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Good morning.
Are we in a tech stock market bubble? I’m amazed to be asking that question, given we are still in the grips of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression. But tech stocks have risen so far and fast in the past year, despite a brief recession-related dip, that parallels to the 2000s are hard to escape. The top dozen tech stocks have risen 170% on average in the past year, versus 146% in the year before the 2000 crash. And the top ten tech stocks comprise an outsized 29% of the S&P 500 today, compared to an outsized 23% in 2000.
But Fortune’s Shawn Tully says there is one key difference in today’s market compared to the dot-com bubble. And I’m not going to tell you what it is. Instead, you can read Shawn’s story here. (And maybe this will be the moment when you finally subscribe to Fortune, so you can always have access to such valuable content!)
Of course, one thing driving today’s tech stock performance is the massive move to digital driven by the pandemic. Hardly a day passes when I don’t hear another mind-blowing story about this quantum shift. Yesterday’s came from Hanzade Dogan-Boyner, who is founder and chairperson of the Turkish ecommerce platform Hepsiburada. “In mid-March, we suddenly saw a level of growth that we thought we would reach in three years,” she told me. “We have tripled, and it is here to stay. We have reached a new plateau. Today, we are doing as much business as we did in May.”
Dogan-Boyner said the company realized during the pandemic that “we had become more than an ecommerce platform. We had become a lifeline.” And it implemented some unusual policies for its users, such as “removing our commissions from all of our fashion merchants” because their business had been hurt the most.
Hear that, Amazon?
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
TikTok Global
TikTok Global, the new company that would arise from the White House's prising of the hit video app from China's hands, would reportedly hold a U.S. IPO next year (if it materializes in the first place.) Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, TikTok owner ByteDance and its soon-to-be-partner Oracle have apparently come up with a revised deal they can all agree on—with new ingredients addressing the national security concerns that sparked this saga—but it all still needs the sign-offs of President Trump and Beijing, so let's see. Fortune
SoftBank divestiture
SoftBank continues to sell off its assets. This time it's Brightstar Corp, the loss-making American wireless-services unit, which is being sold to a private equity firm called… Brightstar Capital Partners, which was founded by former Brightstar COO Andrew Weinberg. Wall Street Journal
Brexit optimism
You'd think the U.K. and EU's post-Brexit-trade talks would have broken down completely by now, what with the U.K. being set to pass a law that potentially overrides the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement signed just months ago. But no, the U.K. says this week's round of informal talks were "useful" and yielded "some limited progress," and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says she's "convinced" a deal can be struck, despite the U.K.'s "very unpleasant surprise." Bloomberg
Irish border
It's not just the Democrats (Nancy Pelosi, then Joe Biden) who are warning the U.K. not to mess with Irish peace by doing anything that could impose a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (see above). Now Trump's White House is getting in on that act, with special envoy Mick Mulvaney warning against a "hard border by accident". Mulvaney, whose job is to keep an eye on the peace process (the U.S. is its guarantor): "The Trump Administration, State Department and the U.S. Congress would all be aligned in the desire to see the Good Friday Agreement preserved to see the lack of a border maintained." Financial Times
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Orange dot
Hey iPhone users—if you've started seeing a little orange dot appearing in the top right corner of the screen, that's a new feature that lets you know when an app is accessing the camera or microphone. Apple added it to counter "spyware" or "stalkerware" apps that, well, those terms say it all really. Fortune
Equal pay
A widespread embrace of stakeholder capitalism would "unleash sustainable economic growth for customers, employees, partners, communities, and society at large," writes Pipeline CEO Katica Roy in a piece for Fortune. And she argues that this embrace should include: the publication of companies' diversity data; the addition of pay data to the already-required reporting on gender and race across job classifications; and the addition of a new category of metrics covering things like rates of promotion and representation on each step of the corporate latter. Fortune
Changing NDAs
Non-disclosure agreements "bear some responsibility for some of the worst cover-ups of our time," Lioness CEO Arielle Steinhorn and employment lawyer Vincent White argue in a piece for Fortune. They write that NDAs have their place, particularly where trade secrets are concerned, but a shift to a more targeted approach is in order. Fortune
Biological age
A new iPhone app called Young.ai claims to determine users' biological age by feeding everything from photographs to fitness-tracker data through its algorithms. It's the latest example of buzz around so-called "longevity tech." Fortune
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.
