Canada's growth advantage disappears
BMO chief economist Doug Porter noticed that Canada's economic growth advantage over the U.S. is now gone,
'There were lots of moving parts in Canada's monthly GDP report, and thus a little bit for everyone. For the pessimists, there was confirmation that the Canadian economy pulled back for the second month in a row in May (with 0.1-per-cent dips). For the optimists, there was the fact that the economy is estimated to have started growing again in June (up 0.1 per cent), and the fact that output was roughly unchanged in Q2—a much less dire outcome than many expected at the start of the quarter. For the realists, there is the fact that Canada's underlying growth rate has retreated to back below 1.5 per cent year-over-year. That's after a brief, albeit glorious, spell when Canadian growth had managed to outpace the U.S. over a four-quarter period (to 2025 Q1), even poking up to 2.3 per cent year-over-year at that time. Given that 1.5 per cent is the neighbourhood that the BoC pegs potential growth, recent trends confirm that slack is opening up.
'BMO: 'Canada's Growth Outperformance: Gone, gone, gone'' – Bluesky
***
Public cloud computing is expanding at a tremendous clip and Scotiabank analyst Patrick Colville offered top picks to benefit from the trend,
'Public cloud results in 2Q25 were strong, with all three hyperscalers beating consensus and reaccelerating sequentially. It's very clear that AI is driving this reacceleration, but qualitative commentary on traditional public cloud was also quite upbeat this quarter. As a result, we see the read through as positive to our consumption software names - Datadog, Snowflake, MongoDB, and Elastic. In our coverage we rate DDOG as our 'Top Offensive Pick', and we have MDB as our 'Be Cautious Call' … We estimate aggregate public cloud revenue growth in 2Q 2025 of 27 per cent accelerated an incredible 295 bps from 1Q. This is highly impressive given these businesses' massive scale and what we would classify as a slightly choppy macro backdrop for IT budgets based on our CIO work. Microsoft posted a jaw dropping quarter, where Azure revenue growth accelerated to 39 per cent due to strength in both AI and traditional workloads. Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services growth also accelerated nicely'
***
Futurism reports that someone gave Chat GPT $100 to invest and it generated a 25-per-cent return in a month,
'In a post on r/Dataisbeautiful, the Redditor in question — real name Nathan Smith — described his project as a '6-month experiment to see how a language model performs in picking small, [under-covered] stocks with only a $100 budget.' According to a chart shared on Reddit, this literal gamble is already paying off. Using GPT-4o, one of OpenAI's most advanced models, the bot-trader's stock portfolio has increased in value by 25 percent over its first month — though given that Smith only invested $100, that means he's only made $25 so far. What's more, that rise was significantly higher than two 'small-cap' stock indexes, the Russell 2000 and XBI — in fact, the S&P 500 is up less than 3 percent over the past month — which suggests that ChatGPT very much picked correctly … To be fair, this is far from the first time someone's attempted such a gambit. Last December, researchers from Germany's Duisburg–Essen University published a paper in the journal Finance Research Letters finding that advanced OpenAI models did indeed seem to select money-making stocks. In an interview with Morningstar in June, meanwhile, University of Florida assistant finance professor Alejandro Lopez-Lira said that over years of simulating stock selection, ChatGPT wasn't all that great'
Money compounded at 25 per cent per month grows FAST.
'Someone Gave ChatGPT $100 and Let It Trade Stocks for a Month' – Futurism
***
Bluesky post of the day:
Diversion: 'Is Your Diet Making You Depressed? A New Study Raises Concerns' – SciTechDaily
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