US Banks
Shares of Goldman Sachs and Bank of America shot up in trading yesterday as both banks reported rises in revenues.
This followed reports of strong revenues from Citi on Monday and positive noises about the health of the US economy from JP Morgan.
Generally speaking, asset quality and lending margins have been strong and even loan growth has been OK. The only real area of weakness was in bond trading revenues and Goldman said it would be cutting costs in this area while others probably won’t as Goldman had been hit harder than others over the last few years.
A chunky valuation for Niantic
The second thing I wanted to talk about was the rather chunky valuation for Pokemon Go creator Niantic.
It managed to rake in an impressive $245m in its latest funding round implying a company valuation of $4bn and is creating a lot of excitement around the launch this year of a new Harry Potter augmented reality game.
The extra money will be going towards AR research, machine learning and building its “real world platform” which powers its own games but will subsequently be released for other developers to use.
I think that this is a great idea as it is notoriously difficult for games makers to continually come up with blockbusters and a platform sounds like it would be decent future revenue generator.
