Fintech Focus For February 9, 2021

Quote To Start The Day: If you can change your mind, you can change your life.

Source: William James

One Big Thing In Fintech: Tesla has disclosed in an SEC filing published Monday that it has bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin.

"In January 2021, we updated our investment policy to provide us with more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on our cash that is not required to maintain adequate operating liquidity," reads the filing. "Thereafter, we invested an aggregate $1.50 billion in bitcoin under this policy and may acquire and hold digital assets from time to time or long-term."

Source: The Block

Other Key Fintech Developments:

• How JPM won in active management.
• Meet in4m, an AI for retail investors.
• Coinsure launching Quick Trade app.
• BNY taps Google Cloud for forecast.
• Northern Trust allies with IHS Markit.
• ETFs Capital has acquired ETF.com.
• Blair launches $100M facility for ISAs.
• Enfusion adds data, productivity tools.
• Ether futures are now listed at CME.
• Big banks and tech face off over fees.
• HKEX invests in China’s Guangzhou.
• TradeStation supporting Ether future.
• NCR acquires Terafin to expand tech.
• Bitwise files prospectus with the SEC.
• 7 Chord, IHS launching a partnership.

Watch Out For This: Thousands of Chinese users suddenly found themselves unable to access Clubhouse on early Monday evening as the country prepared to start the week-long Lunar New Year holiday. Inside WeChat groups, Clubhouse users rushed to report the situation and help each other with ways to get back onto the red hot live audio app.

Source: TechCrunch

Interesting Reads:

• Twitter confirmed 2021 experiments.
• Buttigieg dodges questions on relief.
• US top doctor says vaccination key.
• Bill brings challenge to Section 230.
• Facebook cracks down on anti-vax.
• Costs of poor customer data quality.
• Biden plans to lift 900K from poverty.
• Miami mayor on Musk’s tunnel pitch.
• Cities tap infrastructure for the divide.
• DoorDash acquires robotics startup.
• Bill Gates invests in private jet travel.
• China sent world a chilling message.

Market Moving Headline: In recent weeks, a group of retail traders affiliated with the Reddit social media site appear to have “short squeezed” hedge funds that had heavily shorted a number of stocks listed in the US cash equities markets.

There were extraordinary price increases and volatility for these stocks before the prices for some fell sharply in recent days. These prominent events and related market volatility have opened the prospect that regulatory and congressional authorities may propose changes to the US financial market infrastructure.

The likelihood, nature and extent of any such changes is highly uncertain, but we describe below some possible proposals and their implications for the creditworthiness of the retail brokers, central counterparty clearing houses (CCPs), market makers and exchanges that form the core of the market infrastructure.

• Increased regulation of retail brokers to help ensure they have sufficient capital, liquidity and operational strength to satisfy clients’ market access needs.
• Expedited efforts to reduce the two-day cash equity clearing and settlement cycle.
• A ban or limits on the practice of electronic market makers paying retail brokers to direct order flow to them and away from lit exchanges.
• A requirement that retail brokers enhance their systems’ robustness to handle periods of higher transactional volumes.
• Scrutiny of CCPs’ practices in calculating members’ margin requirements.

Source: Moody's