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UK Regulator Takes Action Against Financial Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Adrian Fuller
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UK Regulator Takes Action Against Financial Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Social media is a powerful marketing tool, and influencers are the name of the game. The best influencers on Instagram and TikTok earn millions. Regulated financial institutions and scammers deploy influencers to chase after clients and victims, respectively. Lately, the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has taken action against Freetrade (www.freetrade.io) and ordered the regulated broker to remove all paid-for sponsored influencer advertisements and posts across all social media platforms, including without limitation Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube.

One of the most prominent influences promoting Freetrade and other financial services providers is Timothy Paul, who has more than 430,000 Followers on TikTok. In his short videos, he is promoting financial services around investing, payments, insurance, or tax.

@tempahtime

#ad If you’re looking to start investing, check out FreeTrade with the link in my BIO #ad #sponsored #invest #stocks @freetrade

♬ Thrift Shop (Instrumental Version) – Starlite Karaoke

Established in 2016, Freetrade is a UK-based fintech providing commission-free stock trading, regulated by the FCA.  The company offers a trading app and works extensively with influencers on TikTok and Instagram to acquire new customers. The FCA takes a critical view of this. In particular, the regulator was concerned about an influencer with over 64,000 followers on TikTok that included information about how she was paying off £38,000 in debt and did pay off £14,000 in 18 weeks. This influencer promoted Freetrade via sponsored TikTok videos.

Read the story on FinTelegram

Climate Change & Rising Sea Level Threatens Future Generations

Charlene Lensburg
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Climate Change & Rising Sea Level Threatens Future Generations

Sea-level rise is one of the most severe consequences of the climate crisis. Global mean sea level has risen by more than 3 cm per decade since precise satellite measurements began in the 1990s. The global mean sea level increased by 0.20 m between 1901 and 2018. Rising sea levels will have a dramatic impact on many coastal regions and cities. A climatecentral video shows the fate of capital coastal cities under rising sea levels.

In particular, the average rate of sea-level rise p.a. was

  • 1.3 mm p.a. between 1901 and 1971,
  • increasing to 1.9 mm p.a. between 1971 and 2006, and
  • further increasing to 3.7 mm between 2006 and 2018.

Human influence was very likely the primary driver of these increases since at least 1971, an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. The global sea level will continue to rise over the 21st century. Relative to 1995–2014, the likely global mean sea level rise by 2100 is 0.28–0.55 m under the very low and 0.63–1.01 m under the very high emissions scenario.

Thermal expansion explained 50% of sea-level rise during 1971–2018, while ice loss from glaciers contributed 22%, ice sheets 20%, and changes in land-water storage 8%.

Sea level rise is just one of the dramatic effects of climate change due to warming. Infertile soils will lead to famine and global migration. The world will undoubtedly look significantly different in 50 years.

Superyachts – the luxury toys for the ultra-rich!

Jacob Weizman
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Superyachts – the luxury toys for the ultra-rich!

For $500M, a boat builder in the Netherlands is making a 127-meter sailing yacht with three masts for Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon. It is so tall it may require the part of a bridge in Rotterdam to be dismantled on its route to the open sea. The former Amazon CEO, who is worth over $200 billion in 2021, already owns another superyacht, the Flying Fox, for which he paid an astounding $400 million. It’s the world’s 20th largest yacht and is available for charter.

The pandemic briefly damaged the superyacht business but it has bounced back rapidly — about 1,000 yachts are on order or being built this year, according to the trade publication Boat International. “The last two years have been crazy. It has been harder to find boats than clients,” says Sybil Napolitano, owner of Peritas International, a London-based yacht charter agency.

The Financial Times reported that Credit Suisse has lent more than $1B to ultra-rich clients to buy their own yachts, called “luxury toys”, in an investor pitch. The Swiss bank has securitized a portfolio of loans linked to its wealthiest customers’ yachts and private jets and offloaded the risks associated with lending to ultra-rich oligarchs and entrepreneurs.

Ron Perelman, the cosmetics tycoon, goes in a different direction. He used to be the owner of a superyacht but sold it for €90M two years ago, along with various of his properties and works of art.

“For far too long, I have been holding on to too many things that I don’t use, or even want . . . It’s time for me to clean house, simplify, and give others the chance,” he reflected. He is sailing against the tide.

Read the story on Financial Times

So, TikTok kills Meta? The Dawning Chinese Social Media Age!

Charlene Lensburg
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So, TikTok kills Meta? The Dawning Chinese Social Media Age!

Meta Platforms saw its stock market value slump by more than $230B last week. A record daily loss for a US firm. Its shares fell 26.4% after quarterly figures disappointed investors. Meta also said that Facebook‘s daily active users (DAUs) had dropped for the first time in its 18-year history and fell to 1.929B in the three months to the end of December, compared to 1.930B in the previous quarter. The Chinese TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance Ltd, is giving Meta a hard time. Is the Chinese social media age now upon us?

According to Cloudflare, TikTok surpassed Google as the most popular website in 2021. It’s no secret that Chinese culture is very advantageous for accessing social media. WeChat has also been superior to the meta-subsidiary WhatsApp for years and has integrated a payment system, for example. In addition, there is a huge home market with more than 1.4 billion consumers. TikTok really seems to herald the dawn of the Chinese age.

Meta’s share price slide saw chief executive Mark Zuckerberg‘s net worth fall by $31bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The drop in Zuckerberg’s personal fortune was equivalent to the annual gross domestic product of Estonia.

Even after that drop, Zuckerberg has an estimated net worth of almost $90bn, which means he is still one of the richest people in the world.

Fraud Allegations Against High-Risk Payment Processor Payvision!

Charlene Lensburg
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Fraud Allegations Against High-Risk Payment Processor Payvision!

The Dutch high-risk payment processor Payvision and its former U.S. partner T1 Payments are faced with fraud allegations and damage claims in several jurisdictions. In the U.S., a former client brought a fraud complaint against the T1 Payments group and its former partner Payvision. The European Fund Recovery Initiative (EFRI) has filed a lawsuit against Payvision for its scam-facilitating activities in Austria.

Payvision laundered money for the cybercrime organizations or Gal Barak and Uwe Lenhoff

FinTelegram reports that Payvision founder and then-CEO Rudolf Booker and his team knew exactly that their clients Uwe Lenhoff and Gal Barak operated cybercrime organizations that had stolen victims’ money. Booker even spent his holidays in Austria with one of the alleged principals of a cybercrime organization, Uwe Lenhoff. Allegedly, Payvision knowingly and wilfully laundered at least €130 million for both cybercriminals. Therefore, EFRI is seeking to recover the money from Payvision on behalf of the victims. The case is considered a precedent in Europe.

In the U.S., Payvision is listed as a defendant in a fraud complaint along with its former partner T1 Payments. In July 2019, IBUUMERANG signed a Card Payment Processing Agreement with T1 Payments. In August 2020, T1 Payments suspended its account and retained more than $1.5M. Moreover, IBUUMERANG was placed on the so-called MATCH list, a public blacklist for merchants, and thus harmed. IBUUMERANG claims that T1 Payments, its people, and its partners, including Payvision, acted unlawfully and is seeking a total of $6M in damages.

On 31 August 2021, IBUUMERANG LLC filed a fraud lawsuit in the competent court in Nevada against T1 Payments LLC, its representatives, and partners, including Payvision B.V.

Read the full story on FinTelegram

About Crypto Evangelists, Anti-Vaxxers, And Great Reset Conspiracy Theories!

Jacob Weizman
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About Crypto Evangelists, Anti-Vaxxers, And Great Reset Conspiracy Theories!

In its very essence, Crypto is an anti-establishment phenomenon. Hence, it comes as no surprise that the percentage of explicit Covid-19 conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers is disproportionately high. The creation of Bitcoin itself by an unknown individual calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto is also prone to conspiracy theories. Dutch crypto analyst PlanB with the Twitter handle @100trillionUSD has earned 1.7 million followers through his S2F BTC price model and his opposition to the Covid-19 vaccination regiment.

The S2F BTC price model

In March 2019, PlanB introduced his Stock-to-Flow (S2F) BTC price model and released an update in April 2020. In essence, the S2F model adopts approaches to valuing scarce precious metals such as gold, silver, and platinum. PlanB suggests that Bitcoin is an as scarce (digital) resource as precious metals with limited availability of 21 million units. In the S2F price model, Stock is the number of the existing Bitcoins, and Flow is the ongoing creation of Bitcoins via mining.

PlanB‘s S2F model has indeed correctly predicted BTC price (with some variation) since its release. However, the forecast was wrong for the end of 2021. That’s when the BTC price should have been at $100,000, according to the S2F model. BTC ended 2021 with a price below $50,000.

The Covid-19 conspiracy thinking

PlanB has become increasingly involved in spreading Covid-19 conspiracy theories and campaigning against mandatory vaccination in recent months. He retweeted an invitation from the World Economic Forum (WEF) to the 2021 Annual Meeting, which was themed Great Reset. The WEF and its Great Reset meeting are the starting point of conspiracy theories surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic. WEF supporters include large corporations and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who is at the center of Covid19 conspiracists.

The original tweet with a facsimile of the WEF invitation to a Dutch minister came from Willem Middelkoop (@wmiddelkoop), another Dutch crypto analyst, Covid-19 vaccination skeptic, and government critics. Most recently, PlanB feared that Twitter might suspend his account because of his Covid-19 tweets.

We don’t necessarily share all the views of PlanB and his colleagues but criticism of government actions from Covid-19 lockdowns to the pandemic-related money glut is entirely appropriate. Crypto is, after all, the money of the anti-establishment movement.

Robinhood Presents Huge Losses And A Declining User Base!

Adrian Fuller
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Robinhood Presents Huge Losses And A Declining User Base!

Commission-free retail brokerage Robinhood posted a net loss of $423 million or $0.49 per share in the three months ended December. A year earlier, the company posted a net income of $7 million or $0.01 per share. Shares of Robinhood sank as much as 15% to $9.98 in extended trading following results. The share price at its IPO in July last year was $38, and its record high in August was $85.

Robinhood posted total revenue of $363 million for the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, compared to $318 million a year earlier. Analysts on average had expected revenue of $362.14 million.

Transaction-based revenue from cryptocurrencies jumped 304% to $48 million in the fourth quarter, while revenue from equity trading declined 35% to $52 million. Robinhood has yet to turn a profit following its IPO. Although revenue was a positive sign, its monthly active users declined 8% from the previous quarter to 17.3 million as retail investors pulled back from the market.

Robinhood enjoyed a strong run during the pandemic, with homebound investors using its app to trade stocks and other assets. However, the platform became a victim of the Meme Stock Revolution. Robinhood has incurred the enmity of the WallStreetBets subreddit’s 11.6 million community for banning the trading of meme stocks at the height of the meme stock revolution. This may have been a strategic mistake.

For the first quarter of this year, Robinhood expects total net revenue will be less than $340 million, which would be down 35% from a year earlier when the meme stock rally boosted trading.

Sorry, But The Meme-Stock Revolution Is Over!

Jacob Weizman
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Sorry, But The Meme-Stock Revolution Is Over!

Remember the Meme Stock Revolution in 2021? Some smart guys behind the Reddit WallStreetBets subreddit and their community (more than 11.5 million members) pushed some penny stocks and transformed them into meme stocks. It was a wild ride for the shares of GameStop (GME) and AMC. These two stocks caught fire in early 2021 as Meme Stock Revolution took off.

On January 28, 2022, they are still up from a year ago, but they’re off to a brutal start in 2022. Shares of GameStop have plunged nearly 35% in January, while AMC has plummeted more than 40%.

The retail trading platform Robinhood, which went public last year became a meme stock itself following its initial public offering, has tumbled as well. Robinhood is down more than 25% this year and is trading at an all-time low. The plunge in Robinhood might be cause for celebration for other meme investors: the so-called “apes” on Reddit who attacked Robinhood last year for briefly restricting the buying of shares of GameStop and other meme stocks.

Some experts argue that the rise of meme stocks is a good thing as it helps to democratize the market. Many of the younger investors have a short-term trading mentality. The love the risk and volatility of meme stocks and cryptocurrencies.

Neither GameStop nor AMC are expected to be profitable this year, or even next. The sell-offs in meme stocks at the start of 2022 may be a sign that investors recognize that the Meme Stock Revolution might have been just another bubble.

Read the story on CNN

Taste That! Mark Wiens On Korean Food Tour In Los Angeles

Charlene Lensburg
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Taste That! Mark Wiens On Korean Food Tour In Los Angeles

Mark Wiens, the US American with Thai roots is certainly one of the world’s most famous food bloggers. According to the motto “I travel for food”, he travels around the world with his Thai wife and son in search of new locations and food. Wiens runs the YouTube channel Migrationology with more than 8.4 million subscribers. In December 2021, he was on a food tour through Los Angeles’ Koreatown or K-Town, which is one of the biggest areas of Korean food and culture outside of Korea.

See the K-Town food tour video!

No New Models in 2022 but Cathie Wood Sticks To Tesla!

Jacob Weizman
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No New Models in 2022 but Cathie Wood Sticks To Tesla!

She still believes in Tela. According to Barron’s, Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment ETFs purchased 33,482 shares of the electric-vehicle company Tesla recently. On the day of the new investment, the Tesla (ticker: TSLA) stock closed Thursday at $829.10, down 11.6%. At that price, Wood paid an estimated $27.76 million for the shares.

The ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) purchased 27,799 shares of Tesla, according to the daily trades posted by the ARK funds, while the ARK Next Generation Internet ETF (ARKW) bought 5,683 Tesla shares. The ARK funds have been sellers of Tesla shares since around September; the share price has declined 21.5% so far in 2022.

Tesla reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings this week. Adjusted earnings came to $2.54 a share in the fourth quarter on sales of $17.7 billion. Operating profit was $2.6 billion, and free cash flow was $2.8 billion —each of the figures represent quarterly records for the company.

However, CEO Elon Musk disappointed investors when he said Tesla wouldn’t be working on new models in 2022 but instead will focus on producing more of the company’s existing models this year.

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