and I'm going to read about less than half of the cool stuff that he is doing with smart home. And you are still going to be hard-pressed to keep up, folks. I'm telling you. I mean, this is amazing. So he writes in, he says, I've got a pretty extensive smart home set up. And while there's no one entry point, maybe this will give people some ideas. It's given me a bunch of ideas. And how to empty your wallet in one day quickly? All the lights in the house, every single light switch, interior and exterior, is powered by a cassette switch in the wall, meaning I can control any light in the house for whatever reason, the most expensive part. And I didn't do it all at once. I basically picked up a room and did it one room at a time until it was all complete. He says that's cassette up by by Lutron, I think, right? Yes. Yeah, I'm sorry. I should have mentioned that. No, no, no. I'm just, yeah. I'll fill in the blanks here. Yeah, no problem. Great. So the central controller is home assistant. Everything feeds into HA. I'll say it quickly like that for now. And automation is all running HA, and it's the main brain of the house. The HA exposes everything to home kit, which has great spouse approval factor, SAF. Plus, it's just convenient, and especially when you're out of the house. This is we have an alarm system in the house that really manages the state of the house. When we leave and set the alarm for a way, all the doors lock after a delay in case we forget to lock the back door or something, and all the lights turn off. And then goes on to say when we get home, if it's dark out, opening the garage door causes a few lights and a few lights in the hallway to turn on, where the alarm keypad is. And once it's this arm, more lights around the house turn on, and the fountain turns back on. Pretty much when we're ready to go to bed, one button in the whole house is off and ready. Here was a cool one for me and I'm assuming it's a shortcut through maybe IFTTT ift or something like that. He says my wife has a Shopify store where she fills orders for customers that buy things from her. If she has an unfulfilled order, a lamp next to her desk turns on so that she knows she had has pending orders to take care of. And when those orders are filled, the light goes out. That's slick. Yeah. Home, is there more for you to read? I don't want to interrupt. Yeah, keep going. I have things to add. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So the other thing I do is occupancy detection in a few rooms. My office, my wife's office have sensors and track presence. And they also have temperatures sensors that attach to the Nest thermostat. So that HVAC in the house controls the room temperature when it senses there's air. Here's another cool one. He gets up in the morning. The Apple TVs are also on there. So when I turn on the news in the morning, when I'm in the shower and getting ready, when I go into the bathroom, I have one button on the wall which turns TV on, launches the channels app and pre-selects the news, turns on a few lights in the house that I use in the morning, not too bright, which I think I mentioned that on another one. I like to use my smart lights at 10% when I have to get up at three in the morning and the morning I let Debbie sleep. Yeah. But there's, last but not least, cameras. He's got a unified camera system and I just won't go into it. There's so much more. But that's just scratching the surface of the cool things you could do. And some of that I never even considered. Yeah. So Home Assistant, have either of you messed with Home Assistant? Not. Have you? No. Okay. So I have had, Home Assistant is an engine that you can run on like a Raspberry Pi. It runs in a Docker container so you could run it on your Mac. I have it running on my Synology. I do not use Home Assistant like Corey does to manage my home. I know a lot of people do. I had just installed it a year ago or so because somebody mentioned it and I thought, oh, I should learn about this. And immediately it just like you install it and it goes and sees everything and sort of inherits all the things that you have in your house or at least makes itself aware of all these things that you have. And what a lot of people really love about Home Assistant and there's a lot of things people love. The thing that I have heard people sing praises about most is that it's running locally and talking to all of your devices locally, including devices that otherwise would need to go through the cloud. So you get much faster response time on things, especially if you're pushing a switch to turn on a light. If that would normally have to go out to the cloud and back to get the light on, there's a little bit of lag there. With Home Assistant, it is built to go and talk to these things directly. And it does. Like it's pretty amazing. And I had messed with it a little bit. This weekend, though, I realized I had used for Home Assistant. We like to have fires in our fireplace in the winter. And sometimes that means going outside at night to get wood out of, you know, refill the, we keep a little bit of wood in the house and then we have wood racks outside. And those wood racks are kind of near our front door. And it's relatively dark out there if the lights aren't on. And it's also kind of dark if we have like funny colored lights on our front door like we often do. Like, you know, right now we have like yellow and purple or something because they're hue lights. And so what I've done in the past is I've manually set these lights to be bright white. And then I have to remember and go set them back.  What I want to do is have it store the state of the light, whether that's on and custom colors or off or whatever, store that state, go turn on bright white for five minutes. And then after five minutes restore whatever the prior state was. And I don't want to have to like figure that out. I want it to just go and get it. And HomeKit will not do this. The A lady will not do this. Home Assistant does this happily. And so we wrote a Home Assistant automation that goes grabs the current state of the light and you pick what parameters you want to grab. So it's like, okay, is it on brightness and color? Great. And it stores those in a variable. And then you then we go set it, we have it wait five minutes, you know, set it to bright white.  And then five minutes later, it reverts back to whatever the prior state was. And I mean, it took us, I don't know, an hour or whatever to figure out how to write this script because it was our first time doing it, but very straightforward. Once we sort of learned the Home Assistant way. And then hearing, you know, you talk about what Corey's done with it. Corey's also the one who wrote the Mac Geekab app for us. So Corey is is also pretty handy.  He's a nerd. Like he's a geek like us. Yeah. Yeah. Geek like us. I knew I recognized the name. Yeah. What do you do? Okay. Yeah. And so like this, after we went through this this weekend, I was like, Oh, I get it now. I see. And now what I'm thinking is, do I want to remove everything from the A lady, everything from HomeKit and put it all into Home Assistant, and then Home Assistant will expose what it sees to the A lady and to, to HomeKit. So you can have all of these things controlled the same way, like he said, the spouse approval factor, but with the real time operation and scripting that is available. Like we were able to and and I say this as though it were trivial. The hardest part about this was exposing Home Assistant to the Amazon A lady. That meant I had to go build a custom skill for the A lady. There are instructions to do it. It's it's relatively straightforward. It's just tedious to go and like put all these things you have to create an Amazon Lambda account and like do all the things. It's free, but you know, it was a pain in the neck. But chat GPT would help. I'm sorry. No, no, no, there's instructions like the instructions are clear.  Like it it it works. It's just, you know, it's just tedious. But once I got it up and running, then you choose what you expose. So I actually exposed the automation to it as a light switch. So now I can say A lady turn on firewood lights and it doesn't turn on the firewood lights. It runs this automation and goes and does its thing. So and you can do the same with with the S lady to with with the with home kit stuff. So yeah, this Home Assistant is cool. I can see why people get really obsessed with it.  I mean, my son and I had fun spending, you know, two to three hours getting this all like working the way we want it on on Saturday night.


Good health to all from Rexall! Harris Alice Fay show presented by the makers of Rexall drug products and 10,000 independent Rexall family druggists. Good evening, this is your Rexall family druggist with a welcome from all 10,000 of us. The 10,000 independent druggists who have added the word Rexall to our own store names and placed the famous orange and blue Rexall sign on our windows. We've done that because we believe in the 2,000 or more drug products made by the Rexall drug company and we confidently recommend them to our customers. One of the newest of these products is Rexall's ammoniated tooth powder compounded according to the official University of Illinois formula yet priced no higher than ordinary tooth powder. Quality like this is what we family druggists are talking about when we tell you you can depend on any drug product that bears the name Rexall. Good health to all from Rexall! And now your Rexall family druggist brings you the Phil Harris Alice Fay show written by Ray Singer and Dick Chevrolet with Elliot Lewis, Walter Tetley, Robert North, Janine Roos and Whitfield, Walter Sharpe in his music, yours truly Bill Foreman and starring Alice Fay and Phil Harris. For the past few weeks Phil has been feeling nervous, restless and irritable. Alice is a little worried and she's insisted that he go to his doctor for a checkup. Phil has taken Frankie along for moral support. And as we look in the doctor is just finishing his examination. Well there's nothing wrong with you organically Mr. Harris. Your nervousness must be caused by some outside influence. Tell me, do you drink 8 glasses of water every day? No, no I mean do you partake of alcoholic beverages? Gee, when you put it so delicately it's a pleasure to say yes. And how much do you drink? Oh I take an occasional glass, I say an occasional glass. Once in a while doctor I engage in a little less and social nipping. I just take a little for special occasions like holidays and birthdays. Mondays, Tuesdays. Another thing Mr. Harris, do you lead a regular life? Oh sure, I eat well and I get plenty of sleep. What time do you get to bed? Well I'm always in bed by 10 or 11, noon at the latest. Doc, I can't understand why I don't feel good. Perhaps there's something in your work that's preying on your mind. What do you do for a living? What do I do for...  You understand it's too close to the stop, Doc, your little... What do I do for a... New doctor, huh? Doctor, I happen to be Phil Harris. I have my own radio program every Sunday. Do you listen to it? Yes, I've heard it. But what do you do for a living? Well that's it, I'm on the radio once a week for Raxall. That's what I do for a living. Oh, you must be kidding. Kidding, what's kidding? Kidding, kidding, I come up here paying 25 dollars a visit. There's no time for kidding. Kidding, kidding. I work like a dog for a half hour every week and he says, what are you doing? You must be kidding. Half hour, huh? Well obviously you have too much time on your hands. Now I suggest you do a little work. A little manual labor. Something to keep your hands and your mind busy. Build something. Yeah. Yeah, you've got something there, Doc. Hey, thanks, Doc, so long. So long, Tyler. So long. Come on, Remli. Yeah. Hey, you know something, really? That doctor's all right. He's absolutely right. I should create something. You know, I always had a desire to build. That's what's wrong with me. I'm a frustrated engineer. You know something?  I know if I put my mind to it, I could accomplish a tremendous engineering project. But what? What? How about filling in the Grand Canyon? Or you could straighten out the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Well, along those lines, but that ain't it. I want to create something new, something that'll be useful. They don't have a bridge between New York and Europe. Remli, a bridge to Europe. What kind of a bridge? Suspension or draw? Draw. Oh, let's make it stud. Remli, on second thought, I'm not ready for anything that big yet. Look, come on over to my house and maybe we'll think of something smaller, huh? Come on. Oh, I'm worried. Philip's been so grouchy and irritable lately. I hope the doctor doesn't find anything serious. Alice, I hate to tell you this, but I don't think there's anything wrong with Philip. Physically. What do you mean? I never wanted to bring this up before, sis, but do you think Philip is all there? What are you getting at? Frankly, I don't think he has all his marbles. Really, that's a very nasty thing to say. Oh, sis, let's face it. He's never been overly smart, but recently I've noticed a change for the worse.  That's not so.  He was too. Really, I meant that... Well, he's been so nervous lately. Daddy? Mommy, has daddy come home yet? No, children, he's still at the doctor's. He's trying to find out why he's so nervous. We know why he's nervous. He's a genius, and he's temperamental, and he's got a lot on his mind. You don't understand him, Mommy. You should let him go out with the boys more often, and he should have more liberty, and he should be... He should be... What else did he tell us to say, Alice? Alice, what else did he tell you to say? He said if you raise his allowance, he'd be a lot easier to get along with. Oh, children, daddy doesn't mean those things. He just says them to be funny. Cornpone is quite a clip. He thinks of the donnest things to tell the children. Alice, I'm home. Where are you, honey? Oh, hello, dear. Hello, Frankie. Hi, Alice. What did the doctor say, Phil? I'm in great shape. There's nothing wrong with me. All I need is something to occupy my spare time, and I know just what I'm going to do. I'm going to become an engineer. A what? An engineer. I am J-U-N-E-A-I. I'm not an engineer, dear. Civil, mechanical, aeronautical, or choo-choo. I've made up my mind, yet I may dabble with a little of each. Oh, Phil, I never heard of anything so ridiculous. Where did you ever get such a crazy idea? Go ahead. Go ahead. Laugh at me. Laugh it up. People are always laughing at genius. They laughed at Edison. They thought he was crazy. They thought Fulton was crazy. They thought Marconi was crazy. They even thought Sam Fromkes was crazy. Yeah, they even thought... Who was Sam Fromkes? My uncle. He was crazy. Maybe there's something around the house that I could build. You know, something that we need, something useful, like an indoor swimming pool, or maybe an elevator in the entrance hall. How about a parachute jump in the backyard? Oh, please. Or a camel run in the attic. What's a camel run? I don't know, but my aunt used to have one. That's what drove my uncle crazy. Ms. Sugarna Fromkes, huh? If you want to do something useful around the house, I have something for you to do. Well, good, and I hope it's something worthy of my engineering talents. It is. I want you to change the bulb and the light over the garage. Change the bulb? Oh, Alice, you're asking me to do a child's job. I know. But with Frankie to help you, you might be able to handle it. Now, just change the bulb and have it done by the time I get back from the market. I'll see you later. I have it done by the time I get back from the market. How do you like that? She's asking a great engineer like me to change the bulb. Yeah. You, the greatest stud bridge builder in the world. Well, let's go out in the garage and change the bulb. It might lead to something bigger. All right, but first let's make sure the bulb needs changing. I'll stay here and turn the switch on. You go out to the garage to see if it lights. No, no, we can't do it that way. We got to go out to the garage to turn it on and off. Why don't you have a switch put in the house? Oh, I don't know. Alice was supposed to call the electrician and have one put in, but... Gee, naturally. And I'll help you. Hey, you know anything about wiring? I know as much as you do. Then we're in business. All we have to do is to put a switch in the wall here, run some wires to the garage, and we're in. Sure. Hand me that hammer.  Okay, here. Now look, in the meantime, I'm going to go down the cellar and get some wire. Oh, Remly, be sure you make that hole big enough so we can get our hands in to connect the wire. Please, I know what I'm doing. You take care of your end, because then I get the wire. Okay. Okay, I guess this will prove to Alice that I'm a pretty handy guy. She thinks I'm just a lousy musician. I'll show her that ain't the only thing I am. I'm a pretty famous guy. I got my picture on the cover of this month's Radio Mirror. I just made a new record for Victor called the Old Master Painter. And now let me see. Is there anything else I want to plug? Now let me see. What are we short on? Now we're loaded. I guess I can sing all right. Then did a rainbow for the rainy day. Dreamed of the murals on the blue summer skies. Painted the devil in my darling eyes. Captured the dreamer with a thousand thrills. The Old Master Painter from far away. Then came his masterpiece and when he was through, he smiled down from heaven and he gave. Good job on that wonderful day. The Old Master Painter from the hills far away. Far away he was. Painted the pilots and the daffodils. He put the purple in the twilight. Pended a rainbow for the end of the murals on the blue summer skies. Painted the devil in my darling eyes. Captured the dreamer with a thousand thrills. The Old Master Painter from the far away hills. Then came his masterpiece and when he was through, he smiled down from heaven and he gave. What a beautiful job on that wonderful day. The Old Master Painter from the hills far away. Far away. Far away. Hey Frankie, I got the wire.  Frankie! Frankie, where are you? Look at the size of that. Remly, come out of that hole. Oh, you come on in. Give me a room for both of us. The idea of making this hole this big. I figured we might as well be comfortable as long as we're going to be working in here for a couple of weeks. What are you talking about, a couple of weeks? Let's face it, Curly. We don't know what we're doing. Maybe you don't know what you're doing, but I do. You do, huh? Well, look over here. I want to show you something, Steinmetz. Okay, I'll look. What was that last word you laid on me? Steinmetz. It's a man's name. I don't think that name's funny. It ain't half as funny as Clyde or Myrtle. I'm not trying to be funny. Then why are you making up names like Steinmetz? You better watch it, kid. You're getting pretty hokey. Curly, Steinmetz happens to be a famous scientist. I don't care who he is, he hasn't got a funny name. It does nothing to me. Of course, I'm concerned it's even a bad straight line. All right. I'm sorry I mentioned the name. I hate it. It's the worst name I ever heard. Oh, it's not that bad right now. It just don't happen to strike my fancy. Other people might howl. I want to do a show you something. Sam, see you play around with that. What do you want to show me? Look at this maze of wires in the wall here. Must be 50 of them. So, which ones do we connect to the garage? Which is which? What different which is which? Wires is wires. I like your scientific approach. Thank you. All I got to do is to take one length of this wire that I brought from the seller and attach it to the positive post off the switch box thusly. Then I take another length of wire and attach it to the negative post like so. And then when the two exposed ends of the wires are joined together, it will close the circuit and presto we have incandescent light. That finishes my end of the job. How do you know there's an electric current running through them wires? Well, all you got to do is to pick up them two exposed wires and then we'll be able to tell. Well, who's got to do? You. That's your end of the job. Oh, yeah. Well, pardon me while I slit my trouser leg and shave my head. What's that for? I want to be properly attired for my electrocution. I got news for you, Curly. I'm not holding any live wires. A guy can get fried that way. Well, maybe you're right. I guess this kind of dangerous. I see your point. I ain't got no right to ask anybody to hold two live wires because they might go. Well, if it ain't Julius, we got nothing to lose if he blows a fuse. Hey, come on in here, kid. Well, we're in there. Oh, never mind. We'll come out there. It's a termite, so I could gnaw a hole in that wooden head of yours. Very job. You want to step in and watch us? How could you say that? Heavens were a gruesome thought. Gruesome, but appealing. Ain't nobody going to miss them. No, we need them right now. Remember that next week. Hey, come on, Julius, we're not up to anything. We'll go in first and we'll show you. Okay, Altholias. The fire's in here. What are they all for? It's simple, kid. I'll explain. Now, these are telephone wires, these are intercommunication wires, and these are electric wires. What's this thick one? That's the gas wire. It carries the gas to the oven. I have a remarkable grasp of absolutely nothing. Never took a lesson, kid. It came by my knowledge naturally. I happen to have a mechanical brain. Well, the next time your mechanic waits on it, have a look. Hey, look, kid, as long as you're here, you can help us. Pick up that loose wire and hand it to me, will you? Which one is two of them here? Well, pick them both up. Look and hold one in each hand so you don't get them mixed up. You mean I... I knew I had the right wire. Look at old Julius Glow. They say a child brightens up a home. He doesn't stop getting lit at that tender age. He's starting to spark a little. Should I turn him off? No, let's not. This is better than working in the dark. The hooked nose, we can hang him over the water pipe and use him as a trouble light. We better disconnect him as filament is wearing thin. All right, I'll turn off the switch. If you can stop, now we turn you off. What are you talking like that for? Rather nervous, child. Everything excites him. He's a worrier. That kid, don't watch out. He's going to have a florescent ulcer before he's seven years old. Well, Remling, I guess I've proved that I know all about electricity. I don't think you could do it, Curly. As soon as we put the wires out to the garage, Alice will be able to turn the light on from here. Oh, no, that ain't all I'm going to do for her. I'm going to make her life easier by making everything in this house electric. Now, let's get to work and have it finished by the time she gets back. Okay, what are we going to do? We're going to put a switchboard in the kitchen, and then she'll be able to control everything in the house from here. The phonograph, the radio, the sprinkler system, the telephone, the garage light. And I'll even put a switch that will open and close the garage door. Now, look, Remling, you take these wires. Alice, you got here right at the right time. We just finished. Finished what? Phil, what are all these switches on the kitchen wall? It's to make life easy for you, honey. Yeah, you're going to love us for this, sweetheart. You've got switches for everything in the house. Phonograph, telephone, sprinkler. Everything, honey. Now, look, go ahead, push one. They're all marked. Hey, push this one. It'll turn on the light in the garage. Okay. Did it go on? No, it didn't. Must be something wrong. Wait a minute. It's starting to glow. Look, it's getting brighter. Yes, burning good now. James, we must have a short circuit. The garage is on fire. Don't get excited. I'll get it out. I'll push the sprinkler switch. Wrong distance. You pushed the sprinkler switch. What happened? I guess we had that switch marked wrong. I'll try this one. The ramps have a ball on the 45-yard line. Tell him to keep running. When he passes the firehouse, tell him to turn in the alarm. Don't touch that phone, Alice. We get in there. Out of my way and let me dial the operator. There's some rheumatism pills for the settlers in the hill. One thing we haven't been able to lick. Every time we dial the phone, we get new trains. Alice and Phil will be back in just a moment. But first, here's your Rexall family druggist. Have you ever witnessed a race between life and death? Golly, that sounds serious. Well, ma'am, the race I'm talking about is serious because it's run to test the germ-killing power of Rexall's famous mouthwash MI-31. Just how is it done? A culture of the bacteria usually found in the mouth is thrown under carefully controlled laboratory conditions until it reaches an accepted standard of strength. Then a very tiny measurement of full strength MI-31 is pitted against this thriving rugged bacteria. I see. That's the beginning of the race. Yes, ma'am. And the end comes only seconds later. Because immediately afterward, the bacteria to which the MI-31 was added is given ideal conditions to hang on and thrive. If it doesn't grow, then Rexall's MI-31 has killed it on contact. And needless to say, full strength MI-31 must kill germs on contact or it isn't good enough to wear the Rexall label. You know, I'm beginning to understand more and more why you family druggist tell us. You can depend on any drug product that bears the name Rexall. Well, ma'am, it's absolutely true. Good health to all from Rexall. Hey, Curly, I can't understand how we got all the wires crossed. None of these switches work like they're supposed to. Hey, here's one we haven't tried yet. This is the one that opens and closes the garage door. I'm gonna try it. You better not. Alice might not like it. She'll never know. She's upstairs taking a bath. You watch the garage door while I push the switch. Okay. Nothing happened yet. Keep pushing it. Quick! What's the matter, honey? It's time you have a headache. Remember Rexall aspirin. By laboratory tests, Rexall aspirin disintegrates faster than any other leading brand tested. This means that when swallowed with water, the five full grains of pure aspirin contained in every Rexall aspirin tablet are ready to go to work for you even before they reach your stomach. Ask for Rexall aspirin wherever you see the orange and blue Rexall sign on the window. And remember, you can depend on any drug product that bears the name Rexall. Stay tuned for The Adventures of Sam Spade. It's next on NBC.


Kind of an interesting situation here, we've got a demo coming up. Is this the Silver Spring demo? Okay. Okay, so we've got a demo from Silver Spring. I know Frank Moab is one... I'm sorry, what's your last name? Hmong, M-O-N-G. Hmong, oh sorry. Okay, Frank, Frank Hmong. It's my big name. Mel, how you doing? Hey, nice to meet you.  Frank Hmong and Mel? Mel Kiers.  Gears, G-E-H-R. Has gears in a car. Gears, great. Okay. So if I'm going to show this meter, what's the... So you've got a colleague who's going to drive a demo at the station. So tell me about Silver Spring and Google and Google Earth and all this cool stuff that you guys are doing. Silver Spring Networks, basically in layman's terms, provides the internet for utilities. I know we all know what the internet's due for us today, but the utilities kind of miss that and now they want their own. And what we provide is the hardware, the software, and the services that enables the utilities to build this thing called the smart grid. And the smart grid, think of it as internet for utilities. We allow the utility to connect directly to the consumer's home and provide services, applications, updates directly to the consumer, much more engaging and proactive. And one of the things we want to show you later on in the demo that Mel's going to provide is that visual. What does that look like? And the benefits of this is huge. For the utility, our customer, they get to be more proactive. They get operational efficiency. And they get to really engage with the customer. From a consumer perspective, our customers that can operate within our network and our smart grid, they get the benefits of energy efficiency. They get to reduce their carbon footprint. And of course, they get to decide for themselves how they want to use energy and how they want to conserve energy. So huge benefits. Do you think we can apply this to healthcare and solve that problem too? I wish we could and maybe we can someday. But the concept applies, right? Allowing the consumer to take control of his or her own consumption and identify ways in which they can optimize their consumption and their use to save energy overall, lower costs, et cetera. Yeah, in Silver Spring, even though we're a quote-unquote start-up, we're doing quite well. We have 16 utilities across five different continents around the world. And we're growing rapidly and having a great time. So what are some of the bigger utilities that you're working with? So for example, Pacific Gas and Electric, Florida Power and Light are two examples of our customers. And we have some customers in Australia as well. Okay, so California obviously, very sensitive to that issue. Very sensitive, yes. Good. Okay, all right, so we've got a demo. That's right. You want to take us through and describe it?  So basically this is an electric meter, but it's a digital electric meter that has a card in it that's a radio transmitter. It's a lot different than my meter. Yeah, probably. Yours is no mechanical meter that sits around. This one doesn't spin. Okay. But it communicates with the utility as many as 96 times a day as opposed to the utility used to read it once a month. So hence big data who would have thought around you is all of this data. So that's little data. So the old meter was little data. This is big data. Okay, yeah. And so some examples of what we do with that, we have some samples in Google Earth. First of all, we deploy these in neighborhoods and in high rises. On the demo here, you'll see a high rise and this high rise is in Chicago. So we're going to tour downtown Chicago flying by the Trump Tower and you'll see two high rises. This is a 150 North Wacker. These buildings have meters scattered throughout the floors. The line show you the RF signal that's propagating across the river and then you'll see all of the meters in the building and the communications up through the center of the building. So this is a mesh. This gives the meter an opportunity to communicate whatever is the best path to send data back to the utility. So it's making those optimization decisions constantly, second by second.  It discovers all its neighbors and automatically communicates back to the utility. So you're saying the infrastructure is a take out the old, put in the new and... Pretty much. Now you do deploy what's called an access point around about 5,000 meters. That access point uses cellular backhaul. So an ATT or a Verizon or a Sprint backhaul. So once that access point is in place... It's hang and run. Utilities can deploy thousands of these a day.  The next thing we did is that once you have these meters in place, the utility can now be proactive as opposed to reactive. So they can look at things like your voltage on the hot summer's day and see how the voltage is. So here we have a mesh of 130,000 meters over this city of Chicago on one of the hottest days of the year. And so the utility can now look at low spots in the grid caused by excessive use of air conditioners and be proactive and go out and fix the infrastructure before it causes problems with the customers. This will also help when electric vehicles are more prominent because electric vehicles will be adding loads that are unexpected loads over time. So that plane there is basically the nominal voltage and you see peaks and valleys based on where the voltage is high or low. So that nominal voltage peak might indicate a threshold of potential problem. Yeah, the lower voltage would indicate that there is excessive load in that particular area or problem in the grid that they didn't know about that they had to go out and fix. It's probably important to note that this data, the magic we're seeing here, is as a result of us using Green Plum. EMC's Green Plum allows us to really aggregate the data, a lot of data all at once and produce some of these fantastic images and reports and the visualization of big data here you see. So compare that to maybe using a traditional data warehouse. Would you be able to do it using a traditional data warehouse? Well, you'd have to have a lot of patience because instead of queries coming back in minutes, they'd come back in days. Okay, so it really couldn't be optimized for that sort of real-time decision-making. Well, and the problem with analytics is sometimes you don't know what you're looking for, so it's an exploratory process. If you have to take hours to get one answer back, you get pretty bored with the exploration process. Yeah, so it's like the old programming days where we used to have to wait for the mainframe. Stick your cards in it back and wait for it to come back tomorrow. I got another 45 minutes before I could solve that bug, so kind of a similar thing going on here. Now, and finally, the other thing these meters can do is when an outage occurs, it will, in effect, ET phone home. They'll send a message saying that they've lost power. Here's an actual outage. You see the green dots coming back. Those are meters that are reporting back. They have power restored, and so the utility had an outage. There's actually a squirrel got across the feeder and tripped the feeder. You see there's one section that's still out. Now all of the customers are back. Squirrel's dead. The squirrel's dead, by the way. So this allows the utility to know exactly all the meters that are out and when they have power back. So it's more accurate as far as they're dispatching of their crews and they don't leave a customer stranded they didn't know about. How much data are we talking about here that you guys brought? So typically each one of these meters has anywhere from four to 30 channels. Those four to 30 channels are read every 15 minutes or every half an hour. Utilities have four to five million customers, so you do the math. A year's worth of data times five million customers times 365 days times 96 readings times anywhere between four and 30 values. That's a lot of data. It's a lot of data. And utilities want to look at long-term trends so they'll do multiple years. How was last year compared to this year from a voltage standpoint? Okay, and you're able with your infrastructure to operate on all those data sets you're not having to... Well with green plumbing, prior to that we were not able to do that. So this is game-changing. It is game-changing. It's changing utility from a reactive state to a proactive state to be active to the customer and call them up ahead of time saying we're fixing a problem you didn't know about. This is with green plumbing. This is definitely the killer app of the smart grid. The benefit goes beyond just utility. Consumers like us, ultimately, get better updates on what's happening. We don't have to call the utility when the power goes out. Utility knows. So where are you guys at?  Tell us a bit more about Silver Spring now. Sure, we're based in Redwood City and started in 2002. We've got 600 people.  You're using Green Plum. That's kind of cool. Oh, we use Oracle also. Oh, okay. So we use both. But Oracle couldn't do this is what you're saying. Everyone's got some positives. Yeah, and fairness. You wouldn't put Green Plum into your Oracle applications. That wouldn't be the right use case for that either, would it? Yeah, well, we're really happy with what we have and Green Plum's done a great job for us on the analytics side. Yeah, okay, so in Redwood City, when did you get started? 2002. So you're up, running fully funded. Yeah, fully funded, doing great. Got lots of customers. Lots more to come. Outstanding. Yeah. Well, Mel, Frank, thanks very much for coming on the Cube. Sharing this great demo with us. Good luck with Silver Spring. You must be working with my friends down at Austin Energy, right?  Those on your shortlist? They are. They're heavy to the smart meters. Have them call us. Andres Carvalho, CIO down there. What do you know him personally? I do. Seriously, I'll give you my card. All right, good. Okay. He'd be all over this. Definitely. All right, good. Thank you. All right, man. Thanks.