🙌 Growing Cities Rule

Yes. This is the CityChad, your financial fitness coach, ready to whip your wallet into shape. Let's start pumping up those savings!

In this week’s edition:

• US Debt Ceiling moving markets

• Article: Growing Cities Rule 🙌

• News: UK Ends No-Fault Evictions

• Power Move: Google All-in With AI

• Chad of the Week: Sam Altman

MARKET REVIEW

Don’t you love it when politicians add extra uncertainty to the markets?

This week was all about the US debt ceiling. Not raising it would mean the US would default on its debt.

No bueno.

But fortunately Democrats and Republicans seem to be reaching a deal to avoid this scenario in the short term.

This made the markets happy (short term, at least).

This is not the first debt ceiling stalemate, which begs the question, what’s the long term plan here, guys?

Just printing more money to borrow more doesn’t sound that great. Just sayin’.

GROWING CITIES RULE 🙌

TLDR: Convenient, Cool and Compelling. Everybody has already dreamt about a place like this. Liveable Growing Cities can provide fertile ground to achieve your biggest dreams and not kill yourself in the process.

• Growing Cities have untapped potential

• What makes them great: Liveability

• What are the drawbacks: FOMO

• Good Options

WHAT ARE GROWING CITIES?

First of all, growing doesn't necessarily mean small.

It means a city that hasn't reached its ultimate potential yet.

When you know that someone in a couple decades will say, “I wished I had moved here and bought a place in 2023!”.

Do you feel that where you currently live?

Well, now may be the time to be thoughtful about where to make your next Power Move, and choose a Growing City that suits you.

WHAT’S SO GOOD ABOUT THEM?

A growing city has little to envy from a big city.

It may yet lack the business density found in New York, for example, but it also avoids the drawbacks that come with overcrowding and bad value for money.

To sum it up in one sentence, a good Growing City is liveable now with lots of potential to be even better. And by that it has to be liveable by your standards, with plenty of upside left.

What are the things that you value the most that make you choose living in a certain place?

If you have not done the analysis yet, check out the City Chad Location Ranker to make your assessment on each relevant criteria.

When it comes to potential, will you be able to get on the property ladder sooner? Or be able to invest more in your business by saving in rent and other costs of living? Is your industry’s scene buzzing there?

WILL I BE MISSING OUT?

Everything has two sides to it.

As we mentioned last week, Growing Cities places might not be the best for starting your high profile career, as it may lack many of the natural business connections found in the World’s capitals.

But we honestly believe that it really is mostly FOMO.

In a world where more of our interactions are online, can you find a way to be intentional about achieving similar results without being based out of a Big City?

Think for example of successful and contrarian entrepreneur Nick Huber, who runs multiple business ventures, and lives in Athens, Georgia.

Also when you think about it you say you live in London, but how much of your day is different from say living in Bordeaux?

The office you go to is probably very similar, as is the Uber you take, just much more expensive.

At the end of the day, it’s all about your perception of value. And you can always catch a short plane trip to visit London or New York.

WHAT ARE SOME GOOD OPTIONS?

There are so many good options out there, but I would start by looking at Nomad List to get a rough idea of what each city has to offer.

We were delighted with many cities in Poland, and this is no secret as you have seen in our previous issues.

Dubai also made a huge impression on us recently.

It is by no means small but certainly growing!

Portimão in Portugal also seems to be making waves, why don’t you let us know if you’ve been there?

NEWS: UK ENDS NO-FAULT EVICTIONS

The UK government finally announced the end of No-Fault Evictions in England, meaning that landlords can no longer terminate a tenancy by providing a “Section 21” notice.

I.e. Landlords cannot kick tenants out without providing a valid reason.

Many people welcomed the move, and you can read it all about it in the many news articles online. But there was also scepticism.

Surely providing security to tenants is always a good thing, right?

Well, it’s not so simple.

Looking at it from the landlord’s perspective, their rights on the use of their property are being more tightly controlled. Is it really your asset if you can’t decide what to do with it?

No matter your opinion, it makes you wonder if investing in property as a private landlord makes much sense, when you can access so many other ways to make passive income without stepping on a political, ethical and philosophical minefield.

What are those passive income sources I hear you say? Well, keep reading this newsletter to find out more in the future.

Now, what do you think of the whole Section 21 debate?

Share your thoughts with us by replying to this email, we may just give you a shout out!

POWER MOVE: GOOGLE ALL-IN WITH AI

For a few weeks now, we've seen Google shake before the power of AI.

Despite being trained only with information that goes as far as 2021, ChatGPT has sometimes proven to be more friendly and efficient than the now seemingly old-fashioned Google search.

About 58% of Google's revenue comes from Google Search, so this is making them very, very afraid and pushing them to consider desperate solutions.

First of all, they want to implement generative AI directly into search engine result pages. This is huge!

It means that the average Joe will have a well-digested concise answer for any question he has. However, this also gives Joe fewer reasons to visit your website, blog, or any other digital activity you have, rendering all that SEO useless.

One can only imagine how advertising will be integrated into this model.

But implementing generative AI would mean nothing if it can't compete with GPT-4.

That's why Google unveiled PaLM-2, a language model available in various sizes: Gecko, Otter, Bison, and Unicorn. Each size offers different trade-offs between speed and sophistication.

Google seems to view Microsoft's Co-Pilot as a menace, prompting them to bring AI to all their business applications like Google Docs or Google Sheets.

It's called Duet AI, and while it may not be as good as GPT-4 currently, it has the potential to improve, especially with the Bison model of PaLM-2. It could outperform GPT-4 once the Unicorn model is implemented.

Oh, and did I mention that these models can also write and debug code?

Lastly, there's Project Tailwind, a language model that can be trained with all the data you upload to the cloud for storage. This potentially opens the gate for a 100% customizable personal AI for every one of us.

I don't know about you, but it seems to me that Google is putting plenty of eggs in the AI basket. Their efforts reflect a determination to embrace AI across various domains and adapt to the evolving landscape of technological advancements.

But will the gamble pay off?

CHAD OF THE WEEK: SAM ALTMAN

With everything happening in AI we have to talk about Sam Altman.

Who is this Chad of Tech?

As the former president of Y Combinator, he's nurtured countless startups from seedlings to unicorns, sprinkling his magic dust of wisdom and investment along the way.

He is now leading the way as CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

He has made angel investments in some of the most successful tech companies such as Airbnb, Stripe, Asana, to name a few. But why this week?

Well, he attended a Senate hearing on AI this week, and dropped some interesting thoughts.

He highlighted the need for regulation in the space, and how this promising technology can also potentially cause harm. But what he also did this week, was announce he raised $100m to fund a new crypto project called Worldcoin.

It sounds a bit scary to be honest, a cryptocurrency that is focused on sharing pictures of your iris for identity verification.

It seems Sam is in the eye of the storm now, and certainly making waves. Some people are just unstoppable.

OUR TWITTER

If you're not following us on Twitter yet, you're missing out on some fire content.

We've got news and insights on investing, finance, and technology. Also, we would love to interact with our followers and answer any questions you might have. So come on and give us a follow!

CHAD MEME

Disclaimer

The material on this email and our website is for informational and entertainment purposes only and we make no guarantees as to the accuracy or completeness of its content – it is subject to change. Please conduct your own due diligence and research.

None of this information is financial advice, and you should consult your financial advisor before making any investment decisions. Your capital is at risk and you may lose more than you initially invested. We do not provide any offer or solicitation to buy or sell any investment products, nor does this constitute an offer to provide investment advisory services.

The Chad index (“the index”) is a combination of historical returns for the following assets:

Equities: Vanguard FTSE All-World UCITS ETF USD Acc
Fixed Income: iShares Core Gl Aggregate Bd UCITS ETF USD Hgd Acc
Real Estate: iShares Developed Markets Property Yield UCITS ETF USD (Acc)
Gold: Gold Bullion Securities Limited
Ethereum
Bitcoin

The index is rebalanced quarterly to the target weights shown in the table. The target weights are subject to change. The index does not represent the performance of a real portfolio and does not imply a recommendation to invest in any of those assets. Past performance is not an indication of future performance.