>> when democrats spent all their time talking about race and gender and tearing down statues, they have nothing else to offer. >> gentlemen, both of you, fascinating discussion. thank you very much for joining us. that is all for this week. i will be back next week. thank you very much for joining us. ♪♪ barron roundtable. ♪♪ jack: welcome to barron's roundtable where we get behind the headlines and prepare you for the week ahead. a one-time advisor to mark zuckerberg is now one of facebook's biggest critics. telling us why it is time to regulate the social media giant. later, how the new bitcoin futures work in whether it should be in the new york portfolio. we begin as always with what we

think are the three most important things investors ought to be thinking about right now. strong earnings report helped power the market higher this week despite advancing bond deals. big technology companies are reporting next week all eyes will be on embattled facebook. is telecom giant at&t the next value stock to buy? my colleagues. some new highs for the s&p and the dow. wire investor suddenly a little bit happier? >> chalk it up to earnings. there have been some stinkers. it is all because of things like rising costs. most partners have been great. wednesday we had 99 companies report. eighty-nine of them beat. they are going up after reporting. i think that has a lot to do with the fact that the market dropped heading into this earnings season. expectations had come down as well. that lowered the bar. aided easier to get over. jack: that lobar season.

the market climbs a wall of worry. what are investors worried about now? >> a couple of things we have been worried about for a wild. one is inflation. we still have those rising prices. still have workers not coming back to the job market. that is hanging over everything. economic growth will slow even as inflation rises. that is the biggest worry out there. they are also looking ahead to next week and thinking about the tech earnings that are coming. maybe a little worried about that, too. big tech made up such a big portion of the market. >> we just saw a chart of the 10 year yield. it dipped back down. it is sort of getting up into territory that may worry tech goals. >> it really is. yields have been going up, inflation expectations are going up. even the expectations for when the fed will hike rates is coming in sooner. sooner than it expected it the

market seems okay with that. it does have to do with the fact that inflation is wearing some people and if you want to keep inflation from getting out of control, you need rate hikes. it is something that bears watching. >> a great sign of the market really is okay with the rate hike. let's look ahead to next week. big tech earnings. what are you looking for? >> facebook will be front and center of this. this has to do with snap reporting earnings this week. it also has to do with apple. apple is changing its ad tracking software which impacts social media companies. the impact was worse than expected. facebook shares tumbled on that. next week we actually find out how bad it was for facebook. projections are pretty low on the financial part for facebook. jack: the all-powerful apple. anything else on the docket next week you will be interested in? >> of course apple reports next week as they are approaching 100 billion in free cash flow.

also, we had intel earnings this week where they warned of the budget constraints. with apple, these new iphones coming out and everything else, we will want to hear from them, if they are also facing similar situations. then of course we have amazon coming out and we have microsoft which will always be a cloud story. jack: back to the apple point that carlton made. you would think if apple is selling all of these iphones, at&t would catch a bid, but shareholders are not interested. >> it seems to be doing okay in the telecom business. at&t may be ugliest to company stock in america right now, 25 bucks a share. you could have bought it at that price here's before the first iphone came out. the company spent going all in on satellite tv. cable tv and movies, parts of

which are getting squeezed by streaming. if getting out both of those deals, i the middle of next year, it will be back to being up your play telecom. we got a glimpse this past week of what earnings may look like. wireless subscribers. companies almost doubling the rates that wall street had predicted. some worrying about generous subsidies. markets do not look too bad right now. at this point, the stock did not rise. i am wondering if at&t is the new victoria's secret. what i mean by that is, that a bath and body works used to be part of this company and four years i regard it as the worst run big company in america. in spring of last year, that stock began to go on an epic tear. for a few reasons, the main one of which, the company has just gotten too cheap he had if you

look at at&t right now, there is a complicated deal that will take nine months to pay out. there is a dividend cut coming. the people who want a high yield telecom do not want anything to do with show business so there are few natural buyers of the stock. if you are buying it here, you are locking in the future dividend yields. somewhere around 6% which is a point more. >> that is pretty good. at&t, the new victoria's secret. coming up, as facebook and mark zuckerberg face more scrutiny than ever. thinking about changing its name just say publication ♪ ♪

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critics have been calling for regulation of social media including our next guest. waking up to the facebook catastrophe. roger, thank you so much for coming back on the show. >> it is a pleasure to be here. >> i want to start by reading a quote from your book. a complex system built around a value system that increasingly complex with the values of the users it is supposed to serve. you wrote those long before we got the wall street revelations and the testimony. can you sum up the problem here for us. >> it is really simple, i think. we live in a time where we have almost no government regulation

of technology. facebook built a network that allows 3 billion people worldwide to interact with people at will. they built an advertising system based on a tension. if you want to get peoples attention, the easiest way to do that is to make them afraid or outraged. facebook's algorithms, basically promote content that does that. paid speech, disinformation and conspiracy theories are three of the most effective tools are getting people outraged or afraid. what is happened is all of these ideas still exist. they have used the facebook advertising system to drive themselves into the mainstream. this is public help during a pandemic. it has hurt our democracy. it has hurt people's ability to make their own choices. too often now companies like facebook really control the choices available to us and they

use recommendation engines to manipulate our behavior. >> it sounds like hyperbole. everything that you said is true. there really tricky question is, what can the government actually do about it. you are sitting in congress right now making the recommendation. >> i work with congress a lot. the key problem that we have right now is our democracy is in a dangerous situation. if we could clean that up, i want to see legislation and three areas. safety, privacy and competition. the culture of technology today does not recognize that other people have rights and that the country has a value system that should be adhered to. i want something that is like the food and drug administration. like the fda that determines which technologies can come to market. it should not be in the market

at all. other things like facebook, like instagram, like youtube and like some of these surveillance devices that amazon makes, they need to be regulated to protect consumers. i worry about the business model. this notion that they collect all the data on all of us. use machine learning to find patterns in our behavior and then use artificial intelligence to both predict our behavior and manipulate it, that should stop. that is like child labor. that is taking away the things that make us individual. on competition. right now i am an investor. i do venture capital. no way for a starter to compete against any of these big platforms. we have to have rules that make that possible. >> that is a really important point. often it is seen as anticapitalist. sucking the oxygen out of innovation. that is a great point.

>> think about when the facebook went down twice a couple weeks ago. all of those businesses depend on facebook. they were denied an opportunity to reach the market at all. that is incredibly unhealthy. there is no alternative. jack: i want to get one thing out of the way real quickly. there is fear that social media giants, especially facebook watched conservative voices. you see that conservative voices seem to dominate the most shared links. what is your take on that? >> the discussion about freedom of speech is really a paper tiger. which messages get promoted most heavily. the people whose messages inspire fear or outrage do best on facebook. as it happens, voices on the right are particularly good at

taking advantage of the algorithms of facebook. they have been amazingly successful on there. to me, the first amendment should not come into play in any of these things i'm describing. not related to safety, not related to privacy, just not an issue. >> only applying to government anyway. we can decide to have you on the show are not or whether or not i am the host. a very quick question. the name change we are hearing about. what do you think about that? >> i think that it is one more attempt by facebook to change the subject. a major release in the facebook files. this one from the washington post and the financial times. there will be a series more that come monday. they will be testifying in europe. facebook is reporting its earnings. it will be a really hard day for facebook. the name change about trying to protect mark zuckerberg from

accountability and it will not work. jack: always great to have your insight. thank you for coming on the show. >> pleasure. >> coming up. investors just got a new way to investors just got a new way to play bitcoin. ♪ ♪ there are beautiful ideas that remain in the dark. but with our new multi-cloud experience, you have the flexibility you need

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♪♪ jack: this week the first bitcoin futures debuted and it was a big hit. it topped $1 billion in trading value on the first day. the price touching a new record of nearly $67,000. this week's cover story. thanks for coming on, beverly. just explain why this is such a big deal. >> it is a first opportunity that investors have had to get exposure to bitcoin via traditional financial services.

you don't need to figure out how digital wallet works, you don't need to open a new account. you can just buy it through whatever means you by what other investments. jack: a reason to buy bitcoin. i suspect barron does not agree. >> no. neither do i. question of whether or not to buy or sell an investment should have nothing to do with the type of product that you buy that investment real. whether it is stocks or bonds, you make the decision of what you want to own and then you decide how to own it. the ctf does not even own bitcoin, it owns bitcoin futures which is a whole different kind of product. jack: beverly, when i hear futures and i hear bitcoin, i think of kick boxing while on rollerskates. i have no doubt that it would be exciting to watch, i would not want to try it, probably hurt my

tailbone. what happens when you use futures to invest in bitcoin? [laughter] >> probably the similar risk that you would entail. it can be problematic for many reasons. for one, they do not always track the price of the actual asset. it can have pretty costly ramifications. this happens all the time with oil futures, natural gas, you name it. even with nonspecific problems, they expired so the funds need to keep buying more. this creates more cost and generates capital gains and capital gains taxes. much more than your average stock etf. the other wrinkle is that the cme is limiting the amount of bitcoin futures per buyer. right now it has funded almost at that limit. it will have to start putting all of that money into other kinds of investment. >> so, beverly, in light of the reservation, just one way to get

exposure to bitcoin. what are some of the others that you have encountered. >> you can buy the actual coin. you can open a coin based account. you can also buy it directly from companies like paypal and square. if you do any of this, you need to secure and track it separately from your other investments with some see it as a negative or a hassle. it is not terribly hard. jack: there are also many other ways to get crypto. the bitwise index fund. it owns a lot of bitcoin. there are things like new illyrian galaxy thing which owns minors and so forth. there are a lot of ways to do this. >> beverly, i feel lot like tom hanks and big. i don't get it. why would anyone even want to own bitcoin. >> i do not think anyone needs

one. if you are curious, and lots of people are, just buy as much as you are comfortable losing. if you think this will be a good long-term investment, you buy a little bit more, but keep it to 1% or less of your portfolio. if it works out, it will grow and if not you will not have jeopardize your future. if you are looking for a truly non-correlated asset because you think stocks are pricey, you are worried about what could happen, you could go up to maybe 5% of your portfolio in bitcoin. it won't really work as a hedge anymore, frankly, it's a bit of a risk for my taste. >> we are almost out of time. when i look at the chart of bitcoin, it looks like it kind of tracks the stock market when everybody has a big risk appetite bitcoin goes up. sometimes it falls when people pull in their horns and the risk entrée pulls away. does that mean it is actually correlated?

>> it really is not. it rose after the capitol hill riot. it rises ahead of good news and then falls pretty sharply after. when the first bitcoin futures started trading, bitcoin spell. >> that is good to know. >> thanks a lot for that, beverly. roundtable members give that. as a dj, i know all about customization. that's why i love liberty mutual. they customize my car insurance,

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♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪♪ jack: thanks to mark zuckerberg and facebook we have been hearing the meadow first. who better to explain than jack howell. >> who better indeed, jack. picture multiplayer audio game with social network shopping and

concerts and school and dating defining as a convergence of physical and digital and in a way that is persistent real-time rendered and infinite in its ability to offer shared experience as allowing for total expense -- what were we talking about? [laughter] want to invest. first of all, if you want to get there, one thing you may want to do a strap what looks like a toddler's toilet seat to your four head. that is called virtual reality. in the future we may use smart glasses to overlay in the real world. that is called augmented reality. facebook chief executive android mark zuckerberg just put out a video monitoring ray-ban stories those are sunglasses with cameras hidden on the side of them. not creepy at all. if you want to invest, you can buy shares in videogame makers. cloud computing, 3 d rendering and mobile chips.

you can buy crypto currency. those are like core holdings in "la la land" speared there is an etf out there. it is called round tail. empty t a. the fee is three quarters of 1%. you have to pay that fee in this universe i will start with carlton. she has something a little bit more down to earth. >> taking a look at the barron real estate. i was at a conference earlier this week where there was a 6040 portfolio. everyone is on board. what you do with the 40%. one of the speakers talked about walking into real estate. this was a hedge fund manager that has access that most of us would not. it should give you some exposure to the area. jack: good way to diversify. what is your idea? >> ge. the company reports earnings this week. it really has done nothing for

last few months. it is earning the expectations. and it's gone down a little bit. if they can beat the expectation, there's a good chance that could rise. >> doing nothing over the last 10 years. maybe now is a time. to read more check out this week's barron. don't forget to follow us on don't forget to follow us on tw fish, america's sustenance from the sea. large or small, fresh or frozen, this protein-packed resource fuels not only our bodies but an offshore industry worth ten billion dollars a year. but it doesn't come easy. bringing the ocean's bounty to your seafood section takes masters of strategy, gluttons for punishment, and a breed of worker bold enough to take on america's last true wild frontier.