6A – Identifying Opportunities in Economic & Regulatory Trends

Economic changes: AMD Stock down/ potential Intel buyout/ AMD lawsuit
Apple falling sales due to the iPhone X series failure
Regulatory changes: Discord/Whatsapp substitute (telegram)
Epic Games/Discord/ Steam
https://www.zacks.com/stock/news/347304/advanced-micro-devices-amd-stock-moves-02-what-you-should-knowhttps://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/22/judge_green_lights_amd_core_lawsuit/


AMD has always been a dwindling company compared to their competitor Intel. In recent years AMD has made a bit of a comeback as their Ryzen processors have proven themselves as well as their graphics cards but with recent rumors began with the rumors of Intel purchasing AMD. Even though many economists denied such allegations as such a purchase would allow Intel to have a monopoly on the CPU industry (which would be illegal). Since these rumors started to spread AMD market shares went on the rise as the year to year growth is averaging 12.5% growth. But after the latest trading session (as of 1/14/19) AMD is down .2% from the prior and now I fear AMD stocks will go down farther as now AMD is facing US class-action lawsuit over their advertisement. According to their advertisement, the AMD’s “eight-core” processors may not be the eight-cores many consumers were expecting as their eight-core processors contain four Bulldozer modules. Meaning that these “sub-processors” contain a pair of instruction-executing CPU cores, so these four modules have 2 cores in the module. The problem is that because of the structure of the modules leads to shared resources cause bottlenecking of the processor. The lawsuit started back in 2015 but now the agreement has shifted to the definition of what constitutes a core. Now AMD is at a crossroads as they can lose the case but can label their cores however they want or they can let a jury of 12 to decide. Regardless of the verdict of the case, regardless of their recent, market shares, it seems AMD isn’t satisfying the market and there may be opening in the market. Right now there only two big companies in the CPU and GPU, but with Intel and AMD underperforming, I can see potential in investing in my own company. Such an opportunity would be very difficult to seize such an opportunity because it would require years building customer relations while also inventing new CPU and GPU technology.
What helped me realize this opportunity was because I have been needing to build a new PC for a while and February is the time to buy based the current stock trends.











https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/282997-apple-may-have-a-major-iphone-sales-problemhttps://boingboing.net/2018/12/28/new-ipad-pros-are-coming-out-o.htmlhttps://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-macbook-pro-owners-cry-foul-6-problem-costs-600-to-fix/


The next opportunity would be creating a service where people can access other phones on the market that normally don’t sell in the US. This idea stemmed from the recent news of Apple products failing to live up to consumer expectations as apple stocks have fallen significantly with reports that this year’s revenue to be less than it was last year. This problem arose from the poor sales of all the iPhone x series phone with even the “budget” iPhone Xr failing to meet sale goals. This also compounded with news of latest Ipad shipping defective with the Ipad suffering with poor durability. All these problems seem to be slowly killing Apple as people are beginning to realize that the price to functionality is no longer correlating. Even though the idea of opening up my own phone manufacturer is an option but it is very difficult to start up but a rather more reasonable option is to act as a shipping service to ship many Chinese exclusive phones to the US. The benefits of many of the Chinese phones are that they usually have the quality of many 500$+ phones for the price of 300$ USD. This still would be a challenge to set up as we would need to contact many manufacturers and find out why they don’t want to ship to the US. The reason I was able to see this opportunity because for years I have worked at the various phone store and first hand noticed the downfall of Apple products as well as seen customer interest of other devices that rarely come to the US. This began when a customer asked if we carried Huawei phones which bewildered me because I had never heard of that brand which leads me to do my research which surprised me as there are hundreds of various other brands that are over 10x the quality, but significantly better price.


























https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_(software)https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/741dz9/is_discord_end_to_end_encrypted/



Next opportunity I uncovered was the recent need for encrypted messaging services as Telegram failed as a whats app replacement and discord as a messaging application failed to have encrypted messages making the platform rather insecure. The main problem with the age of the internet is that data security is more valuable than ever as information collection is becoming more common as Alexa and other google assistants have been notorious in collecting user data and uploading them to their servers. The opportunity I see is a market for an encrypted service such as mumble to allow users to message other users without fear of their information getting leaked. The marketplace for this product would be anyone who uses WhatsApp but wants a more secure network in messaging family and friends as well as a way to make calls. The importance of encryption varies for many people even though many people don’t need it during their everyday use( unless they are doing something illegal), but many would prefer that their data wasn't been sent to advertisers or worst yet had the potential of being leaked. The reason I came across such an idea is in light of my recent disdain for discord as a program and the idea that it has no protection for user messages makes matters worse yet it seems discord is only getting more popular and many encrypted/secure messaging are going under.






















http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/what-fortnite-means-for-the-epic-games-store.htmlhttps://www.tweaktown.com/news/64603/devs-steam-30-cuts/index.htmlhttps://www.thisisinsider.com/epic-games-vs-steam-discord-microsoft-xbox-game-pass-2018-12



The final opportunity that I uncovered was the regulatory change is the sudden shift for many platforms into becoming a video game launcher/store. This trend was witnessed with platforms such as epic games and discord making the switch to being a video game retailer which is making the market oversaturated with launchers and resources to purchase games it is hurting the industry as a whole. The reason why this is becoming a problem is the annoyance of having to open a separate software in order to open another game then having to open another to play a different game. This compounded with the idea that most launchers have an online verification system that runs in the background of your computer and if your computer doesn’t have enough RAM ( unless you download more :) ) you are going to run into issues playing your favorite game. Now there are currently three main video game launchers and more on the horizon yet the solution I have in mind seems rather counterproductive as I want to create another “universal “ launcher that makes it easier to access all your games in one place. Even though this may compound the situation, even more, if I am able to get in contact and set up deals with both companies this could overly beneficial to all parties. I came across this idea when news broke that epic games not only opened their own market but wanted to give developers a larger cut and “customer protection”.