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Here's how I'd invest £5k in a Stocks and Shares ISA today – Motley Fool UK

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There are only a few weeks left until the Stocks and Shares ISA allowance for the 2019/20 tax year runs out. This means investors are running out of time to make the most of the allocation before they lose it on 5 April.

The good news is, is after recent market declines, investors are now spoilt for choice when it comes to investment options.

Claim your FREE copy of The Motley Fool’s Bear Market Survival Guide.

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Global stock markets may be reeling from the coronavirus, but you don’t have to face this down market alone. Help yourself to a FREE copy of The Motley Fool’s Bear Market Survival Guide and discover the five steps you can take right now to try and bolster your portfolio… including how you can aim to turn today’s market uncertainty to your advantage. Click here to claim your FREE copy now!

Stocks and Shares ISA investments

Since the middle of February, the FTSE 250 index has plunged by more than 30%. This decline has caught many investors by surprise. Only a few weeks before the index started to sell-off, it had reached one of its highest levels in five years. Now it’s back to where it was in 2016.

The thing is, barring a major economic depression, the UK economy is much stronger today than it was all those years ago. Most of the FTSE 250’s constituents are also financially more robust than they were back in 2016.

This suggests the market might have got ahead of itself. Granted, some companies are already feeling the pain of the coronavirus outbreak, and their share prices now reflex this. However, other businesses have seen their stocks sell-off despite supportive fundamentals.

Supportive fundamentals

Take infrastructure investor HICL Infrastructure for example. Shares in this company are off around 17% since mid-February. Investors have been selling the stock despite the government’s commitment to up spending on infrastructure by tens of billions of dollars over the next few years.

Meanwhile, shares in veterinary pharmaceuticals group Dechra have fallen nearly a third over the same time frame. The virus outbreak is unlikely to impact the demand for veterinary medicines over the long run. That could make them a great addition to a Stocks and Shares ISA.

Then there’s Tritax Big Box REIT. This is an owner of the so-called big box real estate assets. These help companies facilitate e-commerce logistics. Therefore, while Tritax might not escape the virus outbreak unscathed, the booming demand for e-commerce and delivery services will provide some cushion. Supermarkets are already warning they might struggle to keep up with demand if current trends continue.

While it looks as if some companies will see reduced demand for their services, due to the coronavirus outbreak, others are unlikely to suffer the same impact. As such, now could be an excellent time for investors to snap up a share of these businesses.

I’m particularly interested in infrastructure assets and diversified investment funds as investments for my Stocks and Shares ISA. Infrastructure is particularly attractive because infrastructure investors make decisions with multi-decade time horizons. This suggests the current market upset will be just a blip on these businesses’ track records. 

With infrastructure spending now also at the top of the government’s agenda, it’s highly likely this sector will continue to produce attractive returns for investors for many years to come.

It’s ugly out there…

The threat posed by the coronavirus outbreak has spooked global markets, sending stock prices reeling.

And with the Covid-19 virus now beginning to spread beyond of China and Italy, it seems very likely that the bull market we’ve enjoyed over the past decade could finally be coming to an end.

Against such a backdrop of market worry, it’s little wonder that many investors are starting to panic. (After all, nobody likes to see the value of their portfolio fall significantly in such a short space of time.)

Fortunately, The Motley Fool is here to help, and you don’t have to face this alone…

Download a FREE copy of our Bear Market Survival Guide today and discover the five steps you can take right now to try and bolster your portfolio… including how you can even aim to turn today’s market uncertainty to your advantage.

Click here to claim your free copy of this Motley Fool report now.


Rupert Hargreaves owns no share mentioned. The Motley Fool UK has recommended Tritax Big Box REIT. Views expressed on the companies mentioned in this article are those of the writer and therefore may differ from the official recommendations we make in our subscription services such as Share Advisor, Hidden Winners and Pro. Here at The Motley Fool we believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors.

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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.


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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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