The technician who was supposed to come Sunday instead came today and reinstalled our electric wiring which was blown out last week by a heavy storm and fallen trees. Meanwhile we were all effectively locked out my Global-Investing site because of the outage, which took out our virtual private network. As a result we are posting our articles exclusively on TalkMarkets.com, in which my company has an equity stake.

Today we have a quarterly report and a trickle of news, so enough chatter.

Tech

*The reporting company was Mercado Libre, the Latino version of Chinese and American internet stocks operating in 18 Latin American countries. MELI Q2 results were mixed and while it opened up hitting $1260/sh it then fell back to the low eleven hundreds, in part because of profit taking. (MELI has been a standout gainer in the pandemic.)

Its earnings came in at $1.11 per share, which Reuters said is 6 cents before the Refinitive IBES consensus forecast but well ahead of the Zacks consensus of 10 cents. It also beat last year's Q2 earnings of 31 cents. It missed by a penny in Q1 when it lost 44 cents.. However its revenues came in at $878.4 mn versis a consensus forecast from Refinitive of $732.2 mn, and that of Zacks of $757 mn, even less--a nice beat.

Other numbers from Mercado Libre itself look very good. Its unique active users numbers rose 45.2% in Q2 to 51.5 million users. Its MPago payments system moved $11.2 bn in the quarter, up 72%. It is up 109% year to date. Zacks now rates it overweight. Zacks may also be upping its estimates for the current quarter for negative 14 cents EPS and $831 in sales and for the full year of a minus 95 eps level and revenues of $3.11 bn. Zacks has put commerce in the bottom of its industry ranking which will also probably be amended,

Beyond the huge growth MELI is adding payments across borders within its Latin American bailiwick, initially to Brazil and Mexico, its 2 biggest safe markets, as Argentina, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela are not safe. (It is legally incorporated in Argentina, but is operated from Uruguay in dollars.)

It formally signed up with Paypal (PYPL) which my company uses to pay our writers in countries like India, South Africa, and China, so I think this will boost its business. I am buying today at $1116.35.

*Twitter (TWTR) may be another bidder for TikTok although, unlike Microsoft (MSFT), it doesn't have a link to the ByteDance (BDNCE) owners and is not blessed by the White House for a bid.

*Microsoft was upgraded to buy, but not strong buy, by Credit Suisse today with a $225 target price. Bill Gates opposes the idea of buying TikTok.

Energy and its uses

*Saudi Aramco said it will pay its expected dividend to the Kingdom despite lower oil prices and its costs for buying its formerly separate chemicals arm. It claims that China is back to nearly normal oil demand, 2 This tells you nothing about other oil companies but it nonetheless boosted the price of BP plc by 2.y7% and that of Royal Dutch Shell B (RDS-B) by 1.5%.

*Electric carmaker NIO (NIO) gained 5.7% today because more electric vehicle firms are listing, Xpeng Motors this week.

*Chinese Hollysystems which makes robots gained 5.5% today in Asian trading, HOLI

*CAE Inc. (CAE) which trains pilots gained 4.2% today to US$15.88 on no news except that last week it named a US defense and security liaison in Washington, DC, Daniel Gerston, hired from L3 Harris Broadband.

*Azure Power (AZRE) reports on Thursday the 13^th after the close and the conference call will be at am Friday morning.

Pharma

*German CureVac, soon to be CVAC on Nasdaq. It does mRNA but using low-dose vaccines (1 microgram) for among other threats, corona-virus, and benefits from being a partner of Tesla which is helping it grow the vaccines faster in micro factories, whatever that may be.

*Beigene (BGNE) lost 4.76% today on China issues, despite Morgan Stanley raising it to overweight with a $241 target price last week.

*Roche sub Spark Group which does gene therapy will be headed by Gallia Levy as chief medical officer in Philadelphia. She was with Genentech earlier. Both are RHHBY subs.

All That Glitters

*Kirkland Lake Gold (KL) gained another 2.7% today. The Canadian miner whose latest results beat the odds was recommended by BofA-Merrill analysts.

*Barrick Gold (GOLD) reported a doubling of its profit in Q2. It didn't do as well as KL.

*Meanwhile a writer on Seeking Alpha checked on how expensive it is to buy gold with ETFs (Exchange-Traded Funds). The trouble is that the writer confused the fees charged for purchases with the fees charged for the physical gold EAF from Sprott which avoids taxes on capital gains for gold because you are buying physical shares rather than bullion. While our favorite, SPDR Gold (GLD) is not the cheapest way to buy your bit of bullion it is all of 0.4% of the amount you invest, which is reasonable. Given the paranoia among gold buyers about whether their gold is really there GLD which is run by the World Gold Council (miner's group) and which holds its gold in vaults run by two UK banks, you really do own the stuff.