Last week, the House of Representatives voted 352 to 65 to force Bite Dance, the red Chinese parent company of the wildly popular video app TikTok to sell off its U.S. operations to an American firm by September, or TikTok will be banned in the United States and America. It took just eight days from the bill's introduction to get the thing passed, which is a little bit fast for Washington, President Joseph Robin at Biden II has indicated that he would like to sign such a bill, but don't quite pop those champagne bottles just yet. Josh Hawley, or should I say sparkling wine, American sparkling wine bottles, because the Senate might kick this thing down to the Commerce Committee, which would gum up the works considerably. And there are plenty of powerful people who are aligned against the bill, including a flip-flopping, Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, as well as Reason's own Robbie Suave. So, Katherine, I've seen a lot of ambient irritation at libertarians about this issue, saying that we tend to be naive and what part about having the CCP have access to all your teenagers' data, don't you understand, kind of thing. So can you explain slowly, perhaps, to skeptics of our broad position if we have one? What is our position and why are we all soft on commies? Yeah, I mean, my position, at least, I would certainly not presume to speak for all libertarians on this topic in particular, which is oddly scrambling people's into it. Like, the number of people who have shown up in my Twitter feed or in my inbox with roughly the same take that I have on this issue that I do not expect to see there, it's been a weird one. Like, current affairs out here was a good take on this recently. That was one, and so... That's just because they're soft on the Chai comms. They're soft on the Chai comms, and so am I. I love Chai comms for their own commercial activities. I'm definitely clipping that. I love Chai comms, just put it on a bumper sticker.  So, right, the position here is, there are a few different parts. The most fundamental one is that this is a speech issue and a free association issue. These are platforms that people are using to do all kinds of speech, including political speech, which should be very, very wary of Congress acting to restrict places where people speak about Congress, among other things. Second, no one is forced to use TikTok, and that is a very, very important part of this conversation that weirdly gets left out. You don't have to be on TikTok. You, as a parent, can tell your child not to be on TikTok. You can take away their phone. You can block TikTok from your router. You can do all kinds of, parents have tools to keep their children off of TikTok if that is what we are concerned about, because of course, we are absolutely sort of mixing together in a kind of indeterminate stew for the children argument with the commies are manipulating our elections arguments in ways that make both arguments extremely unproductive. So, the commies are manipulating our elections argument, really not strong evidence that that is happening. Of course, there is censorship by the platform itself of the content that appears on TikTok. That is true of every platform. We have every platform. Equally true, equally true. I mean, there is no clear evidence that it is more true or more perniciously true on TikTok than it is on other platforms. And again, if it is true, feel free to not use TikTok. If you don't want the Chinese to have your data, cool. Don't use it. I just kind of keep coming back to that. We should not try to beat the Chinese by being more like the Chinese. This is my final point. You know who's super awesome at restricting foreign platforms that encourage free discourse and might be clustered to category social media? China, China does this to maintain control of their citizens. We should not emulate them in this. They are not the way we want to go here. The fact that we have some of the biggest anti-China fear mongers also saying, well, China does it, so we have to do it too. That is exactly the wrong approach. That will always be the wrong approach. Peter, you understand the technology and also like to film yourself doing dances to Taylor Swift songs. Can you walk us through some of the details of the bill, the finer print and what the actual legislation would do? Yeah, so basically what this bill does is it says that if a social media type company, and there's a bunch of carve-outs for actually things that it doesn't cover, certain types of commerce, that sort of thing, but a social media type company like this, if it is owned by a corporation that is headquartered, located, and has strong ties to a foreign adversary nation, which is an official designation by the president of the United States, if it may have to divest itself and you can't have that ownership structure. And so this is, I think, one of the big concerns. Katherine already mentioned the constitutional speech issues here. That's a big deal. But the other thing here is that this empowers the president in many ways to basically decide which social media companies can and cannot operate in the United States. Now, yes, there's a review process. This is not a completely new power on the part of the president. There's already a foreign adversary designation that exists. But this is something that libertarians who are correctly concerned about the CCP and correctly concerned about the CCP's access to TikTok data. That's something that I actually think is at least a legitimate thing to worry about. In order to combat that, this bill is going to empower the US president basically to have the power to ban social media apps. And that's one of the reasons I think we're seeing folks like Elon Musk, like Tucker Carlson, some of these folks who are maybe, sometimes, as Katherine said, there is a delightful coalition of weirdos who have come out against this bill. And one of the reasons is that those weirdos value their ability to speak online. And they see that, well, if you can go after TikTok, maybe you can go after Twitter or X or whichever platform you don't like next. I mean, there's really a kind of, in political coalition terms, this thing is like a midnight drunk dinner at Denny's. You know, it's just totally scrambled. And that's kind of delightful.  That is so bad. It's like... Yes, those dinners are terrible. On the other hand, I've had a lot of them. If it's walking on Denny's on Sunset, that's fine.  I mean, is it bad? I don't think so. No, I mean, and partly because the question about the data is, didn't we force ByteDance to sequester US data via Oracle and things like that? So, you know, if that was successful, that's been taken care of. But even that is dubious. But then the other question is, you know, there's two for me.   And they're bleaching out anything that's critical of China, maybe, but although you can still find TMN Square, you know, protest stuff on TikTok, I did that over the weekend. And it's not clear, yeah, it is a dance. It's called the bag band dance. And it, you know, but there's those questions which seem to be completely ridiculous.  And then the other thing for me, there's this, you know, what to me, tips us to understand we are in a social media panic is that even people like Elise Stefanik, the Harvard grad who's one of the co-sponsors of all this stuff, constantly in her comments is shifting back and forth between this is a critical threat to our national security and then she's always slipping into, oh, but it's also, you know, so that should be its own thing, right? That somehow China is going to figure out what dance moves are really powerful and then use them against Americans. And then she's always slipping into and it's poisoning the minds of our next generation. You know, so it's like, what is it? Is it that we need to ban TikTok because it is apparatus?  Because it doesn't seem like that second one then talking about why who owns it doesn't seem to be what Congress would be talking about. To me, this is just the worst kind of hysteria. It's weird in an election year that it is getting, you know, massive bipartisan support and that should be deeply worrying to everybody because this, you know, this passed the house with what, like 50 or 60 dissenting votes and it was a mix of Republicans and Democrats. But this, you know, when consensus starts to form you understand what the real argument is and this is about social media panic. It has nothing to do with China. It has everything to do with the adults feeling like they're no longer able to control the conversation, the political adults.  That really is the answer. That was a clip from the latest episode of the Reason Roundtable. To watch another clip, click here. To watch the whole episode, click here and make sure to subscribe to the Reason Roundtable. You'll be glad you did.


mba kut nge Running Entertainment News embattled Yoruba actor Omi Inkar Olariwuadju James populari nun as Baba Igesha, has pleaded not guilty to charges of rape, sexual assault and abuse of a minor. The actor was arraigned at a special offensive and domestic violence court in Lagos where the prosecution acts for a trial date, while praying the court to remind the defendant in a correctional facility and a counter reaction Baba Ijesha's legal team sought bail. the judge, however, stood down the case for ruling.


The following is a presentation of TFNN, the morning market kickoff with your host Tommy O'Brien. Buddy, I'm Tommy O'Brien, coming to you live from TFNN, hope you had a nice long weekend out there. We kick things off. We got an important week of earnings. We have NVIDIA out with their numbers tomorrow. We kick things off with a little bit of negative action and we got a couple of deals going on out there. You got capital buying Discover One for $35 billion, credit card processing, good business to begin. You got Walmart buying Visio, the TV maker as well. We're going into some of that along with some other things happening in the market.  You make a low of $49.95 at about 6 a.m. this morning. We're trading right now off about 4.10 percent, the S&Ps. NASDAQ 100, we're negative by 4.10 percent as well. You back things up to where you were Sunday evening. Your acceleration begins, yeah, there's the open actually. So what do we have? So we had Sunday but then we had no trading actually. Futures did open Sunday, excuse me. And then you dip lower though. Last night, 9 o'clock last night. You make a low in the NASDAQ 100 this morning of about 17,618. So we're off by almost half a percent in the NASDAQ 100.  You jump over to Bitcoin, can't hold it down man, Bitcoin, $53,200 early this morning. We're up by almost $800 on Bitcoin, crude. Little volatility in both directions for crude. You dip below $78, you're back above that price point, crude trading at $7018 this morning. Yeah, $7818. And how about gold catching a bit? Look at this run. From last week at 1996, just like that, we're up by $15 this morning. That's three quarters of a percent at 2039, we were just above 2040, gold contract. Silver, a little bit of a different story, silver. Not even above where you were the highs of Friday, make it to 2356, silver, negative by 31 pennies this morning and you jump to notes and bonds, depends where you are on the curve this morning. You get the 10-year right now, up by about five ticks, trading at 109.28, say it depends where you are because you go to the 30-year and actually got lower price out there. A little volatility across the board, but you talk about where we are in yields right now, you're talking about 4.28 on the 10-year right now, 4.28 and when we take a look at the curve, going up and down, I guess when you go up to the 30-year, it's pretty much unchanged. You get the 2-year down six basis points right now at 4.6 and as I mentioned, you get the 10-year down one basis point 4.28, blow that up a little bit to make it easier. As your yield curve, as I mentioned, the 2-year at about 4.6, you get to the 10-year at about 4.28, we get some FOMC minutes tomorrow as well. It'll be interesting to see what they have to say as we jump around. But yeah, let's kick things off with this one. They're talking about it and why not? It's a big one. Buying a Discover for $35 billion, all-stock deal, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval. A lot of talk of the regulators this morning. The price, a 26.6% premium to Discover's February 16th close. Now that's the close I think before it came out. Was that there? Yeah, what is Discover? DFS? Yeah, there's a nice pop for you. Look at that from 110 up to 124.75 for Discover. Yeah, it's a COF. Yeah, COF is Capital One. And the person spending the cash, yeah, they're going to drop because guess why? They're issuing shares, folks. They're issuing shares to get it done. So if they're issuing shares and you own shares, guess what? Your shares aren't worth what they were yesterday to a certain degree. 137 down to 131. I heard something once. If a company purchases a company, it makes a lot of sense, right? And they use all cash, well, boy, they really believe in that deal because the last thing they want to do is let's just say you're purchasing any company, right? You want all of it. You think the future is so promising.  You just want to pay them cash because the future of those share prices is going to be exponential once you put those two companies together. If you're not as excited or maybe you're just not in as a great position, maybe you issue them stock, right?  It just speaks to the fact if you really didn't want to give out that piece, nonetheless. So they give them the piece of the deal. They give them an all-stock deal and you're at $131.05 for Capital One from $137.23, $35 billion. We'll see where they go. And they're going to pay $1.019 of its own shares at 26% premium for that company.  And I saw once, I think it's the number three and number six company that are teaming up there. Yeah, they're going to be the biggest lender when they put them together. They got quite a book, man, when you put them together. The acquisition going to generate pre-tax synergies of $2.7 billion is the number. Yeah, Prime customers. Capital One is known for its commercials, of course. Delinquencies has stabilized after reporting net charge offs that were higher than any others expected. Capital One has been trying to attract more premium customers. Is there a deal there? They read by Digital Concierge Service Velocity Black last year, discovers long focused on those Prime customers with better credit ratings, though it's historically shied away from flashy sign-on bonus and lavish perks used by so many of its rivals. So we'll be interesting to see where that one goes through, $35 billion, man, as they team up. Then we jump to the next deal out there. Walmart agreeing to buy a Vizio for $2.3 billion. This one was talked about last week. It'll be interesting to see how this impacts them. Roku in a tough spot there, as they got a big deal with Walmart. That looks to be in question, of course, but they're buying Vizio, and it's about advertising there. $11.50 a share, they're simple. This was already reported last week, so yeah, they're major sellers of Vizio devices, but in buying the company, Walmart touted the potential to boost its ad business through video smartcast operating system, which allows users to stream free ad supported content on their TVs. Now that's the part I wanted to get to, man. We watch Roku TV in my house because we don't have cable. If you want some live TV, it's free ad supported content on the TVs. This is everywhere. It's going to be a big part. It's basically the new set top television. In terms of free television, ad supported, we're going back to where we were, man. It was that first it was all TV was free, right? You put the antennas on top of your television, you're paying for ads that support that. Then you've got cable television to follow, then what happened? Then you've got streamers. Now it's happened. Well, the streamers had figured out, you know what the best actual model is? Give it to them for free and sell ads and we're going round and round, man, as it goes. They've tried to expand their media business, Walmart Connect, which comes with bigger profit margins than selling groceries or clothing. Advertising sales grew 22% for Walmart in the fourth quarter. We believe Vizio's customer centric operating system provides great viewing experiences at attractive price points. We believe it enables a profitable advertising business that's rapidly scaling. Advertising is a good business to be in. Ask Mr. Zuckerberg on that one and then you jump over to Roku and that deal was already there as well in terms of that deal speculated last week.  They're going to open down another $4 this morning to 67.94. We jump over to Walmart shares on that news. There you go. They got earnings as well. Walmart. We'll get into that. Let's talk about folks. Walmart, up by eight bucks on their earnings, not on that deal. One of the components. Stay tuned, folks. 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Visit TFNN.com and try Mastering Probability, 30 days risk-free today, TFNN Educating Investors. for the quarterly revenue as shoppers turn to the big-box retailer throughout the holiday season and the company's e-commerce sales grew by double digits, earnings a buck eighty versus a buck sixty-five, revenue one point seven three four versus one point seven hundred and seventy-three point four billion versus one hundred and seventy point seven billion. Now you know it's remarkable this, right? They buy some of these companies. They buy Vizio for two point three billion, which is not even the revenue that they beat on a 90-day basis, right? They could have just taken the extra revenue, which was what, two point four, about two point seven they beat, two point six, two point six, not two point seven, yeah, two point seven. They beat by two point seven billion dollars in revenue, absolutely remarkable. Net income, five point four billion in those same 90 days. Now they were comparing it to six point two eight a year ago, revenue increased from 164 billion a year ago, look at that, right, 173 billion for the year ago period, man, remarkable from 164. Net sales going to rise four to five percent in the fiscal first quarter, adjusted earnings a buck forty-eight to a buck fifty-six on the pre-stock split basis, man, just big numbers across the board, you can see why they're accelerating higher. Comp sales rose four percent at Walmart U.S. at Sam's Club, Comp sales increased 1.9 percent, including fuel. I'll tell you folks, I belong to Sam's, we don't have cost, we have Costco in Tampa, I'm a little far from it, Sam's got a great thing going on, man, they do. It's interesting, I was telling my dad even this weekend, I told him before, Sam's is a different feeling inside, which is, you know, they know they have to compete with kind of the Costco, and Costco does not have the Walmart feel, but it's amazing how you go into a Sam's, and it feels so great, and yeah, it's the big box, you know, warehouse type feel, of course, versus you go into a Walmart, for some reason, man, that Walmart, it's not, you know, anyway, nonetheless, big numbers, man, e-commerce sales, here's the number I want to get to, 23 percent, how about that, yeah. In the U.S., e-commerce, 17 percent, as shoppers used curbside pickup and got orders delivered to their homes, advertising, here you go, 33 percent globally, 22 percent in the U.S., visual acquisition going to be an accelerant for the higher margin, fast growing part of the business, how about that, customer transactions increasing 4.3 percent compared with a year ago period, average ticket declined slightly, which is interesting in the face of inflation and all that stuff, right? The company could soon face a deflationary environment where prices are not just stabilizing, but going down, he said those lower prices could help customers pay for more discretionary items on Tuesday, however, Randy said Walmart sees deflation as less likely, because that's what he had said in November, okay, in some categories of general merchandise prices are lower than a year ago. He added food prices still rose by low single digits year-over-year. Now, I'll tell you that in being a Sam shopper as well, so the coolest part is, is that when you go into these places now, right, this is how it's going to be in Sam's, it's how it's going to be everywhere in no time. So I go in Sam's now, I pull out my phone, it's called Scan and Go, okay, and what you do is you just scan the item with your phone, it adds it up as you're going, so you just do it as you throw it in your cart, right, you don't need to do it all at the end, as you take something, you throw it in your cart, you scan it on your phone, and when you're going to check out, you just hit the check out button on your phone, it pays for everything, and then you have to walk out and the way they do it is Sam's, I think they do the same thing at Costco, right, they take your receipt, they scan a few items to make sure, they do a check to make sure, you know, you've paid for everything, and then you go, that's the way it's going to happen, man, and they're not going to need the person at the door, right, eventually they're going to have all those items with an RFID, you throw it in your cart, you pay for it, and the store knows that somehow you're leaving with an item that hasn't been paid for yet, it's happening, man, now you take that, they talked about gas, right, so I get gas at Sam's as well, you pull up to the gas station, well, you need to be a Sam's member to use the gas station, so you either use your card or you can use the app, I use the app for everything these days, I pull open the app, what happens, I scan the app, it immediately tells me, you know, it knows who I am, it tells me you want to use the card on file to pay for the gas, yes I do, I hit the button on my phone, it's done, I don't need anything else but my phone and a membership, scan it at the pump, it knows my credit card, it knows my membership, I put the gas in there, I'm done, you know, on a technological basis, the fact that Walmart is at the forefront of that, that's going to matter folks, they're catching up to Amazon because Amazon is doing that as well, but using that technology, it's going to be everywhere in five or ten years, man, the days of, and let me tell you, I love that I no longer have to go to a register to check out, I don't have to go there anymore, that's the best part of it man, it knows everything, right, it knows everything man, yeah, and that's the interesting part, you know, Costco is high-end and I agreed Duffy and Walmart not so much but Sam's is a different deal man because out here, Sam's is a different deal and the aura and the feeling inside is a different deal as well, I'll give you an example, at their, at their deli, right, so they got a bunch of great pre-made stuff at Sam's, right, I'm really talking about Walmart, yeah, I do have a small amount on a Walmart retirement but maybe I should have some more, the way that we're performing today, check out this chart, but I'm spending a lot of time on this folks but think about it because you want to be in these companies, I think the annual feed for Sam's like 59 bucks Duffy and I think I got a deal where it was even less than that to begin or something like that, I think I got a deal and I'll look it up because it's not much man, the amount of money I save even on gas, you'd add it up, it's a no-brainer, you know, paper towels, easy stuff, let alone, but you go to the deli, right, so they get the pre-made stuff, they get the good stuff and sometimes you know where they get the rotisserie chickens, like at Publix and stuff, right, they get the good rotisserie chickens they put out there, okay, and it is interesting how these two brands within the same company, Walmart and Sam's, you go to Walmart and yeah, you can buy a rotisserie chicken but I'm always like, I don't know about that rotisserie chicken at Walmart, I don't know, how long has that Walmart rotisserie chicken been out, what employees have been hanging around, you know, handling that versus you go to Sam's man, they got the guy back there who are cutting, you know, prime steaks, you can watch them through the thing, they have their rotisserie chickens, which are a great deal, I buy those sometimes and they even have baby back ribs out there, which are out there in the same deal, right, they're hot, they're right next to the rotisserie, how about those sometimes? I would never buy baby back ribs pre-made in the hot, you know, container at Walmart, wouldn't touch the stuff, they're getting it done at Sam's, they're doing it with technology and it's going to come to Walmart, man, and now they get the advertising on top of it. And check out this chart, so you're training 178 from Walmart, man, you put this on a three-year weekly, you're gonna open almost 180 folks, this is blown away, everything we had from 117 at the lows of May of 2022, absolutely remarkable, you compare that to Target, yeah, they get some problems, man, right, look at this, you're basically at the lows of 2022 for Target, whereas Walmart has surged higher in dramatic fashion, I love Target, I love the brand in Target, man, Target is expensive, they don't have the technology that Walmart has right now, and the funny thing is, is that I cannot stand having to check out at Target because most of the time, if you guys are familiar with girls, you end up in a line for the self-checkout, it's like 15 people long, and I'm not exaggerating, man, and that's just on a normal, like, Friday, Saturday night, maybe a Thursday night sometimes, who knows?  Are you ready to take charge of your financial future? 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Let's take a look at what we're talking about here. So you talk about a move, man. You want action through Friday? How about some volatility for you? $80. $80 is the volatility priced in in either direction if you just want action through Friday and that's because they got their numbers coming out tomorrow. And yeah, $80 is not that outlandish. When you look at the trading range, this thing is in without earnings, where you're really bouncing around between about 7.10 and maybe 7.40. You put this thing on a daily. So you're off by 1.1% to kick things off. It's been a one-way trip, man, to almost 800 bucks, which would complete that A to B, C to D we've been talking about here. So maybe that's the final thrust on their earnings. At some point, you're gonna need a little consolidation, man. Doesn't mean it has to happen right now though. As we know, when this thing runs, we'll see what they come up with with their numbers, man. It seems like everybody wants the chips they're making and they can't get them fast enough for years to come. NVIDIA, off by 1.1%, even as the NASDAQ caused back some of those losses. We go over to the other big player in AI, Microsoft. They're basically flat this morning at 404. We jump over to Google shares, Google, off by 2.10% this morning. Amazon shares down by about 1.5% this morning. We jump over to Tesla. Tesla off by 2.2% so far this morning. Let's see how the companies are open in Walmart. Yeah, they open up 5.5% and that's quite an acceleration for a company like Walmart, man. Up by $9 to $179.49. That's an all-time high, right? Yeah, all-time high, man. Look at that. You get your consolidation area from what? There's our COVID pullback. Yep, Walmart, one of the companies that didn't suffer too dramatic of a pullback, right? Everybody was going to need their items from Walmart no matter what. Consolidates for 2020. You get that steep pullback into 2022 and then, boom, you take off like a rocket ship, man. From 120 up to 60, you're up 50% on this equity and this is not one of the equities that usually runs 50% folks in terms of a high-flyer road stock. You're talking about Walmart, but now you're talking about advertising multiples that are growing double digits, right? E-commerce sales growing double digits, purchasing Vizio, et cetera. That would be an interesting one. And jump over to Capital One. How are they digesting their purchase? Capital One, off by about 5.4% to kick things off as they purchase Discovery, it's $35 billion. And let's check back to yields and see how they're trading this morning. There's your long-term chart, man. You got the tenure rising a bit, pointing to a slightly lower yield to get the tenure back above 110 barely. We're trading at 110,005. You're up by about nine ticks right now on the tenure. And that'll jump us to our next story. From the journal out here, no, Bloomberg, excuse me, is the market starting to speculate and if the next Fed move is up, boy, if the next Fed move is up, man, watch out. We talked to Teddy Kakes that tomorrow, Wednesdays at 40 pass, he's been talking about that they might not be done, man. And at the beginning of this, kudos to him. He's had some great calls, man. Check out that Forex report that he puts together, folks, he's got a new issue out, of course, this week. But yeah, the market's starting to price it in when it hadn't for a long time. The options market sees a small chance of a rate hike, rate hike, 6%.  The implied probability of Fed policy path by December, by December, one more hike or zero, that's still 13% when you put the two together, right? Yeah, guy who knows Duffy what would happen the day that that happens.  That's not gonna be a shocker.   We got a ton of Fed speak coming up this week, man. Thursday, we get like six different people speaking as well. Yeah, and particularly volatile. Look at January 31st, that's when it was. When you even have the chairman saying that they believe our policy rate is likely at its peak for this tightening cycle, pretty strong words. But we've had a few expectations to have gone awry in that. And this is the rate cut bets in terms of how many cuts are coming down the line, right? And looking as we go week by week, these are just weeks. This is all it is. This is how fast things can change over a weekly basis, right? Let's blow this up, man, because this speaks volumes. The median of the Fed's dot plot in December, okay, was three. Look at where we've come from, man. December 22nd, we were at seven. January 12th, we were almost back at seven. You're above five on January 19th. You're above five on January 26th. And just like that, we're at three and a half cuts priced in now. Three and a half cuts, right in line with where the Fed is, man. Now, the chairman has said that everybody's basically on board that they think it'll be time to cut sometime this year. It's only February. That gives him a lot of time to go forward from where we are. But keep your eye on how fast things have moved week over week here. And the yields have reacted to that accordingly. But we've had some job numbers that have been dramatic. We've had a CPI number that's been dramatic. And we'll see where it goes from there. PPI as well, right? Yeah, and then what happens to the dollar, right? This is the Dollar Spot Index, the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index. The dollar could return toward 2022 highs if the Fed hikes. I'm not sure they're gonna be hiking, man. Okay, there's gonna be some data that's gonna have to come down the line. And we're gonna get to see that. And you're getting quite a reversal today, man. Look at that, 103.84. I mean, that's the reason why you got gold accelerating this morning in dramatic fashion. Gold up by 16 bucks up to 2,040, but you get back to the dollar index briefly.  In the dollar index, you blow where you were on that Tuesday acceleration to higher price. You back it up on the daily. We've rolled over at the 618, folks. That's what I wanted to get to. We have rolled over right at that 618. Look where we get to, right? 104.75 was about the 618. We hit that price point and just like that, we've given up a full point from where we were just a few days ago as we're under 104. We're at 103.84 and that's given a bid to commodities. Gold in particular. Speaking of, you jump over to crude, $78. Bump it up against it, man. We'll see where we get to. But that's where we've been before. We were back up here January 29th. You accelerate to 72. We're right back at 78 bucks this morning on the price of crude, basically down by 35 pennies. You jump over to the VIX on a little bit of negative action on the market. VIX slightly elevated this morning, right? Check out that pop. That was Sunday Night Futures. That was Monday Night Futures. We were closing out Friday action, 1380. We're sitting at 1520 right now. You hear that? We were closing out Friday, 1380. We're sitting at 1520. That is quite a rise in the VIX. As we approach a porn week, as I mentioned, Nvidia, ooh, what's going on over here, man? Can't fault somebody for wanting to get out of Nvidia before they hit their earnings, man. You know, over a period of 90 days, just a remarkable acceleration to higher price. And are you really gonna be waiting when they got an $80 move priced in?  I'm sure that you'll be okay. I'm not sure, folks. They're dealing with multiples that are bonkers, but boy, they're in a sweet spot. AI is gonna change everything for the future to put it lightly. And I'll see if I can find, you know, I was on there last night with ChatGPT, playing with some images, man. The future is gonna change so quickly, folks. I'll see if I can find some of those images. I will. I'll see if I can find them during this break. All right, we got a lot to talk about. It's Tuesday trading on a shortened week, but it's a big week, man. We got Nvidia earnings coming up. We got Fed Minutes coming up this week. We got some FedSpeak, along with more companies with their earnings. Stay tuned, folks, we'll be right back. Are you ready to take charge of your financial future? TFNN is your gateway to the world of trading and investing. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, TFNN empowers traders and investors of all skill levels with top-notch investing systems, strategies, and techniques. It's time to protect and grow your money with insight you can trust. Join us live Monday through Friday during market hours for exclusive content that moves with the markets. At TFNN, we bring the trading floor to you. Our seasoned hosts are here to answer your calls and questions live on the air. 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A fund's prospectus and summary prospectus should be read carefully before investing. An investment in the funds is subject to risk, including the possible loss of principal. The funds are designed to be utilized only by sophisticated investors such as traders and active investors, distributor for side fund services, LLC. This program is brought to you by Vista Gold, traded on the NYSE American and TSX under the symbol VGZ. Folks, we got a little drop going on right now. We got the S&Ps, you see the drop off there. Right on the opening bell, man, we hit a high of 5,000 and what'd we get to? Yeah, right after the opening bell, these are five-minute bars we're looking at. You hit 5,000 and nine, just like that. You give up 17 points in the S&Ps. As we roll over, you get the NASDAQ 100, off by about nine-tenths percent. What do we just give up? 150 points in the NASDAQ 100, the span of about 10 minutes from where we were. You're negative by 1%. And yeah, it's not just NVIDIA, man. Check out NVIDIA, though. What is going on, man? Somebody knows what's happening in the den. I think it's just selling going on right now, but maybe something's going on. Somebody, but boy, that is quite a sell. As you got NVIDIA shares just traded down 40 bucks from 720 to 682, just like that, man. You got Google shares, nah, not quite. But Microsoft, nah, not quite as well. So we got winners and losers here in terms of, you got a few selling, man. Amazon off by 1.6. Maybe Walmart eating into their business, I don't know. Walmart holding steady up by 180, not a bad number for them. Tesla shares off by 3%. We're getting the tech stock because they're selling off. And we're back to Microsoft. So ChatGPT, so I'm playing with ChatGPT. Excuse me. And you can create pictures with it now. And you can create videos if you're using one of the plugins, man. You can do a tremendous amount. I encourage you. My dad's encouraged it as well. Take some of the courses. Amazon has some on augmented reality. You wanna learn this stuff because it's gonna dominate the world, man. Just start playing with it. That's the best, just start playing with it, right? So I'm just playing with it last night. And I'm laying in bed, I'm on my phone, okay? Now I pay $20 a month for ChatGPT4, okay? Through OpenAI. And that gives you a few more options than a normal one, but check this out.  I say, ah, I said, make me a picture of my son, O'Brien IV. Let's have him playing in the Olympic games. I wanna play in the Russians. I wanna him winning the, win the Olympics, score the final goal, have him celebrating. Let me see his name on the back of his shirt, so we know it's him. And let me see what you create as a picture. And look what it does. Look at this. If you're watching Tiger TV, if you're in the den, check it out. It's just so cool where technology's gonna go, man. Now, there's a few intricacies in this photo that are amusing, okay? First of all, check out the people and the fans. All right, and it's one of my buddies was joking because I was sharing with him last night.  I don't know what's going on in the fans, folks. But how cool is that? I don't know what's going on. It seems like the goalie is like in the middle of the ice out there, right? I don't know what's going on there. Seems like they put Tommy in the goalie crease that's over here somehow. The goalie nets out in the middle of the ice, right there, right? It doesn't do well with words and letters and spelling yet, okay? But you see the American places is pretty cool, right? Pretty amazing, really, okay? So then you go there and so I say, okay. I say, have him checking Putin on the Russian team, right? I say, I want him to check Putin. I want him to lay out Putin with a big hit. Well, what they say is you can't put real names in there, okay? Probably a good check, but instantly I say, well, that's not gonna maintain, man. Somebody's gonna create something. I just want a picture of a fun picture of my son winning the Olympics, checking Putin on the way to scoring that goal. Well, you can't create names, okay? So he couldn't put, it's funny, they could create O'Brien IV, but they couldn't have him check in Putin. So I say, okay, just have him check some Russian in part of the game. I wanna see Tommy O'Brien IV checking a Russian when he's playing. Check out this visual, man. I said, AI don't mess around, man, when it comes to playing hockey. Look at that picture, isn't that awesome? Yeah, keep the skates down, Tommy. That's not legal, man. You'll get in trouble, that's a big problem. That's AI for you folks, isn't that hysterical, man? So they create that, okay? Now, the kicker is, is what you can also do, okay? Is that you can upload a picture of yourself and say, well, use this picture of me to create a picture of likeness of me or something like that, right? So I upload a picture of me and I say, create a picture of Tommy when he's the president of America and put him in the White House, put him here. And then you know what else I told him? I said, put him in some cool high-top sneakers that are red and bold and green and have some red shoes because we're not gonna let Trump get a monopoly on those shoes, man. It can't happen, right? So look what he does for the third one. Let me find it, check this out. Look at that, there's Tommy. He's in the Oval Office. He's sporting his own pair of fine kicks and in 20 years, maybe he'll be hawking those. No, he won't be hawking those folks. Isn't that amazing though? So that one is predicated off my facial picture as well. I'll take that, man. Look at that gentleman. Hopefully that's Tommy the fourth, why not? Isn't that amazing? And just by description of the high-tops, check out the high-tops, right? I didn't say the Trump shoes or anything like that. I imagine that Trump was sitting there playing with AI for those shoes, man, maybe because look at what they did. I said, create me some high-top shoes, give them gold, red, white, and blue and give me some red soles on those shoes, man.  So it's pretty remarkable to play with it, but pretty cool, right? I thought that was pretty cool, man. And videos are right there, too. What actually made me go down that rabbit hole last night is I saw a pretty cool video. I said, how long is it gonna be until you see these videos?  That's made by some 13-year-old using an app in his bedroom that can create any video in the world. We're probably only a few years away from that being the case, man, when you think about it. Pictures are not that far off from being fake and videos are probably not that far off. We know they're not. You just gotta have the technology, but the technology is gonna become rapidly available in the next few years, just like it always does with technology when it comes about. But check that out when you get some time, folks. You're sitting on the couch, you're playing with your phone, man. That was the Wally Image Generator, I think, which is one of the plugins that now is accessible on ChatGPT, at least on ChatGPT4. Nonetheless, right? Yeah, Tommy's scoring that a little bit goal. Why not? Microsoft down 710s percent right now, as we got a little bit of a rollover, man.  It's like people taking their cash and running a bit if they've been in that run, and heck, man, if you've been in that run, right? Boy, optimism at all-time highs for NVIDIA to put it lightly. You don't have to be in NVIDIA for long, man, to be up gangbusters when you look at it. I mean, just what, a year ago? A year ago, this thing was at 215, and you just opened today above 700, let alone the 90-day run that you're on, which is from about 400, no, excuse me, 500 up to 690. Wild. Yeah, and that was a bummer deal. I saw that one, Dan, it happened in real life, I know, right? All right, we jump around, see what else has got going on. See how Walmart's digesting those numbers, up about nine bucks. All right, let's see what else we got going on in this market. Yeah, this one's interesting, man, the Saudis. They got a lot going on, right? And they're going to the market for even more. Saudi public investment fund cash and treasury assets. Look at this, man. There's a reason why this, they're selling shares. Treasury assets and cash combined for almost $200 billion in 2020, where do they sit right now? What are they at total, $37 billion? Absolutely remarkable, man. The sovereign wealth fund. Last month, it's cash levels as of September had fallen by roughly three quarters to about 15 billion. That is nothing for what they're doing, man. The lowest since December, 2020, when the fund began reporting the data to keep the spending taps open, the kingdom has turned a tool that it shunned in recent decades, borrowing. Yeah, it also plans another gargantuan sale of stock in the country's Count Jewel, Saudi Aramco, the supersized spending and borrowing underscore, Muhammad Bill Salman's, expansive ambition for the country and show how they could face fiscal strains in a world of elevated interest rates. That's the crazy part to look at in this article, man. The Saudis, are they gonna be streamed? Seems like that's not the case right now, but we will see. One more segment, folks. Don't go away, we'll be right back. The Gold Report. As a precious metal, gold is still king. It continues to hold the most effective safe haven in hedging properties across the global major trading hubs of the London OTC market, the US futures market and the Shanghai Gold Exchange. The Gold Report. 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The opening call newsletter is written by Basil Chapman, creator of the trading methodology known as the Chapman Wave. The Chapman Wave up-down sequence gives you an edge in identifying price turns, finding the peaks and valleys in stock prices.  First-time subscribers also get a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you're not satisfied, let us know, and you'll get a full refund within 30 days of signing up. TFNN.com, educating investors. The reality is that navigating financial markets can be risky. Markets can be chaotic and difficult to understand. Having the latest market advice can help you turn this chaos into a key for creating winning trades. At TFNN, we understand that it can be hard to find reliable market news. That's why each of our market experts offers their very own market newsletter. A must-have tool for every trader out there striving to find an edge in today's markets, TFNN newsletters cover every aspect of the markets so you can analyze the market before you trade. Try any of our great newsletters risk-free with our 30-day money-back guarantee. Just visit the newsletters tab on the front page of TFNN.com. TFNN, educating investors. Don't forget, you can listen to TFNN live on your mobile device 24 hours per day. Go to TFNN.com and hit Watch Tiger TV. That's TFNN.com and hit Watch Tiger TV. Back folks, we have the S&Ps down by about 29 points right now, a little bit of a sell-off. We catch a little bit of a bounce just off of that 49. Let me get that low, 49.86. Yes, 49.86 in the S&Ps. We're trading at 49.91. You're down by 28 points or about half a percent of the red NASDAQ 100. You're off by more than a percent right now. The Dow catches a little bit of a bid as we get divergence going on right now and keeping our eye on some of these high fliers, man. Off by 5.2% to kick things off it. And yeah, I think it's just selling folks. It's selling ahead of their numbers. And as I mentioned, you got an $82 move priced in for their numbers on Friday. And just like that, you give up 40 bucks, man, for NVIDIA shares at 6.89. You check out some of the other companies that were flying there, Amazon shares, off by 1.3 so far this morning. We check back to Walmart on their numbers, 179.60 so far. Back to that story about Saudi Arabia, man, the numbers are just video game style numbers what they say. The 2030 plan, which is a big plan that they're about halfway through or in 2024, right? Calls for the Well Fund, known as the Public Investment Fund, to manage two trillion in assets up from the 718 billion as of September. The Public Investment Fund has said it expects to receive more funding from the government. They're gonna need more money, man, which is remarkable. Excuse me. At the same time, that spending has ramped up, oil revenue has leveled off, oil prices would need to be above 86 barrel in 2023 and $80 a barrel this year to balance the government's budget, yeah? So they have an unbalanced budget right now, which is remarkable when you think about the money that they're getting. Saudi Arabia is expected to run a budget deficit of 21 billion or about 2% of the country's GDP.  Wouldn't it be wild if we got higher interest rates in the crushed Saudi Arabia? We would crush us too, which is the problem right now. All right, folks, that was a quick hour, man. We got a lot going on. Stay tuned. We got our man, Basil Chapman. He is coming up next, folks. I see him there. He's getting ready in the den. Have a great Tuesday. Have a safe Tuesday, folks. Look forward to seeing you back here tomorrow morning. Stay tuned for Basil. Have a great day, everybody.


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So, there is chocolate. I was not lying. Okay, so we're going to all play a game. You are not going to look at the screen.  I'm going to put a question on the screen, and I'm going to have you guys try to answer the question based on what he's about to tell you. And what you're going to do is you're going to take this chart and you're going to describe it to them and hope that they can answer the question. You all have 15 seconds. And 15 seconds. Okay, what was the trend of that chart? Down is the correct answer. Admittedly, he could have just said Bitcoin and you would have guessed it. So, just so you all know what the picture looks like, here you go. I hope you had that visually in your mind as he was describing it. We're going to do this again. Okay, so I'm going to have, we're going to change the picture to that. And I'm going to post the question now. Go. And time. Great. Okay, everyone. What was the price last week? That is actually correct. Good job. That's not what I wanted. Too good at audio description. Okay. So, assuming we didn't guess from nearby values, it would have been impossible for you to know what the price was because usually the exact price on any given point in time is not expressed in an alt text or text description that is what he just provided. So, thank you for your audience participation. You can have some chocolate. Thank you, everyone else, for guessing along with us. And Richard, can you tell us how was that experience of coming up with those descriptions? Yes. Yes. And that is great. Just so you all know, for this chart, I asked a friend of mine to come out with the alt text and he said, some charts just don't deliver. Which was unhelpful. And taught me something about my friends and how helpful they would be. Which is that they think dad jokes are the correct answer to anything. If we can't get that level of precision from alt text, if it's more of a high level, here's the direction, or even like here are the major beats, then how would we get that level of precision that a user might want? So, you provide them the data. So here's data table. So, everyone, what was the price of this Amazon stock on Black Friday? Why yes, everyone was shouting the correct answer in $93.41. Thank you. Great question. And so, like, you were able to find it. You find the column, you find the row. It's fine. Great. Okay. So now that we have precision, we now need to figure out what the general trend is. That was what alt text was good at. And so, what direction is the price going? Exactly. And so sometimes you'll go through, you'll see the dates. You'll see that the dates are kind of in the opposite order. You see kind of like the vibe, the numbers are going in. And of course, I've let you all cheat because you're seeing all of the data at once instead of one cell at a time, which is how you would be doing it if you were, of course, blind. So, that's great. It's nice to have that level of precision, but it's a trade-off between getting precision immediately or getting your high-level overview. So, let's do this one more time.  Yeah, what was the trend? It was down. Excellent. So, but we also, that was the general overview. What was precision? What was the exact point in time? So, I'm going to... They probably want me to use the microphone. So, what is, what were we just listening to? And that is sonification. It's when you turn data into sound. It's been around, I think, like sonification, I think it was coined in, like, the 1920s. It's been around for a while, but you don't really see a lot of examples out there of it. Highcharts has something, Apple did something with audiographs. There are a couple of implementations out there, but you don't see them getting a lot of traction. And part of that is because they're all very siloed. If you want to implement something, you're implemented to get yourself or you're using one of their systems, and it is fairly difficult to implement, you need to have a lot of experience around, like psychoacoustics as well as coding, user interface design, it can be complicated to get all of those pieces in alignment, so there hasn't been a lot of development in the space. So, welcome to church music. That's what you were all listening to, and that's what we were all interacting with. So that was not only sonification where you hear all of the sounds, you're converting data into sound, but it was also interactive. So you're going through point by point and getting individual sounds, as well as background information that you would get to a screen reader. Does this exist besides just like it's fun to listen to weird sounds? I wanted a magic wand for developers. I've worked with developers. I am a developer. I've worked with people to help remediate charts and graphs over the past for the last decade, and everyone wanted to do something accessible. They wanted it to work, but they also were busy. They were doing a million other things, and you don't have time to become an expert on a whole wide array of subjects in order to just get the accessibility to work for something, especially something so complicated. So I wanted just something really quick. If you've never even heard of blind people, I still wanted to be able to work for you, where you just know your JavaScript, and it just works with you. I wanted it, and it's so hard to find that. You're never going to find magic wands, but I did it, you guys. And part of the real reason that I think it's going to be so successful is that I included my partner who is blind in this process. He's a data scientist with a PhD. He's been using data... He's been using sonification before in order to get access to deep levels of data and really understood the space and understood the requirements he would have that he would need to get out of, which... So having him involved from the very beginning as part of design and development and the testing and the feedback and including him as well as many other members of community was part of why I believe that this is going to be really successful to be... And one of... One of the most important parts of that is being able to customize things. It's being able to fully appreciate everything that you're working with and doing so completely independently. So what is the developer experience? If I'm calling this a magic wand for developers, what does that actually look like? Well, here on our left is just some code that makes a chart. I found it from a demo site of a thing when I googled JavaScript library charts. I'm sure you're wondering what this looks like. It's that. It's a bar chart. The old standby. The old warhorse of all chart types. So let's say I have this bar chart and I want to make it accessible. How do I do that? You add about four or five lines of code where you're like, by the way, this is a bar chart and that data already handed to the charting library. Here it is. And there you go. That's what you do. And so magically, that bar chart you just saw is being accessible for the blind. That's all I want you to do. You already know it. If you already know JavaScript, you're just like, yes, obviously. That'll do it, man. And that's what I want. That's what I want your developer experience to be. And it's partially working because it's living alongside the chart. You could honestly have a static image. You could have a completely blank space and you'd still be able to get that interactive notification. So I have, honestly, the most difficult part is making all the visuals look pretty for sighted people, which, honestly, the blind people are usually not going to care about. So here are some examples. If you go to our website, you'll see all of these different charting libraries already up and running with chart to music, usually with visual syncing to just, like, really make the demos shine. So it does not matter what charting libraries you have. It doesn't matter what silo you've already put yourself in. You don't have to leave it in order to be able to get the accessibility. We can bring it to you and you can use it whenever you want. So what have the responses been from the blind community? It's great to know the developers are fine with it, but what's the response from the blind community? So the first thing that we got from people was, like, I'm old and I can't hear all of those sounds? Can you change them? Yes, we can. So we added an options library. It was actually very important to me right now because I felt like I couldn't hear the lower sounds when I was in this room. So I just bumped up the Hertz values for the lowest level then until I felt like I could comfortably hear it. And that's what we did just moments before you all came inside. So if you feel like you can't hear the upper level or the lower level, you can just adjust it yourself and it'll remember that adjustment on your page. It'll remember for all the other charts on the same page. We're just using local storage. And it just goes with the way you want it to. You can customize this to be as successful as you want. Was the next thing I heard from people? I was like, can we use this with stocks? I was sharing people's like, here are some fun facts about the census. People are like, we don't care. We want stocks. So if anyone here does anything with stocks and charts, there are a lot of people who'd be interested in that. But finally, my favorite response I've ever gotten from anyone for sonification was this fully blind woman. She worked for the government in Toronto and she played it over and over and over again. And she said, no one decided people like charts so much. And this is why we do it, guys. So just to recap, what are the different ways that you can make charts accessible to the blind? You can use alt text and thank you Richard for being significantly better than most alt text writers actually are. It's the industry standards. It's been the industry standards since the 1990s. It's a really low cognitive load. If you're going down, you're like, I get it. It's going down. But it has fairly low precision. Normally. But it's very expensive and difficult. Can we all imagine Richard coming up here and having to write thousands of alt text because he has that level of experience? No, normally you get randos who show up and they're just like, I don't know. It looks like a mountain, I guess. It's very weird and craggy. There's also automation technology out there. Plus, it's hard. It's trying. Maybe it'll be there in a few years and it'll just generate these long paragraphs that will be the same as a person but cheaper. But you still don't get the level of precision. Data tables are around. They're an industry standard. The cognitive load is very high because you have to hold all of that in your brain just to process it. But the precision is very high. You do get access to exactly what you want once you find it. And it's pretty easy to generate scale. Generally, there's giant asterisk on that. Data cells will crash your screen reader. Please don't do that. You need to implement pagination at that point and also formatting. It's theoretically easy, especially if you only have a couple hundred data points. Anyway. And then we have interactive salvagation. It's not the industry standard yet. But it's user-adjustable. The user can decide how much cognitive load they wanted to have and it'll remember everything for it. The precision can be very high because you can go find the exact data point you want. And then you can generate scale. If you were able to generate the chart, you're able to generate the interactive sonification. So in conclusion, chart to music. It's a better user experience all around while also being a better developer experience all around. Easier to implement, easier to use. Any questions? Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. And you can never rely on knowing what the end user actually wants to get out of it. Besides hoping it's general vibes. Vibes are very easy to write down. Anyone else have any other questions? Yes. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Thanks. Thanks. Great question. So the types of charts that we support are bar charts, line charts, candlesticks, hichoo, Bannplot, etc. and pie charts. The way we and heat maps. We support a lot of things really now but the thing is for our bar charts and our line charts we basically pretend they're all the same thing. We don't care about the fact that in a row, and we let you change between those lines, so if you have like four or five lines we'll let you change between them, but it's still fundamentally the same sonification style, the difference between band plots and open, high, low, close, it's still fundamentally the same kind of interaction. This does mean we don't support things like maps, we don't support scatter plots, which is potentially an issue for some people if you really need scatter plots, but we have all of these other chart types that are all using the same general style, and part of the reason for that is how cognitively easy it is for a user once they have climbed the learning curve of when I make a sound, like the sounds mean this, and here are the interactions I do to get that. Once they've climbed that, they don't have to climb it again, it's always the same interaction, so I was trying to keep sonification as consistent as possible between the different chart types for that reason, but thank you so much, yes. Do you mean are there other accessibility challenges or can interactive sonification be used outside of accessibility? Yes, so I have been told that sometimes traders will look at a picture and have a five and there's the shape of the line can mean something to them, and that if you're more of an audio learner that may be the sound of something, if you just hear something really quickly that the sound will become that shape, it'll become that feeling for you, and so certainly some people have told me that they feel like traders would just use this whether they actually could, like whether they could see or not, but it would be just really convenient to be really fun to have like a different way of doing this. You can also set it up on another monitor and just have it running, and you'll be able to hear the sounds as the sounds are going by and you can like zone out until it starts spiking or until it starts dropping and be like, oh shit, I need to go look at it. Like there are a lot of different uses that you could have if you don't absolutely need it as your only way of getting access to that data. So people have told me it's possible. I think that would be really cool. I also think it would be really cool for blind people if all traders decided we're not looking at anything anymore, we're only listening to it, it's going to make it really easy for blind people to get into the space. So if you think that that is the case, that traders might think it's cool to listen to stuff, please do it. Some people will appreciate it. So there's a lot of the other accessibility issues that are out there, wind up being around visuals, the accessibility issues with charts, the biggest one is color blindness, and that's really going to impact how you built it. And so we have to become a question of what exactly did you do with your chart? You're going to need to learn some stuff about how the math of colors work or get some best practices. I can't really do a lot about that. I can do stuff for screen readers like this. This is what I can do. Anyone else have any other questions? Great question. So we have a couple of different things on our roadmap. One of them is adding ear cons. So we just have a single set of sounds that are already pre-programmed that we're thinking we should be able to add things like dings or other items that users might think are particularly useful. We also were looking into letting people export the audio sounds. We've had some people say, oh, I really like this, or oh, I really like being able to make music out of this chart. I want to construct a chart that plays this particular song. And I don't understand that vibe. But if that is what they want, I can write code. So I'm looking into maybe letting people export stuff. This is particularly important to me when I am listening to podcasts. So we have this chart, but unfortunately we're in an audio medium, so there's no way to show this chart to you. So let me just tell you, this is a chart that's going down and it's making everyone very sad. It's like, what if you were just playing it? What if you just had sound? That'd be so nice. I want to make a tool for podcasters to stop awkwardly trying to provide audio alt text on the fly. They're all very bad at it. Thank you. Anyone else have any other questions? I don't. I do not drink coffee. And I have never drunk coffee. And I don't like it. Yes? We're going to get to the floor. Oh no, you'll have to send me to another conference, Phil. Thank you all. If anyone has any other questions about accessibility or you want me to play any other random chart types for you, you can find me at the FDC3 booth downstairs. Thank you, everyone.


Hi, Craig. This is Yara Noxmore, Toyota. I just want to send a tribute to introduce myself. I got your message that you're looking for the Adelon. Give me a call when you get a chance. My phone number is 502-2147-143. Thank you. Bye.


So, IT financial management actually touches about 50% of the reference architecture. And that goes back to what I presented in the beginning around that there's a lot of data flows that is happening and there's a lot of functional component that has got some minor trimmings in terms of what are the attributes that are maintained on these objects in order to truly support financial management. Let's look at it in a little bit more detail. Well, the first thing is that, and I mentioned that in the beginning, but it's very important to stress, the fact that we now have a service backbone that goes all the way from conceptual to actual allows, and we have connectivity through it, allows us to do much, much better cost tracking. Today, in most IT organizations, the requirement to deploy is kind of a fussy area that doesn't really connect you between what was originally kicked off and what is actually running. And so what you do is, the one, you service dice everything. You make sure you describe everything as service. You build the service budget and then plan out, build out something you put into production. And then you track what you have in production. And all of that cost that you track, you aggregate backwards through the chain so you can track it all up at the conceptual level. And you can do that fully automatically if you have the data models in place. Whereas in many organizations, it's a very complicated job at the side, run through window invoicing and cross-charging and what have I, do much smarter here and much more fine-grained. It's a little bit like when you first learn to program and you are learning about recursive functions. And the first time you write a small program that works with recursive function, you look at it and say, it can't be true. That was just too easy. It just works by magic almost. It's a little bit with this one. Once you've got it in place, you can actually do magic in terms of tracking. So moving on, if you know where that, let's just look at not the entire hierarchy. We don't have time to go through all the details here, but we'll just look at the employee expense management service, hands and the way it gets a new instance developed. And we will start at the, in how you describe the system. Just recalling what it is here. So we will look at that and then we go back to how you capture it in the planning space. So essentially, we've gone through it. We, Hans has deployed his system. It's up and running. There is a charge-back contract that has been created. The owner is Hans. It's associated with the, so the price structure that is associated with that system might be something like that the hosting is being paid for by the cost of the hosting. The FTEs that is being used to support this is charged two and a half K per FT per month. And the backup is charged with what the backup is actually costing. And I should note again that here in the financial management work that has been done in 2.1, we are primarily cost-based, but the system would actually also work in other models where we have cost plus or a price based on the value of the service and not the cost of the service. Okay. So at the collection time, at the end of the charging period, we need to create a charge-back record. And what is happening is that the usage record will be produced and there will be a usage record here for the hosting component that basically says, for period of May, you will cost, you have cost me two K dollars. And that's the hosting service that has produced its own charge-back record that is now being fed into my employee expense management system as a usage record. And similarly, there is usage for the people that has been running support. They spend 243 hours in the support systems. It could also maybe be a number of tickets or something else, right? And the price for that is 3.6 K dollars. That's what has been collected from the support guys. We might not charge because I said, well, we just do a flat charge upwards, but that's actually the cost that has been collected. And finally, the backup says you back up two gigabytes of data. It costs you one K dollars. The charge-back record will then be compiled from that. And for May period, it's a hosting two K, FTE, there are two FTEs, it'll cost you five K because that's what we have. The contract says it's two and a half K per person. Even though the actual cost will lower, right? And the backup, two gigabytes, it's going to cost you one K dollars because we're just giving you on the charge, total eight K dollars. And the reason why we know what to collect is because we have a service model that tells you the hosting service, no, sorry, the employee expense management service is delivered by some software that runs on hosting and runs on use some backup and use some FTEs. So the model tells us what to collect and what to compile the charge back from. If you then move backwards into saying the investment portfolio, how does it work from an investment perspective? And that's kind of where it all gets together. Well, it all started, if you remember in the beginning with that, there was some demand coming in that was portfolio backlog items. That essentially is that I want something more to be developed. And we have defined now, listed in red here, some extra attributes that I see for IT compliant modules must capture. Like what is the investment budget associated with the portfolio demands? So somebody has estimated that it will cost you 36 K to deliver the next version of the employee expense management. And by the way, they also estimated when it would be complete, essentially. And then you build up a proposal that is a scope agreement. And based on that, you go down and associate an IT budget item in the financial side of the house. Where you would sign up the budget and say, yeah, you can get 36 K for that. And by the way, we also want to have some budget allocated for running the service 28 K. And that is now being tracked in all of these various components as something that is being budgeted. And approved, finally, that's associated with the proposal. Is it approved for this budget and then it gets approved? And maybe the status act of that in blind that we're actually developing it right now. We can also, at the service portfolio level, then track what is the total cost of ownership budget that is budgeted for it, which is the 36 plus 28 K dollars, that's 64 K dollars, but what is the actual? Here it says the same figure, but that's actually only after the fact. You need to track it as you move along. And how can you do that? Well, that's back to what we just looked into. It happens in R2F with the uses and the charge back component. Because as you track that information, you can essentially from the charge back and users record, you can compute every month what is actually being spent. And by the way, it's not only what is spent in production, but also what developers are spending when you develop the product, because you allocate resources in order to develop. It's FT, you just allocate it from the catalog. It's just a resource like any other resource. You allocate the servers that you test on. You allocate the test licenses you need, et cetera. So you can get all of that information back. And then you can feed it upwards to the project into the service portfolio, and you can track what is the actual spent. The details need to be worked out in a much bigger spreadsheet. We don't have time for that today.