Hi guys,
I’ve been studying for step1 since April using Amboss. Unfortunately, they just downgraded the iOS subscription to their lame basic membership, so I won’t be using it anymore.
UWorld pricing seems also crazy for the short term subscriptions (1 or 3 months), so I am not sure what to do honestly. Some friends suggested to purchase the 6 month subscription while some other friends think I should just move to NBMEs at this point.
I was getting about high 50s low 60s in Amboss, including their 5 hammer questions (which were pretty insane). I have done 970 Step1 Amboss questions (~35% of 2700q) and about 1500 Usmle Rx Step1 questions. I still did not schedule my exam as I was hoping to do so when I consistently got 70+. Should I move on to NBMEs and free 120 or UWorld?

Is it possible for the information used to sign up for the Summer ‘24 free membership be deleted? I no longer want it and was wondering if me & my parents info could be deleted.

Hey everyone,
I've recently gotten into tennis and I'm really enjoying it! I'm on the lookout for any free tennis clubs or groups where I can meet other players and improve my game. Do you know of any clubs in the area that offer free membership or have low-cost options? Any suggestions or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Join our Rust & Runescape Private Servers - 1000+ Players in our Discord - Lookup SnowRSPS on Google - Custom RSPS & Rust PC/Console Community Servers - Open 24/7 - Daily Holiday Events - Best Oldschool RSPS in 2024 - Free Starter Kit

Happy Tuesday, Barkada --

The PSE gained 92 points to 6604 ▲1.4%

Shout-out to Atot for saving the Inside the Boardroom special [MB link] for their "lunch read" (at least it's not a porcelain chair?), to Trina Cerdenia for retweeting the ITB episode with highlights, to Tenkan Sen for noting the bloodbath that has been the recent (and even not-so-recent) IPO market, to Just'n for recognizing that in most cases a secondary IPO is for exit liquidity, to Enrico P. Villanueva for mentioning the ITB article as a jumping-off point for further research and analysis, to Jonathan Burac for providing interesting background on auditors and former-auditors as Independent Directors, to kalel.RON for having their mind blown by my reveal that I'm not Matteo Guidicelli (deep cut for the OGs), to Tirador for the straight-forward review ("pangit an ipo yan"), and to arkitrader for the Monday vibes GIF.
Thanks also to the many readers who wrote in privately with praise, follow-up questions, and comments about yesterday's Inside the Boardroom special episode with OceanaGold PH's President, Joan Adaci-Cattiling. I won't list your names because you didn't choose to make your comments public, but I appreciate all of the notes that I've received and it's encouraging to see the interesting in the ITB series. Thank you!
Just for background, the Inside the Boardroom series takes a lot of extra work to organize, conduct the interview, and write the content for each episode. MB does not receive anything in return for an Inside the Boardroom interview; I only ask for direct access to the c-suite executive and the understanding that all questions that I ask will be direct (not trying to avoid unfavorable parts), to-the-point (not flowery), and without honorifics or deference (no titles or fawning).
I have a great amount of respect for companies and executives that agree to those terms, as there are many companies here that would never in a million years allow their executives to speak publicly, let alone on topics that are not 100% positive and dripping with marketing talking points.
OK, enough of that, let's get to the new stuff!

▌In today's MB:

• COMING UP: This week
  • PH: OGP 1st week
  • PH: BSP rate decision
  • PH: UBP SRO start
  • INT'L: US April inflation
• OceanaGold falls 6% in 1st day of trading
• CREIT, MREIT, and FILRT declare Q1 divs
• FMETF halted due to broken price tracker

▌Daily meme Subscribe (it's free) Today's email

▌Main stories covered:

• [COMING_UP] The week ahead... PH: While we had the OceanaGold PH [OGP 12.50 ▼6.2%; 100% avgVol] IPO yesterday, the biggest waves will be made on Thursday when the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) meets to evaluate our interest rate situation. The Union Bank [UBP 34.60 ▼6.0%; 83% avgVol] stock rights offer period will also start on Thursday. International: The only datapoint that I’m following for this week is the US April inflation report, which we should get early Thursday morning.
  
  • MB: The inflation metagame is where my mind’s at these days, and that’s all about inflation expectations. Not so much where inflation “is”, but where people (and companies) think inflation “will be” in the future. Inflation expectations matter because they can cause dramatic changes. For individuals, expectations of higher inflation can lead to changes in purchasing behavior and higher wage demands. For corporations, expectations of higher inflation can cause companies to increase their prices. I think you can see why the US Federal Reserve and the BSP are most afraid of these expectations; they’re something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There should be a lot of analysis to consume on this point after the US CPI report is out on Thursday morning.
• [UPDATE] OceanaGold falls 6% in first day of trading... OceanaGold PH [OGP 12.50 ▼6.2%; 100% avgVol] [link] dropped a little over 6% in its first day of trading, falling ₱0.82 from its ₱13.33/share IPO price to close at ₱12.50/share. The highest the stock traded was ₱13.34 in the first 20 minutes of trading before consistent selling pressure pushed OGP price to an intra-day low of ₱12.46 around 1:30 PM. The stock mounted a significant recovery to around ₱12.90/share before a massive amount of late-day selling pushed it back down to the ₱12.50 level at the close.
  
  • MB: Since this is the first IPO of the year, the questions in my inbox tell me that we need to quickly cover a few points before we move forward. First, yes, OGP does have a stabilization fund, but it’s important to remember that a stabilization fund isn’t supposed to entirely prevent a stock’s price from falling. A stab fund is best thought of as a discretionary pool of money that a paid agent (in this case, BDO Capital) can use to buy shares on the open market to provide some artificial demand for the stock. It has a limited amount of money (usually around 10% of the value of the total IPO) and a limited amount of time (30 days), and once either of those is gone, so is the fund. The other thing to remember about stab funds is that it’s entirely up to the agent to deploy the limited resources of the fund. They might be hands-off for days before suddenly smashing the market with a swarm of buy orders to soak up the selling pressure, or they might constantly drip artificial buy orders into the market. Or they might employ a chaotic mixture of those strategies. Stability funds are a little bit of short-term downside protection and a handy pool of exit liquidity, but they shouldn’t be seen as IPO Investing insurance or a protection against loss! Be careful out there!
• [DIVS] CREIT, MREIT, and FILRT all declare Q1 dividends... Citicore Energy REIT [CREIT 2.83 ▲0.3%; 345% avgVol] [link] and MREIT [MREIT 12.96 ▲0.1%; 96% avgVol] [link] declared their Q1 dividends on Monday, while Filinvest REIT [FILRT 2.93 ▼2.0%; 47% avgVol] [link] declared its Q1 dividend on Friday. For CREIT, the dividend will be ₱0.049/share (stable), payable on July 9, representing 101% of CREIT’s Q1 distributable income (DI). For MREIT, the dividend will be ₱0.246 (stable), payable on June 14, representing 93% of MREIT’s DI. For FILRT, the dividend will be ₱0.062/share (falling), payable on June 7, representing 99.9% of FILRT’s DI for the quarter.
  
  • MB: The name of the REIT game is stability. While REITs cannot help what happens in the macroeconomic world with interest rates (all REITs got smacked when rates rose to fight inflation), what separates a good REIT from a bad one (in my opinion) is the management team’s ability to effectively worry about everything else to protect the income stream from loss. Bonus points should be awarded to teams who grow their dividend over time. Between these three companies, both CREIT and MREIT have shown the ability to deliver a stable dividend. CREIT has even managed to grow its dividend 11%. That leaves FILRT, which has continued to deliver giant turd after giant turd to its bagholders in the form of smaller and smaller dividends. FIRLT’s first three quarterly divs were at the ₱0.112/share level, and their most recent div was just ₱0.062. That’s a 44.6% drop. I don’t have a thesaurus within reach capable of accurately describing to you just how bad that is for a REIT. It’s not like the company suffered some major trauma that nearly halved the dividend; the div level has fallen four times over the past twelve quarters and in each of the last three.
• [NEWS] FMEFT halted due to broken price tracker... FMETF [FMETF 105.20 ▲0.9%; 5% avgVol] [link], the PSE’s only exchange-traded fund, was halted by the PSE at 1 PM yesterday after it was discovered that its iNav had failed to update since 11:30 AM. FMETF said that it would “coordinate” with its “service provider” to implement a fix, but as of this writing, FMETF has not advised that a fix has been implemented nor has the PSE lifted the halt.
  
  • MB: This problem happened six times last year, and while it’s great that we made it into May before we had our first FMETF outage of this year, it’s still discouraging to see “iNav not calculating” as a problem that we need to contend with in 2024. For those who are unfamiliar, FMETF is an exchange-traded fund, so FMEFT’s per-share price is derivative of the per-share prices of all the shares that FMETF owns/represents. The “iNav” that keeps breaking is the number that represents the current value of FMETF’s holdings, expressed as a “NAV per unit” or “NAV per share”. So, if the iNav isn’t updating, then traders are not getting the kind of information they need to place FMETF stock trades. “We need more ETFs” is something that I’ve heard traders say for years now, and while I still count myself as part of that group, I wish we could see some forward progress in the maintenance of FMETF before we introduce anything more exotic to the market.

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⁠⁠⁠Age: 32
Description: 5'5" I have a beard I intend to keep.
No rush on your end but I will send photo immediately.
⁠⁠⁠Age Range that you would want/require in a prospect: 26 to 39ish
Location: Northern Virginia. Looking for someone from NOVA as well.
Ethnicity: Parents from Cambodia but I am open to all ethnicities.
Status: Never married but open to single, divorced, single moms, etc. NOT open to polygny.
Timeline: 6 months - 1 year
Five important characteristics you look for in a prospect: Compassionate. Nurturing. Playful. Practicing. Health conscious.
Religiosity: Pray daily prayers. Follow the 5 pillars. Trying to be better with knowledge of the history/teachings
Level of education, and what are you looking for? I have a bachelors but it's not required. Education is good though and doesnt ever hurt.
⁠⁠⁠Current Job Status: Full time and from home.
Children: I want children and only interested in women that want or already have children.
Hobbies, or things you like to do in your free time: Basketball. Hiking. Sports. Video games. Hope to become a reader.
Add something short and interesting about you that makes you stand out!
I'm not very fancy but I do have a Premium Costco and Premium Barnes and Noble membership.
I'm allergic but still want a cat as a pet. Inshallah there is a Russian Blue in my future.

A month or so ago I busted my phone, and it was a huge pain in the ass. Aside from some lost data which was minor, the biggest PIA was resetting MFA, getting in touch with my US banks, and any other services that were tied to my phone. The experience also made me take a step back and realize I am pretty lax with security, and if someone had gotten hold of my phone and somehow god-forbid gotten the passcode, then I'd be fucked. They could do so much damage with unlimited access to my email + MFA SMS, even in just a few hours.
As a result, I kind of went down the ADHD rabbit hole hyper-fixating on how best to "optimize" my iPhone and iCloud configuration for two things:

1. If it breaks, the transition to a new device will be relatively painless. I won't have to spend several days stressing and trying to find the right international customer support number for a myriad of institutions and services to get into my accounts.
   
2. If it gets stolen and compromised, then there will be enough barriers such that the I'll have enough time to lock down the device and/or my accounts remotely before the thief can get key data or move funds.
   

So I put together this guide and checklist that I thought I'd share with others. I am a programmer but by no means a security guru, and so if any IT, DevOps, or SecOps folks want to chime-in with suggestions or improvements, please do.

Requirements

• an iPhone XR, iPhone XS, iPhone 11, iPhone 12, iPhone 13, iPhone SE (2nd generation), and iPhone 14 or newer for eSIM compatibility.
• a US-based carrier with eSIM support + a pay-as-you-go model for international travel (I use Verizon)
• iOS 17 or above (may not be strictly necessary, but I know my setup works with iOS 17.4.1)
• a password manager. I personally use 1Password because it works, is reliable, has cross-device support, and is easy and intuitive. It's also only $3/month.

Dual Sim Setup

I have been rocking an iPhone 12 for the past few years, and it's served me very well. I know the newer iPhones (14 and up) no longer offer physical SIM card support, but carriers in most developing countries are behind the curve. Even if they offer eSIM support, it's been my experience that it's a major headache to get setup, there is a lack of customer support in English, and they may even require a local ID to register the eSIM. It's way easier to just head to a shop and pay $5 for a SIM card, load some funds onto it, and then you're good to go.
The eSIM has been very helpful for maintaining a US phone number for which I can receive SMS texts from my banks and other financial services as well as continue to use iMessage with all my US contacts since hardly anybody is on Whatsapp.
Most, if not all, carriers in the US support eSIMs now, and so you should try to find a carrier that offers an international pay-as-you-go plan. Verizon offers two international plans - one is a "Travel Pass" where it's a flat fee of $10/day anywhere outside the US or Canada (even for just one text message). The other is "pay for what you use" which has a rate per text, minute, and mb. For my US plan, I only care about receiving SMS texts from my banks and the occasional phone call to a service that doesn't have an international, toll-free number. Data will always be cheaper outside the US, so I disable cellular data switching for my US line.
The last time I was in the US was for the holidays and I bought 2 used iPhone 12's for about $200 each. They have some scuffs, but they're perfectly serviceable. In LATAM, it also doesn't attract nearly as much unwanted attention in the street as an iPhone 14 or 15.
I brought these with me as extra devices. When my phone busted last month, thankfully I had a backup in iCloud and everything was loaded in a few minutes as normal. This was before I was using the eSIM, but if I had the eSIM I could just go to Verizon support online via chat and they could help me switch the line to the new device easily.

Basic Configurations

• Always use the latest version of firmware
• Require a passcode that's unique to that device.
• Use FaceID instead of passcode when possible (a thief can't snipe your passcode from a distance if you unlock your phone with FaceID)
• Set auto-lock to 30 seconds (lowest possible)
• Erase data upon excessive passcode failures note, this is complemented in a later step with daily backups. The odds of you putting in the wrong passcode 10 times is low, but in the event you do and you wipe the device by accident, you should be able to easily load in a back-up from the previous day)
• Turn off "Ask to Join Networks"
• Forget unused networks so that you don't rejoin automatically (airports, hotels, etc.)

Creating Backups

• Set iCloud backups to run automatically every night. This will allow you to load your entire phone as is (contacts, call history, iMessages, apps, even your wallpaper) onto another device during setup. The iCloud backup usually runs at 2am while I'm sleeping.
• You may need to pay for a higher tier in iCloud if you have too much stored on your phone. It's $3/month for 200gb of iCloud storage, and I find it worth it. Though I know some people with tens of thousands of photos for which 200gb might not be enough.

Password Policy

• For any accounts that may contain sensitive data (payments, PII, etc), always generate a unique password with 1Password. Don't reuse passwords. Same goes for PIN codes.
• For core accounts, create a strong but memorable password and then memorize it. The odds of getting locked out of 1Password are low if you're diligent, but for 2 or 3 core accounts (where you access money, your primary recovery email, your iCloud, 1Password), it's worth it to create strong, unique passwords for each core service and memorize them.
• I try not to reuse passwords in general, but I still sometimes am lazy and use one of my handful of typical passwords if there's no sensitive data collected by the service and it's a service I don't use often.

MFA

Set up MFA with everything. Add multiple options if possible. My preferred MFA options are as follows:

1. One-time code that renews every 30 seconds. This is device agnostic and can be stored in 1Password. You could also use Microsoft Authenticator, Google Authenticator, Authy or similar, but there's just more overhead to now recover those accounts if your device becomes inaccessible.
2. One-time code to recovery email.
3. One-time code via SMS to my US phone number. On the pay-as-you-go Verizon plan, I only pay 5 cents per text message received. It's worth it to keep one consistent number.
4. List of recovery codes (stored in 1Password as an attached txt file for the given account)
5. Use another app for verification (Google does this a lot).

Lockdown your iCloud security

• Enable MFA.
• Create a strong, unique password.
• Remove any old or unused devices from the iCloud account (old phones, ipods, etc).
• Enable "Find My" for all of your devices.
• In Find My, configure all devices to send the last known location.
• In Find My, enable the configuration to remotely wipe a device.

In the event your phone is stolen, the idea is you could run back to any of your devices or even use a friend's device to log into iCloud on the web, go to Find My, and then in a single button click you can lock and wipe the stolen device. If the thief turned off the device or disabled wifi/cellular, then as soon as it comes back online it will be wiped.

Final Clean-Up

• Move any compromising photos to the "hidden" folder (which requires FaceID or passcode to unlock)
• Review the Files app for any documents containing sensitive info. If you need these documents to be accessible on mobile, then move them to 1Password and delete them from the Files app.
• Create a shortcut to trigger the lock screen (and thus require FaceID or passcode) when specific apps are opened (banking, email, photos, etc).
• Not sure if this is best practice, but I just keep everything in 1P and turn off apple keychain and the apple built-in password manager. I also don't save passwords in Chrome or Safari.

Extra tips

These aren't really iPhone tips but general tips. They are probably obvious to you if you aren't as scatterbrained as me, but I figured that I'd drop them here in case they help someone.

• Add thorough security measures to iCloud, primary email, and any banking or financial services. Review each account and make sure you have a strong, unique password as well as a unique PIN, MFA configured, login alerts, recovery codes, and an international, 24-hour toll-free phone number stored somewhere to contact the service in the event of a crisis. For banking services, add withdrawal limits, regional restrictions (if you bounce between the same few countries), and SMS notifications for charges over a certain threshold. Open up a second checking account with a separate debit card for trips to the ATM.
• Consolidate and close any unused bank accounts. I realized that on my phone I had Revolut, Venmo, Paypal, Nequi, plus 4 US banking institutions. I took this time to close my Discover account (which is pretty much useless outside the US anyway), close my Revolut account since I'm hardly ever in the UK/EU, and consolidate investment accounts from different institutions into just a handful that's easier to monitor.

Welcome to Everybody Plays Anything, the place for all Fire Emblem fans to post their playthroughs of their favorite non-FE games (or FE games, I don't care)! Feel free to start up any game your heart so desires!
Current ongoing playthroughs:
PuritanPuree - Oldschool Runescape, Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail
noirpoet - Skyrim, Genshin Impact (begrudgingly)
Packasus - Xenoblade Chronicles 2 3
Beddict - Final Fantasy XIV & IX, Genshin Impact
lerdnir - FFXIV
Gravity_Queen - Elden Ring
IcerDragon5 - Fire Emblem: The Sacred Echoes
Hopefully lots of you will join in on the fun! Enjoy everybody's playthroughs!
Yesterday's Update

launching a new digital downloads site and my head is spinning a bit going through all of the options.
i'll be selling image files, but i want to offer a $50/year subscription that, while active, allows unlimited downloads for free.
the main wordpress options here look like:

• EasyDigitalDownloads with their all access pass extension
• Woocommerce + Yith Memberships + a paid subscriptions addon

i briefly looked at shopify too but it seems the above functionality would be a lot harder to hack together.
yith seems like exactly what i want here - once a member and logged in, can hide all of the pricing and just display a 'download' button in the shop instead of 'add to cart'.
i'd rather not fork over $300+ / year for yith + a subscriptions plugin off the bat if i can avoid it, but will do so if that's the only way.
am i missing anything here or are those my options? doesn't seem like surecart can handle that and all of the other content locker plugins don't really seem geared towards allowing free access to assets after becoming a member.

Hi - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Each week I post a summary recap of the week's top stories, which I cover in depth with sources in the full edition. Let's dive in...
___
STAT OF THE WEEK: Kohl's sales have shrunk by $2.3B since 2019. During that same period of time, the company lost 1.3M customers who no longer shop with the retailer.
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BigCommerce is exploring a sale after attracting takeover interest, according to sources who chose to remain anonymous due to the confidentiality of the information. The sources said that BigCommerce asked investment bank Qatalyst Partners to solicit interest from potential buyers that include private equity firms, but that the discussions are at an early stage and no deal is certain.
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Squarespace announced that it will be going private in a $6.9B all-cash deal with private-equity firm Permira, who agreed to pay $44 per share (a roughly 30% premium). Although Squarespace never lost 90% of its share price like BigCommerce, it has experienced a tumultuous time on the market since its IPO in May 2021 — opening around $49.50 and at times trading in the low $20s. Shares rose nearly 13% to $43 in pre-market trading upon release of the news.
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ByteDance filed a lawsuit in US federal court seeking to block the new law that would force the sale or ban of the app within the country. The lawsuit challenges the law on constitutional grounds, also citing commercial, technical, and legal hurdles, as well as opposition from Beijing. Legal experts say the legal battle will play out in the courts in coming months and likely will reach the Supreme Court.
___
OpenAI unveiled its newest model, GPT-4o, designed to turn ChatGPT into a digital personal assistant that can engage in real-time, spoken conversations and interact with users using text, screenshots, photos, documents, and charts. The new version of ChatGPT also has memory capabilities, which means it can learn from previous conversations. It will be available to both unpaid and premium customers alike. OpenAI also announced that it would be launching a desktop app with the GPT-4o capabilities, giving users another platform to interact with the technology outside of a web browser.
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Amazon launched in South Africa last week, marking its first marketplace in sub-Saharan Africa, and bringing its total number of marketplaces worldwide to 22. To launch the new marketplace, Amazon is offering free delivery on first orders and on subsequent orders above R500 (about $27), access to 3,000 pick-up points, status updates via WhatsApp to track orders, 30 day refunds, and 24/7 customer support. The marketplace was supposed to launch in the country in 2023, but got delayed due to changes in priorities within Amazon.
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In an unlikely partnership, Instacart is partnering with Uber Eats to expand into the restaurant delivery business. Instacart will add a new tab for restaurant delivery to its app in the coming weeks, the listings will be provided by Uber, and the food will be picked up and delivered by Uber Eats drivers. Customers will receive the same prices on both apps and Instacart will receive an affiliate commission on orders. It's a strange partnership though given that Instacart and Uber Eats actively compete on grocery delivery. Are they planning to merge? Uber says no.
___
Apple's advertisement for its latest iPad Pro sparked criticism for showing an animation of musical instruments, paint cans, cameras, record players, and other symbols of creativity being crushed by a giant machine, with the output being the new iPad Pro, which the company says is the thinnest Apple product ever. In this context, “crushing” was supposed to symbolize “consolidating” and “compacting” — with the visuals meant to showcase how the new iPad Pro puts the power of all these tools into the hands of creators in one thin device. However online commenters criticized the ad as insensitive and as symbolizing a “destruction of the human experience.” The ad hit the web on Tuesday, and by Thursday, Apple issued a mea culpa and apologized for the campaign.
___
Google is encouraging merchants to enable conversion annotations on their Google Shopping ads, which offer social proof that highlight a product's popularity. Conversion annotations like “best selling” or “3K shopped here recently” would provide visual cues about a product’s popularity or sales performance directly in the ad unit. Annotations like these are par for the course with e-commerce retailers including Amazon, Walmart, and Temu, which all employ similar tactics. They can provide valuable info for shoppers and also help with conversions. However they also open data privacy concerns, given that Google is not the actual retailer or marketplace selling the items, so a merchant would have to share this purchase history data from their e-commerce platform with Google — which technically most already do by giving access to GA4.
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Shein is attempting to join the National Retail Federation as it pursues regulatory approval to go public in the US. The company believes that NRF membership would boost its chances of receiving SEC approval. However so far, Shein has been rejected numerous times. An anonymous source familiar with the matter said someone with heavy influence at the NRF is strongly against the Shein's admittance. However board members who spoke to CNBC said that Shein's membership application hadn't come up in meetings, and that they aren't involved in deciding which companies are granted access.
___
Amazon is leading the way with selling home goods, capturing 18.8% of consumer home furnishings spending, compared to Walmart's 7.3% market share. Notably, Amazon’s gains in the furniture category come in spite of the company’s decision to phase out two of its three furniture brands last year.
___
Stanley, which is projected to do $750M in sales this year, up from $73M in 2019, after seeing its water bottles become a status symbol thanks to TikTok, is now expanding into trendier accessories. The company is launching a line of bags called the All-Day Collection which include a mini cooler, backpack cooler, and Quencher Carry-All, designed for someone to sling their Stanley over their hip.
___
Jack Dorsey left the Bluesky board and deleted his account on the service he helped kickstart, claiming that Bluesky was “literally repeating all the mistakes” he made while running Twitter. Dorsey says he never intended Bluesky to be an independent company, but rather, an open source protocol that Twitter was supposed to be the first client of. He also confirmed that he is financially backing Nostr, another decentralized Twitter-like service popular among crypto enthusiasts and run by an anonymous founder.
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Amazon is deploying 50 electric trucks in California, which it claims is the largest EV fleet in the country, as part of its mission to eliminate pollution from its global operations. The trucks will be integrated into first-mile operations, moving goods from container ships at the ports to fulfillment centers, as well as middle-mile operations, transporting packages from fulfillment centers to delivery centers.
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Wix launched a new tool called AI Portfolio Creator, which allows a user to upload and organize large-scale image collections, select the type of portfolio they want, and then have the AI tool sort and generate a portfolio with clustered images, recommended titles and descriptions, and personalized layout options.
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Amazon is now requiring all dietary supplements to be verified by a third-party testing, inspection, and certification organization — which is something that not even the FDA requires. Amazon is the largest supplement retailer in the US ahead of Walmart and Target, and its new requirements are expected to put more pressure on the industry, which is being scrutinized more than ever.
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Alibaba is revamping its flagship retail website Taobao for the first time in seven years with a focus on providing a smoother search and buying process. The website overhaul comes ahead of the 618 sales event, China's second-largest annual shopping event. A few weeks ago I reported that Eddie Wu, the CEO of Alibaba Group, would now be directly overseeing its domestic e-commerce arm which includes Taobao and Tmall Group, and it sounds like he's hitting the ground running with his new responsibilities.
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Amazon is hosting its first-ever Amazon Book Sale, a new shopping event starting on May 15th that offers up to 50% off print best sellers and up to 80% off Kindle Books. The six day shopping event will exclusively run in the US, and Prime-membership is not required to take advantage of the deals.
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FTX reported that nearly all of its customers will receive the money back that they are owed, two years after the cryptocurrency exchange imploded. The company owes about $11.2B to its customers and estimates that it has between $14.5B and $16.3B to distribute to them. The caveat is that customers will receive the USD value of their holdings at the time of the exchange collapse, and not the actual crypto holdings themselves, which means that they'll miss out on all gains during the past two years during which BTC went from around $16k to now over $60k. Better than nothing though, that's for sure.
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800,000 consumers in Europe and the US were duped into sharing card details and other sensitive personal data with a network of fake online designer shops operated from China, which comprised one of the largest scams of its kind with 76,000 fake websites created. The scammers used expired domains to host its fake shops in order to help avoid detection by websites or brand owners, and more than 1M orders were processed in the past three years alone.
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Beyond Inc, which owns Bed Bath & Beyond, Overstock, and Zulily, reported that its Q1 net loss swelled to $72M from $10M a year ago, while its operating loss widened to $58M from $8M. The company's active customers grew to 6M, up 26% from nearly 5M a year ago, however, its average order value dropped to $173 from $220 a year earlier.
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TikTok will begin automatically labeling AI generated content when it is uploaded from certain platforms like DALL.E 3, Adobe Firefly, Photoshop, and Microsoft Copilot. TikTok will also start attaching Content Credentials to content, which will remain on the media when downloaded, allowing other platforms to read the metadata.
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eBay is testing an Add To Cart button in search results that opens a Quick View window, allowing buyers to skip the listing page. Technically the button should probably not be labeled “Add To Cart” since it doesn't perform that action, but rather, displays a quick view window with three buttons: Buy It Now, Add To Cart, View All Details. Sellers are worried that buyers will miss crucial details in the product description that may lead to increased returns and negative feedback.
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Amazon is planning to launch its fleet of drones in Tolleson, Arizona, but the city's extreme temperature is hampering its efforts. Drones can't operate in temperatures exceeding 104 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that Tolleson crosses for a full three months of the year.
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A US district judge dismissed X's lawsuit against Bright Data, a data-scraping company accused of improperly accessing X system and violating X terms and state laws when scraping and selling data. The judge basically said that if X owned the data, it could perhaps argue that it has exclusive rights to control it, but then X wouldn't be able to enjoy the safe harbor of Section 230, which allows the platform to avoid liability for third-party content. Can't have it both ways!
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Nintendo is discontinuing its X integration for the switch on June 10th, which means users will no longer be able to post screenshots or videos to the platform from their device. The drop in support also affects games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which had game-specific options to send out tweets. Microsoft Xbox dropped support for X in April 2023 and Sony Playstation dropped the service in October 2023 due to the increase in X's API access fees.
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Amazon claimed that its recordable incident rate — a metric that comprises all injuries requiring “more than basic first-aid treatment” — at its US warehouses has improved by 24% since 2019. However the National Employment Law Project challenged Amazon's injury data in a report last week, claiming that Amazon's overall injury rate in 2023 was 71% higher than that of other employers in the sector at 6.5 cases per 100 workers.
___
Amazon Ads announced three new advertising formats for streaming TV including shoppable carousel ads, interactive pause ads, and interactive trivia ads. Amazon did not say when the new ad types would officially launch, but noted that it will formally present them at a presentation on May 14th.
___
Meta is rolling out an expanded set of generative AI ad tools that can create full image variations with text overlays, expand images to fit across different aspect ratios, and generate alternate versions of headlines and other ad text. The features will become available globally to advertisers by the end of the year.
___
Square introduced a tool called Square Kiosk to allow self-service ordering at fast food restaurants. The device is a combined software, hardware, and payment solution that allows customers to select exactly what they want with customization options, upgrades, and add-ons.
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The European Parliament announced new measures to make packaging more sustainable and reduce packaging waste in the EU, including reduction targets of 15% by 2040 — which sounds far away but is only 16 years away?! As part of the new rules, the EU will set maximum empty space ratios for e-commerce transportation, ban certain single-use plastic packaging types, and beverage distributors and take-away food will have to offer consumers the option of bringing their own container.
___
Indians who pre-ordered Teslas in 2016 are giving up and seeking refunds of their deposits after Elon Musk canceled another visit to the country last month. Disillusioned Tesla enthusiasts in India say they will now buy a car from the company only if they see it in a showroom, or they'll buy a different electrical vehicle from a company that actually exists in the country.
___
Target is limiting its Pride Month collection to select stores this year instead of rolling out the merchandise nationwide like it typically has for the past decade, due to backlash the retailer experienced last year. Last May customers in certain stores knocked down LGBTQ+ merchandise displays, angrily approached store employees, and posted threatening videos on social media from inside the stores.
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E-commerce spending from Jan 1 to April 30, 2024 rose 7% YoY to $331.6B, according to Adobe Analytics. One trend Adobe identified during the period is a shift of online spending to purchasing the cheapest goods across personal care, electronics, apparel, home & garden, furniture, and grocery.
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Plus 7 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest, including Shopify's acquisition of Peel, a tool that integrates with a merchant's tech stack including Klaviyo and Recharge and helps them analyze their sales data to improve customer retention.
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I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week!
PAUL Editor of Shopifreaks E-Commerce Newsletter
PS: If I missed any big news this week, please share in the comments.

Hi - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Each week I post a summary recap of the week's top stories, which I cover in depth in the newsletter. Let's dive in...
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STAT OF THE WEEK: Kohl's sales have shrunk by $2.3B since 2019. During that same period of time, the company lost 1.3M customers who no longer shop with the retailer.
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BigCommerce is exploring a sale after attracting takeover interest, according to sources who chose to remain anonymous due to the confidentiality of the information. The sources said that BigCommerce asked investment bank Qatalyst Partners to solicit interest from potential buyers that include private equity firms, but that the discussions are at an early stage and no deal is certain.
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Squarespace announced that it will be going private in a $6.9B all-cash deal with private-equity firm Permira, who agreed to pay $44 per share (a roughly 30% premium). Although Squarespace never lost 90% of its share price like BigCommerce, it has experienced a tumultuous time on the market since its IPO in May 2021 — opening around $49.50 and at times trading in the low $20s. Shares rose nearly 13% to $43 in pre-market trading upon release of the news.
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ByteDance filed a lawsuit in US federal court seeking to block the new law that would force the sale or ban of the app within the country. The lawsuit challenges the law on constitutional grounds, also citing commercial, technical, and legal hurdles, as well as opposition from Beijing. Legal experts say the legal battle will play out in the courts in coming months and likely will reach the Supreme Court.
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OpenAI unveiled its newest model, GPT-4o, designed to turn ChatGPT into a digital personal assistant that can engage in real-time, spoken conversations and interact with users using text, screenshots, photos, documents, and charts. The new version of ChatGPT also has memory capabilities, which means it can learn from previous conversations. It will be available to both unpaid and premium customers alike. OpenAI also announced that it would be launching a desktop app with the GPT-4o capabilities, giving users another platform to interact with the technology outside of a web browser.
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Amazon launched in South Africa last week, marking its first marketplace in sub-Saharan Africa, and bringing its total number of marketplaces worldwide to 22. To launch the new marketplace, Amazon is offering free delivery on first orders and on subsequent orders above R500 (about $27), access to 3,000 pick-up points, status updates via WhatsApp to track orders, 30 day refunds, and 24/7 customer support. The marketplace was supposed to launch in the country in 2023, but got delayed due to changes in priorities within Amazon.
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In an unlikely partnership, Instacart is partnering with Uber Eats to expand into the restaurant delivery business. Instacart will add a new tab for restaurant delivery to its app in the coming weeks, the listings will be provided by Uber, and the food will be picked up and delivered by Uber Eats drivers. Customers will receive the same prices on both apps and Instacart will receive an affiliate commission on orders. It's a strange partnership though given that Instacart and Uber Eats actively compete on grocery delivery. Are they planning to merge? Uber says no.
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Apple's advertisement for its latest iPad Pro sparked criticism for showing an animation of musical instruments, paint cans, cameras, record players, and other symbols of creativity being crushed by a giant machine, with the output being the new iPad Pro, which the company says is the thinnest Apple product ever. In this context, “crushing” was supposed to symbolize “consolidating” and “compacting” — with the visuals meant to showcase how the new iPad Pro puts the power of all these tools into the hands of creators in one thin device. However online commenters criticized the ad as insensitive and as symbolizing a “destruction of the human experience.” The ad hit the web on Tuesday, and by Thursday, Apple issued a mea culpa and apologized for the campaign.
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Google is encouraging merchants to enable conversion annotations on their Google Shopping ads, which offer social proof that highlight a product's popularity. Conversion annotations like “best selling” or “3K shopped here recently” would provide visual cues about a product’s popularity or sales performance directly in the ad unit. Annotations like these are par for the course with e-commerce retailers including Amazon, Walmart, and Temu, which all employ similar tactics. They can provide valuable info for shoppers and also help with conversions. However they also open data privacy concerns, given that Google is not the actual retailer or marketplace selling the items, so a merchant would have to share this purchase history data from their e-commerce platform with Google — which technically most already do by giving access to GA4.
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Shein is attempting to join the National Retail Federation as it pursues regulatory approval to go public in the US. The company believes that NRF membership would boost its chances of receiving SEC approval. However so far, Shein has been rejected numerous times. An anonymous source familiar with the matter said someone with heavy influence at the NRF is strongly against the Shein's admittance. However board members who spoke to CNBC said that Shein's membership application hadn't come up in meetings, and that they aren't involved in deciding which companies are granted access.
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Amazon is leading the way with selling home goods, capturing 18.8% of consumer home furnishings spending, compared to Walmart's 7.3% market share. Notably, Amazon’s gains in the furniture category come in spite of the company’s decision to phase out two of its three furniture brands last year.
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Stanley, which is projected to do $750M in sales this year, up from $73M in 2019, after seeing its water bottles become a status symbol thanks to TikTok, is now expanding into trendier accessories. The company is launching a line of bags called the All-Day Collection which include a mini cooler, backpack cooler, and Quencher Carry-All, designed for someone to sling their Stanley over their hip.
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Jack Dorsey left the Bluesky board and deleted his account on the service he helped kickstart, claiming that Bluesky was “literally repeating all the mistakes” he made while running Twitter. Dorsey says he never intended Bluesky to be an independent company, but rather, an open source protocol that Twitter was supposed to be the first client of. He also confirmed that he is financially backing Nostr, another decentralized Twitter-like service popular among crypto enthusiasts and run by an anonymous founder.
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Amazon is deploying 50 electric trucks in California, which it claims is the largest EV fleet in the country, as part of its mission to eliminate pollution from its global operations. The trucks will be integrated into first-mile operations, moving goods from container ships at the ports to fulfillment centers, as well as middle-mile operations, transporting packages from fulfillment centers to delivery centers.
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Wix launched a new tool called AI Portfolio Creator, which allows a user to upload and organize large-scale image collections, select the type of portfolio they want, and then have the AI tool sort and generate a portfolio with clustered images, recommended titles and descriptions, and personalized layout options.
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Amazon is now requiring all dietary supplements to be verified by a third-party testing, inspection, and certification organization — which is something that not even the FDA requires. Amazon is the largest supplement retailer in the US ahead of Walmart and Target, and its new requirements are expected to put more pressure on the industry, which is being scrutinized more than ever.
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Alibaba is revamping its flagship retail website Taobao for the first time in seven years with a focus on providing a smoother search and buying process. The website overhaul comes ahead of the 618 sales event, China's second-largest annual shopping event. A few weeks ago I reported that Eddie Wu, the CEO of Alibaba Group, would now be directly overseeing its domestic e-commerce arm which includes Taobao and Tmall Group, and it sounds like he's hitting the ground running with his new responsibilities.
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Amazon is hosting its first-ever Amazon Book Sale, a new shopping event starting on May 15th that offers up to 50% off print best sellers and up to 80% off Kindle Books. The six day shopping event will exclusively run in the US, and Prime-membership is not required to take advantage of the deals.
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FTX reported that nearly all of its customers will receive the money back that they are owed, two years after the cryptocurrency exchange imploded. The company owes about $11.2B to its customers and estimates that it has between $14.5B and $16.3B to distribute to them. The caveat is that customers will receive the USD value of their holdings at the time of the exchange collapse, and not the actual crypto holdings themselves, which means that they'll miss out on all gains during the past two years during which BTC went from around $16k to now over $60k. Better than nothing though, that's for sure.
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800,000 consumers in Europe and the US were duped into sharing card details and other sensitive personal data with a network of fake online designer shops operated from China, which comprised one of the largest scams of its kind with 76,000 fake websites created. The scammers used expired domains to host its fake shops in order to help avoid detection by websites or brand owners, and more than 1M orders were processed in the past three years alone.
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Beyond Inc, which owns Bed Bath & Beyond, Overstock, and Zulily, reported that its Q1 net loss swelled to $72M from $10M a year ago, while its operating loss widened to $58M from $8M. The company's active customers grew to 6M, up 26% from nearly 5M a year ago, however, its average order value dropped to $173 from $220 a year earlier.
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TikTok will begin automatically labeling AI generated content when it is uploaded from certain platforms like DALL.E 3, Adobe Firefly, Photoshop, and Microsoft Copilot. TikTok will also start attaching Content Credentials to content, which will remain on the media when downloaded, allowing other platforms to read the metadata.
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eBay is testing an Add To Cart button in search results that opens a Quick View window, allowing buyers to skip the listing page. Technically the button should probably not be labeled “Add To Cart” since it doesn't perform that action, but rather, displays a quick view window with three buttons: Buy It Now, Add To Cart, View All Details. Sellers are worried that buyers will miss crucial details in the product description that may lead to increased returns and negative feedback.
___
Amazon is planning to launch its fleet of drones in Tolleson, Arizona, but the city's extreme temperature is hampering its efforts. Drones can't operate in temperatures exceeding 104 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that Tolleson crosses for a full three months of the year.
___
A US district judge dismissed X's lawsuit against Bright Data, a data-scraping company accused of improperly accessing X system and violating X terms and state laws when scraping and selling data. The judge basically said that if X owned the data, it could perhaps argue that it has exclusive rights to control it, but then X wouldn't be able to enjoy the safe harbor of Section 230, which allows the platform to avoid liability for third-party content. Can't have it both ways!
___
Nintendo is discontinuing its X integration for the switch on June 10th, which means users will no longer be able to post screenshots or videos to the platform from their device. The drop in support also affects games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which had game-specific options to send out tweets. Microsoft Xbox dropped support for X in April 2023 and Sony Playstation dropped the service in October 2023 due to the increase in X's API access fees.
___
Amazon claimed that its recordable incident rate — a metric that comprises all injuries requiring “more than basic first-aid treatment” — at its US warehouses has improved by 24% since 2019. However the National Employment Law Project challenged Amazon's injury data in a report last week, claiming that Amazon's overall injury rate in 2023 was 71% higher than that of other employers in the sector at 6.5 cases per 100 workers.
___
Amazon Ads announced three new advertising formats for streaming TV including shoppable carousel ads, interactive pause ads, and interactive trivia ads. Amazon did not say when the new ad types would officially launch, but noted that it will formally present them at a presentation on May 14th.
___
Meta is rolling out an expanded set of generative AI ad tools that can create full image variations with text overlays, expand images to fit across different aspect ratios, and generate alternate versions of headlines and other ad text. The features will become available globally to advertisers by the end of the year.
___
Square introduced a tool called Square Kiosk to allow self-service ordering at fast food restaurants. The device is a combined software, hardware, and payment solution that allows customers to select exactly what they want with customization options, upgrades, and add-ons.
___
The European Parliament announced new measures to make packaging more sustainable and reduce packaging waste in the EU, including reduction targets of 15% by 2040 — which sounds far away but is only 16 years away?! As part of the new rules, the EU will set maximum empty space ratios for e-commerce transportation, ban certain single-use plastic packaging types, and beverage distributors and take-away food will have to offer consumers the option of bringing their own container.
___
Indians who pre-ordered Teslas in 2016 are giving up and seeking refunds of their deposits after Elon Musk canceled another visit to the country last month. Disillusioned Tesla enthusiasts in India say they will now buy a car from the company only if they see it in a showroom, or they'll buy a different electrical vehicle from a company that actually exists in the country.
___
Target is limiting its Pride Month collection to select stores this year instead of rolling out the merchandise nationwide like it typically has for the past decade, due to backlash the retailer experienced last year. Last May customers in certain stores knocked down LGBTQ+ merchandise displays, angrily approached store employees, and posted threatening videos on social media from inside the stores.
___
E-commerce spending from Jan 1 to April 30, 2024 rose 7% YoY to $331.6B, according to Adobe Analytics. One trend Adobe identified during the period is a shift of online spending to purchasing the cheapest goods across personal care, electronics, apparel, home & garden, furniture, and grocery.
___
Plus 7 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest, including Shopify's acquisition of Peel, a tool that integrates with a merchant's tech stack including Klaviyo and Recharge and helps them analyze their sales data to improve customer retention.
___
I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week!
For more details on each story and sources, see the full edition: https://www.shopifreaks.com/bigcommerce-for-sale-openai-gpt-4o-instacarts-unlikely-partnership/
What else is new in e-commerce? Share stories of interesting in the comments below (including in your own business) or on shopifreaks.
-PAUL Editor of Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter
PS: Want the full editions delivered to your Inbox each week? Join free at www.shopifreaks.com

Hi! I’m turning 18 in two weeks and the week after I’m going to live in a van I bought with my own money and going to NASHVILLE for about two months. Bought my own gear: expl300 jckery, 6 gal jug, propane stove, solar panal, fridge, etc. I would love advice from locals or other van lifers! I’ve slept out of my van a few times for fun trips (beach, sleeping in Cracker Barrel parking, camping etc.). I really am looking forward to this trip. I’ll be going for two months and hoping to find a mediocre job maybe bartending hell idk. I really hope to walk in places, meet people, make connections, and possibly play my music for who ever wants to hear it! I’ve counted my dollars and I’ll have enough to get me by. But if music is somewhat working out, I’d love to stay a while longer and see what happens.
I’ll have a free membership at planet fit bc of their under age free summer pass! But I’ll only go to one planet fitness.
Should I sleep in Nashville itself? Should I live a little outside of it for safety? Are there any musicians looking for a young vocalist/harmonies/both guitars/bass/pianist? Should I bring my acoustic, electric, and bass? Should I just bring acoustic because of people breaking in?
Would love some answers from you guys 😁

Hi! I’m turning 18 in two weeks and the week after I’m going to live in a van I bought with my own money and going to NASHVILLE for about two months. Bought my own gear: expl300 jckery, 6 gal jug, propane stove, solar panal, fridge, etc. I would love advice from locals or other van lifers! I’ve slept out of my van a few times for fun trips (beach, sleeping in Cracker Barrel parking, camping etc.). I really am looking forward to this trip. I’ll be going for two months and hoping to find a mediocre job maybe bartending hell idk. I really hope to walk in places, meet people, make connections, and possibly play my music for who ever wants to hear it! I’ve counted my dollars and I’ll have enough to get me by. But if music is somewhat working out, I’d love to stay a while longer and see what happens.
I’ll have a free membership at planet fit bc of their under age free summer pass! But I’ll only go to one planet fitness.
Should I sleep in Nashville itself? Should I live a little outside of it for safety? Are there any musicians looking for a young vocalist/harmonies/both guitars/bass/pianist? Should I bring my acoustic, electric, and bass? Should I just bring acoustic because of people breaking in?
Would love some answers from you guys 😁
PS I will most likely be coming back home in the fall to do community college. But if music works out, hell why not stay!

I have done a lot of research on this, but I wanted to ask this group about my upcoming situation. I am moving to London for school as a US citizen. I want to keep my US number for purposes of talking to friends and family via iMessage plus having 2FA working for my US bank, etc.
From my research it seems best to move my number to an eSIM on Ultra Mobile text+talk then put it on "Wifi-calling" with a UK SIM. It seems this way I can use wifi or my UK data for anything I would need my US number for. A few questions:

1. Will this work as intended?
2. Will Ultra kick me off their network because my usage is not "predominately in the US"?
3. Will receiving texts/iMessages from the US be charged to me still? It seems that Ultra Mobile has unlimited international texting, but going through the fine print implies its only free to send messages.
4. Is there a better carrier to use than Ultra Mobile? Is there a carrier recommended to use in the UK?

Note: I am okay spending a bit of money to keep my US number functional above just google voice (which appears to be just SMS), but I still want to do this as cheaply as possible.

Hi all,
I was wondering if anybody knows if any social groups for running. I've seen groups of people jogging together but I'm not sure if this is an organised club with paid memberships or just a social group free to all. Could anybody advise?
Thanks in advance

As the title indicates, Dr. M. David Litwa has kindly offered to be the guest of our next AMA ("Ask Me Anything") event two days from now!
Dr. M. David Litwa is a historian who specializes in ancient Mediterranean religions and their intersection with the New Testament and early Christianity. He earned his PhD from the University of Virginia, and has taught courses at Virginia Tech, the College of William & Mary, and the University of Virginia. He also previously served as Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, and is currently working with Boston College.
One of Dr. Litwa’s current goals is to make knowledge accessible to a wide public audience. So beyond the AMA, I highly encourage checking out his blog here. In addition, he has a host of other resources available, including his YouTube channel, where he frequently uploads both short-form and long-form content about his scholarship. Dr. Litwa also has a Patreon, with membership tiers ranging from early access to his videos, access to his academic reviews and articles, signed physical copies of his books, and even personal, one-on-one weekly language instruction with him directly!
Dr. Litwa’s many published books are available here for purchase. Particularly affordable are his Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God, his Found Christianities: Remaking the World of the Second Century CE, and his How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths which is also available on Audible!
Finally, beyond the AMA event with Dr. Litwa, he also has an ongoing webinar, Re-Dating the Gospels without Apologetics, that’s available for registration now. I’ve mentioned it before in previous posts, but Dr. Litwa has decided to still allow for registration even now that the webinar series has started, it was just offered at a reduced price during the previous announcement. For more information please see his latest video about the ongoing webinar on his channel here. Those who sign up for his webinar also get a free PDF copy of his monograph, We Are Beings Transformed, as well as full complementary access to the rest of his blog where he makes regular posts. The webinar series ends June 16th, so I highly encourage checking it out!
A variety of Dr. Litwa’s past courses are also available on his website here. Topics include Marcion, Carpocrates & Secret Mark, The Naassenes, Nag Hammadi, and more to come!
The AMA will take place on Wednesday, May 15th. The AMA post will go up in the morning, and solicit questions throughout the day until around 8:00 PM EST, after which the questions will be sent to Dr. Litwa who will make a response to them on his YouTube channel.
If needed, you can use this page to convert timezones.

IKKPS is the first of its kind and our members love it! Everything we do is centered around helping KuneKune breeders be successful. We do this in a variety of ways:
· Providing excellent educational resources such as eBooks, articles, virtual meetings, and one on one assistance.
· Breeder Promotions – we promote our members on social media every single month and depending on your membership level it can be 2-4 times a month. That’s right, for FREE we promote your farm to drive new customers to you.
· We market your pigs for sale not only in the herd book but, also on social media, YouTube and the website.
· We offer 3 shows a year including a first ever National Show where you can compete for the first ever National Titles.
· We offer quarterly newsletters and a variety of important, relevant membership benefits to help your farming business.
· Superior customer service. You can text us, email us, Facebook messenger us and we are so old fashioned that you can even pick up the phone and call us.

Key take aways:
It is important to know that this organization’s leaders are comprised of prior KuneKune breeders and other professionals who no longer breed KuneKunes. This is important to note because of this you are not competing with anyone in a leadership role to sell pigs. Instead, we are 100% focused on helping you sell YOUR pigs and driving potential customers directly to you.
So, don’t wait, join today so we can start helping you with your farm and your pigs.
Take a moment to watch the video to learn more.
https://youtu.be/odUnfckY6XI?feature=shared

Hi investors,
I am relatively new to investing so I am hoping to get your feedback. I did a deep dive into $YOU as sort of a practice run so I get more acclimated to the value investing landscape. YOU is particularly interesting to me because it is a simple business, which as a newbie, is important because I can easily gauge its strengths and weaknesses. It has easily identifiable green and red flags.
$YOU is CLEAR which is basically a service where you pay $189 a year to skip the TSA line at the airport to get to the bag-screening portion. With Amex platinum and other various products you get CLEAR membership free or discounted.
YOU management has plans to offer other vertical products as they are an identity verification service. You might've seen their identity verification using Linkedin. They are also trying to break into medical, sports arenas, and enterprise account recovery. Personally I only see value in the latter. They also mentioned possible upsells at the airport like holding your bags. I think that is nonsense.
Green flags:

• They generate a 33% FCF margin
• Their growth potential is relatively large
• There are other valid applications of their product that they may be able to capitalize on
• They choose strategic locations to open new locations to strengthen their network.
• They are looking to expand in Canada and Mexico.
• They are shareholder friendly (dividends and buy backs)
• They operate in a town that can only support one business. I think it is extremely unlikely for newcomers to enter the market.

Red flags

• They are one regulation away from being in financial ruin. Calfifornia legislators floated banning CLEAR.
• They are one mistake away from being in financial ruin. Imagine a scenario where a potential terrorist gets through their security. Although they still have to pass TSA, this risk may be limited.
• Their shares are extremely diluted approx 146m
• Expanding to scountries may be overly optimistic (what sane government wants a US company to have their citizen's biometrics?
• Limited growth prospects. I know I listed their growth as a pro, but the con side is that there is a ceiling to who can enroll. Think like six flags. If everyone has a flash pass, nobody has a flash pass. You need people to be in the slow line for the fast line to add value. Notwithstanding, there is room to sign up significantly more people and expand locations.
• A significant portion of their revenues depend on partners like AMEX.

They currently have 6.8 million clear plus members. Approx 49% of Americans reported taking a commercial flight in the past year. I would guestimate that at least 30% of those people take 3 round trip flights or more a year. That leaves a population pool of 44.6 million people whom CLEAR might be an appealing service to (provided they are available where those people are traveling).
Based on their core business, my DCF (based on FCF) of 30% annual growth of 6 years will return $15.98 of value to shareholders and they will achieve 19.4 million paid members. I used a 11% discount rate.
My EPV analysis found that they are worth $3.16 a share with growth factored in.
Obviously not financial advise. I am curious what you might think of the company.