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Have $1,000? Here's My Single Best Investment Idea for April – Motley Fool

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It’s a truly wild time to be an investor. Since the stock market peaked on Feb. 19, 2020, the benchmark S&P 500 has:

  • Logged 10 of its 13 biggest single-session point declines in history.
  • Recorded its seven largest single-day point gains of all time.
  • Screamed into bear market territory twice as fast as any previous bear market.
  • Pushed lower by 30% in 22 trading days, which is about 10 times faster than it typically takes bear markets to lose 30%.
  • Recorded its largest single-session percentage loss since 1987, and its biggest single-day percentage gain since 2008.

In other words, volatility has been the name of the game, with the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) squarely to blame.

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Image source: Getty Images.

Investing during bear markets is always a smart move

As of Saturday, March 28, there were almost 658,000 cases confirmed worldwide, with over 30,400 deaths attributed to COVID-19, per Johns Hopkins University. The number of worldwide cases has doubled in a week. With stringent mitigation measures firmly in place in many developed countries, economic activity has ground to a crawl, with equity markets around the world paying the price. 

However, there’s always light at the end of the tunnel in even the most dismal situations when it comes to investing. That’s because each and every stock market correction and bear market, no matter how steep or prolonged, has eventually been completely erased by a bull-market rally. This means that if you invest in high-quality businesses and hang on for the long run, thereby allowing your investment thesis to play out, you should come out a winner.

While we can’t predict when the coronavirus crash will end or if we’ve already hit the bottom, we can say with a fairly highly degree of confidence that the stock market will be higher in the future. This means now is the time to take advantage of depressed stock valuations.

The question, of course, is which top stocks to buy?

A person writing and circling the word buy underneath a dip in a stock chart.

Image source: Getty Images.

My single best investment idea for April

Although I’ve personally bought 12 new stocks during the coronavirus crash, as well as added to a handful of existing positions, one stock stands out head and shoulders above the rest. If you have $1,000 in disposable income to invest right now (i.e., not money you need to pay bills or for emergencies), then you should consider buying into what I view as my single best investment idea for April: Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ:ISRG).

Intuitive Surgical is a manufacturer of surgical-assisted robotic systems. These systems help trained surgeons perform various types of soft tissue surgeries with finite precision, leading to potentially faster recovery times for patients.

As recently as last Monday, March 23, Intuitive Surgical’s share price had lost over 40% of its value from its very recent all-time high. Like many companies wading through the uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic, Intuitive Surgical warned Wall Street that this outbreak would have an adverse impact on its financial results. With many elective procedures being cancelled and pushed further down the road, this will, undoubtedly, hurt the company’s very near-term growth potential.

However, COVID-19 is not going to be a long-term concrete weight on the global economy. Eventually, treatment options will be found and/or an antiviral discovered, and the corporate world will return to normal. When this happens, Intuitive Surgical’s numerous competitive advantages will shine through.

A surgeon holding a one dollar bill with surgical forceps.

Image source: Getty Images.

Three no-brainer reasons you need to own Intuitive Surgical’s stock

The first clear-cut advantage can be seen in the company’s sheer number of installed systems. Intuitive Surgical ended 2019 with 5,582 systems installed worldwide, up nearly 600 from the end of 2018. None of its competitors are anywhere close to having this many precision surgical systems installed around the world. When coupled with a lofty price tag of $0.5 million to $2.5 million for the da Vinci surgical system, and the training provided to surgeons, there’s virtually no chance of client churn or lost business to a competitor.

Secondly, this is the perfect example of a razor-and-blades business model. In this instance, the razor is the pricey da Vinci surgical system. Even though these systems generated $1.35 billion in sales for the company last year, they don’t generate beefy margins given how complicated they are to manufacture.

The bulk of the company’s margins and growth are derived from its blades, which include the instruments and accessories sold with each procedure, as well as the servicing needed to keep these systems in perfect working order. Last year, $3.13 billion was derived from the combination of high-margin instrument, accessories, and service sales. As the number of da Vinci systems installed grows worldwide, the percentage of total sales being generated from these higher-margin revenue sources will climb. Or, put in another context, Intuitive Surgical’s profit growth should continually outpace its double-digit sales growth

Third and finally, Intuitive Surgical is still only scratching the surface on what its da Vinci system is capable of. The company is already a leader in gynecology and urology surgeries, but still offers a long runway to acquire market share in thoracic, colorectal, and general soft tissue surgeries. Since we’ve established that no surgical system developer has the geographic reach or rapport with the medical community as Intuitive Surgical, it’s only a matter of time before its systems are more widely used in place of traditional laparoscopic procedures.

If you have $1,000 to invest right now, I’d suggest putting it to work in Intuitive Surgical.

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Amazon completes $4B Anthropic investment to advance generative AI – About Amazon

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Amazon concludes $4 billion investment in Anthropic.

Customers of all sizes and industries are using Claude on Amazon Bedrock to reimagine user experiences, reinvent their businesses, and accelerate their generative AI journeys.

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The work Amazon and Anthropic are doing together to bring the most advanced generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) technologies to customers worldwide is only beginning. As part of a strategic collaborative agreement, we and Anthropic announced that Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future models and has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure, easy access to the industry’s widest choice of high-performing, fully managed foundation models (FMs), along with the most compelling set of features (including best-in-class retrieval augmented generation, guardrails, model evaluation, and AI-powered agents) that help customers build highly-capable, cost-effective, low latency generative AI applications.

Earlier this month, we announced access to the most powerful Anthropic AI models on Amazon Bedrock. The Claude 3 family of models demonstrate advanced intelligence, near-human levels of responsiveness, improved steerability and accuracy, and new vision capabilities. Industry benchmarks show that Claude 3 Opus, the most intelligent of the model family, has set a new standard, outperforming other models available today—including OpenAI’s GPT-4—in the areas of reasoning, math, and coding.

“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS. “Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI. Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”

Global organizations of all sizes, across virtually every industry, are already using Amazon Bedrock to build their generative AI applications with Anthropic’s Claude AI. They include ADP, Amdocs, Bridgewater Associates, Broadridge, CelcomDigi, Clariant, Cloudera, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Degas Ltd., Delta Air Lines, Druva, Enverus, Genesys, Genomics England, GoDaddy, Happy Fox, Intuit, KT, LivTech, Lonely Planet, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, M1 Finance, Netsmart, Nexxiot, Parsyl, Perplexity AI, Pfizer, the PGA TOUR, Proto Hologram, Ricoh USA, Rocket Companies, and Siemens.

To further help speed the adoption of advanced generative AI technologies, AWS, Anthropic, and Accenture recently announced that they are coming together to help organizations—especially those in highly-regulated industries including healthcare, public sector, banking, and insurance—responsibly adopt and scale generative AI solutions. Through this collaboration, organizations will gain access to best-in-class models from Anthropic, a broad set of capabilities only available on Amazon Bedrock, and industry expertise from Accenture, Anthropic, and AWS to help them build and scale generative AI applications that are customized for their specific use cases.

Deepening our commitment to advancing generative AI, today we have an update on the announcement we made to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic for a minority ownership position in the company. Last September, we made an initial investment of $1.25 billion. Today, we made our additional $2.75 billion investment, bringing our total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion. To learn more about the broader strategic collaboration between Amazon and Anthropic, of which this investment is one part, check out the stories below:

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Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, completing its planned $4B investment – TechCrunch

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Amazon invested a further $2.75 billion in growing AI power Anthropic on Wednesday, following through on the option it left open last September. The $1.25 billion it invested at the time must be producing results, or perhaps they’ve realized that there are no other horses available to back.

The September deal put $1.25 billion into the company in exchange for a minority stake, and certain tit-for-tat agreements like Anthropic continuing to use AWS for its extensive computation needs.

Amazon reportedly had until the end of the first quarter to decide whether to increase its investment to a maximum of $4 billion, and here we are just before the deadline, and the company has decided to throw in the maximum amount.

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Anthropic’s AI models are one of very few that compete at the highest levels of capability (however you define it) yet are available at scale for enterprises to deploy internally or in user-facing applications. OpenAI’s GPT series and Google’s Gemini are the others up there, but upstarts like Mistral may soon threaten that fragile triumvirate.

Lacking the capability to develop adequate models on their own for whatever reason, companies like Amazon and Microsoft have had to act vicariously through others, primarily OpenAI and Anthropic. The two have reaped immense benefits by allying with one or the other of these moneyed rivals, and as yet have not seen many downsides.

What we can take from Amazon’s decision to invest the maximum after (one must assume) getting a pretty close look at how they make the AI sausage over there is, really, pretty scant.

It makes too much strategic sense for these companies, which possess enormous war chests saved up for exactly this purpose (outspending rivals when they can’t out-innovate them), to pour cash into the AI sector. Right now the AI world is a bit like a roulette table, with OpenAI and Anthropic representing black and red. No one really knows where the ball will land, least of all the companies that couldn’t predict or create this technology themselves. But if your bitter enemy puts their chips down on red, it only makes sense for you to bet on black.

Especially if you can bet on black at a discount — which is what Amazon got here, since it could invest at Anthropic’s September valuation, which is most certainly lower than it is today.

That said, if things were looking sketchy over there — the way they must have looked at Inflection before Microsoft pounced on it — Amazon could have backed out or just invested less than the full supplemental $2.75 billion. But that might have sent a confusing signal no one wants getting out there, least of all existing multibillion-dollar investors.

We know Anthropic has a plan, and this year we’ll find out what Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other multinational interests think they can do to monetize this supposedly revolutionary technology.

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Canada to tighten foreign investment rules for AI, other sectors

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Canada will require foreign companies to warn the government in advance before making investments or acquisitions in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and space technology, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing an interview with Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne.

The move will aid the government in conducting a national-security review before transactions get too far advanced and would-be investors may be restricted in their access to target companies’ user data or other property while the inquiry is taking place, the report said.


Click to play video: 'Canadians concerned about risk of AI generated fraud'
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Canadians concerned about risk of AI generated fraud

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The tougher rules will also apply to investments in critical minerals and potentially other sectors, Champagne said to Bloomberg.

Earlier this month, Champagne said Canada will crack down on foreign investment in the interactive digital media sector to stop state-sponsored actors from endangering national security.

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