Driverless, voice and cryptos: Some key takeaways and photos from the Consumer Electronics Shows

More analysis and insights and even a story or two to come from my CES 2018 trip, are a couple key takeaways from my week running around CES last week with celebrity guests:

1. Driverless is coming and it’s coming sooner than most people think. Cities and companies are spending tens of billions on making driverless happen. Most exciting driverless company I saw at CES — probably Aptiv (stock symbol is APTV). More on them in coming weeks.
2. Crytpocurrencies are in a bubble. Oh, you already knew that if you’re a subscriber to Trading With Cody.
   • At dinner with Kevin O’Leary (Mr. Wonderful) from ABC’s Shark Tank, we were interrupted by two of the staff who overheard us talking about cryptocurrencies, both of whom were confident that their recent trading success in “cryptos” (as they put it) was a precursor of much bigger gains ahead (yes, we were in the gambling capital of the world).
   • There were cryptocurrency/Initial Coin Offering/blockchain companies running around trying to create hype — not partnerships. The rest of CES was busy trying to get deals done, develop business partnerships, network and so on, the few cryptocurrency-related entities I did see around were all about raising money, not working. I’m not sure what business literally any of the cryptocurrency/Initial Coin Offering/blockchain companies are actually in — maybe I just wasn’t smart enough to understand what they were pitching, but I did just write a whole book about warning people about shady crypto stuff, right? 😉
   • Cryptocurrencies came up with three of the four celebrities I was hanging out with at CES, two of whom just bought their first cryptocurrencies in the last few weeks or months and the other who wanted me to talk a “finance business” friend of his who wants him to invest in ICOs.
3. We’re in a bull market in tech — CES and all conference businesses are cyclical, and the cycle is good for tech companies right now. Lots of money to spend to market and research and design and network and schmooze clients, partners, customers, competitors. We got ourselves positioned to profit from the start back in 2010 and I plan to help us get out before or near when this cycle finally turns south again.
4. The Voice Revolution is here and the biggest tech companies are vying to become de facto standards as voice platforms. Google dropped $100 million plus on that conference promoting their Google Assistant. Lots of talk about Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant — never heard anybody mention Microsoft’s Cortana or Samsung’s Bixby. Neil and I joked about how Siri doesn’t work quite as well as it did in that commercial he did for Apple a few years ago. Remember when I wrote that all this was coming in The Voice Revolution book I published last year?

I’ll be back with markets commentary tomorrow. Might be time to nibble a few more puts and hedges again. In the meantime though, here are some pics and comments from the trip.

More pics.