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By Suzanne McGee

(Reuters) – The weakening of a long-established correlation between the price of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tied to gold and gold mining stocks have investors eyeing a range of potential causes, including massive buying from global central banks and shortfalls in gold production.

The SPDR Gold Shares ETF, which tracks the price of gold, has rallied 9.82% this year, driven by concerns about inflation and economic growth as well as geopolitical turbulence. Yet those gains have not been reflected in the share prices of gold miners: the iShares MSCI Global Gold Miners ETF and the VanEck Gold Miners ETF, which track the shares of gold producers, are up only 2.28% and 1.7% respectively.

More broadly, the correlation between gold prices and gold miners’ shares stands at 0.6 in 2023, down from a historical level of 0.8, according to data from VettaFi going back a decade. A figure of 1 signifies a perfect positive correlation, while zero signals absolutely no link.

“Interest in gold just hasn’t been carrying over into interest in the companies that actually produce it,” said Imaru Casanova, portfolio manager for the gold and precious metals investment strategy at VanEck. “It’s puzzling; we’re scratching our heads.”

One reason, according to Casanova, is a multi-year buying spree from the world’s central banks, which purchased more than 1,100 tonnes of gold last year, according to the World Gold Council. That buying, the largest recorded amount since 1950, helped propel gold to an 11-year record in 2022.

In spite of a third-quarter dip in central bank buying, the World Gold Council still expects 2023 purchases to approach last year’s levels.

By contrast, production shortfalls have weighed on some gold miners’ bottom lines and hurt their share prices, said Roxanna Islam, associate director of research at VettaFi.”

“Gold prices can only help so much, if you can’t produce the gold in the first place,” said Islam.

Production at Newmont Corp., which has a nearly 16% weighting in the iShares mining ETF, will likely fall short of analysts’ expectations this year after a just-settled strike at its Penasquito mine in Mexico.

Other factors are also dampening the production outlook. “Gold mining companies have been spending heavily on exploration and production but are barely able to sustain current production levels,” said George Milling-Stanley, chief gold strategist at State Street Global Advisors.

Even Barrick Gold, which reported a 3% gain in gold production in the third quarter, said overall output in 2023 won’t meet expectations. The company’s annual production hovers around half of its 2006 peak of 8.64 million ounces.

The dip in the broader market over the last several months, which has pushed the S&P 500 some 5% below its July highs despite a recent bounce, has also weighed on miners’ shares – even as it bolstered the appeal of gold to haven-seeking investors.

“Investors seem very wary of stocks as a whole, and gold miners have been tracking that rather than what’s happening in gold itself,” said Casanova.

(Reporting by Suzanne McGee; Editing by Ira Iosebashvili and Chizu Nomiyama)

By Krystal Hu and Anna Tong

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -OpenAI unveiled a marketplace on Monday that enables users to access personalized artificial intelligence “apps” for tasks like teaching math or designing stickers, signaling an ambition to expand its consumer business.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared the updates at the AI lab’s first developer conference, which attracted 900 developers from around the world and marked the company’s latest attempt to capitalize on the popularity of ChatGPT by offering incentives to build in its ecosystem.

ChatGPT, launched in November 2022, now has 100 million weekly active users, Altman said.

OpenAI is calling the customized AI apps “GPTs”, which the company said are early versions of AI assistants that perform real-world tasks, such as booking flights, on behalf of a user.

It will launch a GPT Store later this month where people can share their GPTs and earn money based on the number of users. It’s a renewed effort from the company’s failed attempts to build an ecosystem of ChatGPT plugins earlier this year.

“Eventually, you’ll just ask the computer for what you need, and it’ll do all of these tasks for you,” Altman said in his keynote speech at the event in San Francisco.

“We really believe that gradual iterative deployment is the best way to address the safety challenges of AI. We think it’s especially important to move carefully towards this future.”

In addition to GPTs, OpenAI also released a slew of developer-focused updates, including significant cost slashing, an announcement met with loud cheers from the audience.

‘HUGE BOOM’

Even before attendees were allowed to check in early Monday morning, hundreds had lined up around the block in the Mid-Market neighborhood of San Francisco. Most were developers already using OpenAI technology who wanted updates.

The YouTube live stream of Altman’s speech attracted more than 40,000 viewers, and some even set up watch parties.

For its 2 million developers, OpenAI announced a new GPT-4 Turbo model, which compared to its predecessor GPT-4 is several orders of magnitude cheaper and processes much more data.

It unveiled assistant application programming interfaces (APIs) with vision and image modalities, confirming a Reuters report. It also launched a beta program for developers to fine-tune GPT-4 models.

“It’s a huge boom for startups like us. All of a sudden, our costs went down by a factor of three X, which is huge,” said Flo Crivello, the founder of AI assistant startup Lindy and one of the attendees at the conference.

Crivello also acknowledged Lindy could be competing with OpenAI’s upcoming GPT bots, calling his startup’s relationship with OpenAI “complicated.”

Speaking to the media on Monday, Altman warned startups using OpenAI’s technology against building applications that only have simple integrations with OpenAI.

“We are planning to build the obvious features,” he said. “But there’s enormous value to building a deeper integration on top of OpenAI.”

Altman said he envisions a future where each person has multiple GPTs that can work together to accomplish tasks on their behalf.

OpenAI wants more enterprises and developers to build models to rival those developed by Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google, and open source models such as Meta Platforms’ Llama. It also competes for enterprise customers with Microsoft.

Satya Nadella, the CEO of OpenAI backer Microsoft, made a brief, surprise appearance at the conference, reiterating his support for the expensive race in building foundation models. Microsoft has invested more than $10 billion in OpenAI.

“We commit ourselves deeply to making sure you all, as builders of these foundation models, have not only the best systems for training and inference, but the most compute so that you can keep pushing forward on the frontier,” he said.

To address the concerns of big enterprises, OpenAI launched its Custom Models program, offering to create custom GPT-4 models at an “expensive” price.

It matched offers from Google and Microsoft to cover any legal costs incurred by claims around copyright infringement for enterprise users.

(Reporting by Krystal Hu and Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Paul Simao and Stephen Coates)

(Corrects story keyword used by media customers)

(Reuters) -Kinder Morgan on Monday announced that it would acquire NextEra Energy Partner’s South Texas assets, STX Midstream, for $1.82 billion.

(Reporting by Seher Dareen in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)

By Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) – General Electric’s aerospace unit agreed on Monday to pay $9.4 million to settle federal government claims that a Massachusetts plant sold parts to the U.S. Army and Navy that were not properly inspected or did not meet specifications.

The U.S. Department of Justice said GE Aerospace’s plant in Lynn, Massachusetts, skipped at least two inspections, did not consistently use functional gauges to inspect features on some parts, and sold engines that contained improper metal fragments.

Investigators said failing to conduct inspections and selling nonconforming parts could compromise military hardware and national security, and even endanger service personnel.

The settlement resolves claims that Evendale, Ohio-based GE Aerospace violated the federal False Claims Act, the government’s primary legal means to address alleged fraud it experiences, between July 2014 and December 2019.

GE Aerospace was credited in the settlement for its cooperation and remediation efforts, which the company said began more than five years ago. About $5.4 million of the settlement constituted restitution.

“Safety is our top priority,” GE Aerospace said in a statement. “While these issues had no impact on the safety of the aircraft involved, we implemented significant corrective actions to ensure this does not occur again.”

GE, based in Boston, in 2021 announced plans to split into three companies focused on aviation, energy and healthcare.

It spun off the healthcare business in January, and plans to spin off the energy business in next year’s second quarter. GE would thereafter become a pure-play aviation company known as GE Aerospace.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

(Reuters) – More automakers signed up to access Tesla’s electric-vehicle charging infrastructure across the United States, taking the Elon Musk-led company’s superchargers closer to becoming the industry standard.

Texas has approved a plan to require EV charging companies to include Tesla’s plug if they want to be eligible for federal funds.

Tesla’s North American Charging Standard is more widely available and reliable than rival charging network CCS, which is backed by automakers such as Volkswagen and Hyundai Motor.

Here is a list of the companies adopting NACS:

Company Type Announcement Adoption

Ford Motor Automaker 2025

May 2023

General Motors Automaker 2025

June 2023

Rivian Automotive Automaker 2025

June 2023

Volvo Cars Automaker 2025

June 2023

Polestar Automaker 2025

June 2023

Mercedez-Benz Automaker 2024

July 2023

Nissan Automaker 2025

July 2023

Honda Motor Automaker 2025

Sept 2023

Jaguar Automaker 2025

Sept 2023

Hyundai Motor Automaker 2024

Oct 2023

Kia America Automaker 2024

Oct 2023

BMW North America Automaker 2025

Oct 2023

MINI Automaker 2025

Oct 2023

Rolls-Royce Automaker 2025

Oct 2023

Toyota Automaker 2025

Oct 2023

Subaru Automaker 2025

Nov 2023

Lucid

Group Automaker Nov 2023 2025

SK Signet Charger 2023

maker June 2023

ChargePoint Charger 2023

Holdings maker June 2023

Blink Charging Charger 2023

maker June 2023

Tritium DCFC Charger 2023

maker June 2023

EVgo Charger 2023

maker June 2023

ABB Inc Charger Not

maker June 2023 Specifie

d

Wallbox Charger 2023

maker June 2023

Electrify America Charger 2025

maker June 2023

Fisker EV 2025

developer August 2023

List of U.S. states that have either mandated Tesla’s charging tech or plan to:

U.S. states Approval

Texas Texas approved plans to require

companies to include Tesla’s

technology in EV charging stations

to be eligible for federal funds

despite opposition.

Kentucky Kentucky mandated Tesla’s plug for

state-backed charging stations,

according to documents reviewed by

Reuters.

Washington Washington state plans to require

EV charging companies to include

Tesla’s plug if they want to be

part of a state program to

electrify highways using federal

dollars.

Florida Florida will mandate NACS one year

after standards body SAE

International, which is reviewing

the technology, formally recognizes

it.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram and Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Chavi Mehta, Yuvraj Malik and Mehr Bedi; Editing by Devika Syamnath and Arun Koyyur)

Elon Musk Unveils Grok To Rival ChatGPT and Bard on AI Powered Chatbots

Elon Musk has come through on his initial call for a third force to rival Google and Microsoft on artificial intelligence. Earlier in the year, he called for a third horse to rival the tech giants on concerns over the advances being made that require a lot of scrutiny and regulation. Grok is Musk’s new AI tool out of his AI company xAI. The chatbot is poised to take OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Bard Musk has been accused of being politically biased.

Musk AI Company

Grok is the new AI-powered chatbot with a rebellious streak and the ability to answer any question. In a world where most chatbots are designed or programmed to be politically correct with their responses, Grok should be able to answer questions that other AI chatbots dodge.

xAI has emerged as Musk’s go-to Artificial Intelligence Company as he seeks to play a pivotal role amid the artificial intelligence revolution. The company, which came into being in July, is stacked up with experience, with most of its staff being former employees of OpenAI DeepMind, among others. The startup has set out to build artificial intelligence to advance the collective understanding of the universe.

Reports indicate that Musk runs xAI separately from other companies. However, the technology being developed will be used in other businesses. For starters, Tesla is increasingly leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance its self-driving features.

Leading up to its release, Musk outlined how Grok was able to provide a recipe for homemade cocaine, signaling its ability to provide answers to queries that other tools would often decline or dodge. “Just a moment while I pull up the recipe for homemade cocaine. You know, because I’m totally going to help you with that,” Grok responded while requesting the cocaine recipe.

Grok also proved its prowess in middle school math problems and Python coding tasks, having surpassed other models in its computing class. The fact that it beat ChatGPT 3.5 and Inflection underscores its edge in the segment.

Musk AI Chatbot

In a bid to strengthen Grok’s competitive edge and ability to provide answers to clarity, it will have access to a vast pool of data including X, the social networking app that Musk acquired for $44 billion. The prototype is still under development in the beta phase and available to a select number of users before its release to a broader population

Currently, xAI is accepting early users through a waitlist as it continues to fine-tune it to take on ChatGPT and Bard have remained the go-to chatbots for the better part of the year. Nevertheless, it is highly unlikely that Grok will be available to all users once development is complete. Musk says that it will be a feature of X premium+ and will cost $16 a month.

Even as Musk continues working on artificial intelligence innovations, he has warned of the dangers that the technology poses to the human race. He has already termed it the biggest existential threat, given that it is moving too fast, like summoning the demon. Similarly, he has called for more regulation of the burgeoning AI landscape.

LONDON (Reuters) – Big U.S. investors at the top five western oil firms’ shareholder meetings this year rebuffed an activist group’s resolutions to align their emission targets with the Paris climate pact, in contrast to some European peers, voting data showed.

Netherlands-based activist group Follow This was created first to target Shell and subsequently expanded to file climate resolutions at other western majors including BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and TotalEnergies.

According to the data published by it and investors, giant U.S. investors BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and JPMorgan all voted against the Follow This resolutions this year.

The resolutions asked the groups to align their 2030 end-use emissions targets with the Paris goal of keeping warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, which scientists say will mean cutting greenhouse gas emissions by around 43% from 2019 levels.

France’s Amundi and Britain’s HSBC voted in favour of the activist group at all five energy companies, while Switzerland’s UBS voted in favour of its resolution for all apart from BP.

Germany’s Allianz supported Follow This at Chevron’s and Exxon’s meetings.

“Investors hold the key to tackling the climate crisis with their shareholder voting power at Big Oil. Amundi, Allianz, and UBS use their voting power to mitigate the climate crisis,” said Follow This founder Mark van Baal.

In 2022, Follow This resolutions received between 15% and 33% of the votes at the big five excluding TotalEnergies, where it did not file a resolution that year. This year, it received between 10% and 30% support at the five firms.

Britain’s Legal & General IM voted against Follow This across the board this year, after supporting the activist resolution for Chevron and Exxon at last year’s shareholder gatherings.

This mirrors big shareholder proxy voting firm Glass Lewis and ISS, which changed some of their recommendations for this year to the detriment of Follow This, including withdrawing support for the activist resolution at Chevron.

(Reporting by Shadia Nasralla; Editing by Jan Harvey)

By Krystal Hu and Anna Tong

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -OpenAI said on Monday it will enable ChatGPT users to build customized AI bots called GPTs to handle specific tasks, and it has slashed costs on more powerful models for developers.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared the updates at the artificial-intelligence lab’s first developer conference, which attracted 900 developers from around the world and marked the company’s latest attempt to capitalize on the popularity of ChatGPT by offering both developers and average users incentives to build in its ecosystem. ChatGPT, launched in November 2022, now has 100 million weekly active users, Altman said.

OpenAI is launching a marketplace for GPTs, which are AI agents that will allow ChatGPT to book flights and perform other tasks when commanded by a human without close supervision.

It will launch a GPT Store later this month where people can share their GPTs and earn money based on the number of users. It’s a renewed effort from the company’s failed attempts to build an ecosystem of ChatGPT plugins earlier this year.

“Eventually, you’ll just ask the computer for what you need, and it’ll do all of these tasks for you,” Altman said in his keynote speech at the event in San Francisco.

“We really believe that gradual iterative deployment is the best way to address the safety challenges of AI. We think it’s especially important to move carefully towards this future of agents.”

‘HUGE BOOM’

Even before attendees were allowed to check in early Monday morning, hundreds had lined up around the block in the Mid-Market neighborhood in downtown San Francisco. Most were developers who already were using OpenAI technology and wanted updates. The YouTube live stream of Altman’s speech attracted more than 40,000 viewers.

For its 2 million developers, OpenAI announced a new GPT-4 Turbo model and slashed the cost by more than 50%. It unveiled assistant application programming interfaces (APIs) with vision and image modalities, confirming a Reuters report. It also launched a beta program for developers to fine-tune GPT-4 models.

“It’s a huge boom for startups like us. All of a sudden, our costs went down by a factor of three X, which is huge,” said Flo Crivello, the founder of AI assistant startup Lindy and one of the attendees at the conference.

Crivello also acknowledged Lindy could be competing with OpenAI’s upcoming GPT bots, calling his startup’s relationship with OpenAI “complicated.”.

Speaking to the media on Monday, Altman warned startups using OpenAI’s technology against building applications that only have simple integrations with OpenAI.

“We are planning to build the obvious features,” he said. “But there’s enormous value to building a deeper integration on top of OpenAI.”

Altman said he envisions a future where each person has multiple GPTs that can work together to accomplish tasks on their behalf.

OpenAI wants more enterprises and developers to build models to rival those developed by Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google, and open source models such as Meta Platforms’ Llama. It also competes for enterprise customers with Microsoft.

Satya Nadella, the CEO of OpenAI backer Microsoft, made a brief, surprise appearance at the conference, reiterating his support for the expensive race in building foundation models. Microsoft has invested more than $10 billion in OpenAI.

“We commit ourselves deeply to making sure you all, as builders of these foundation models, have not only the best systems for training and inference, but the most compute so that you can keep pushing forward on the frontier,” he said.

To address data and price concerns of big enterprises, OpenAI launched its Custom Models program, offering a dedicated group of researchers to train custom GPT-4 for them.

It matched offers from Google and Microsoft to cover any legal costs incurred by claims around copyright infringement for enterprise users.

(Reporting by Krystal Hu and Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Richard Chang, Matthew Lewis and Paul Simao)

Top New Year Resolution Trades to Consider

We’re again nearing the holiday season.

And that means that it’s time to start looking at some of the top New Year Resolution ideas, as we do every year.  In the next few weeks, there’s Halloween, when we eat more of the candy we hand out at the door.  Then, there’s Thanksgiving, where we eat until we pass out from too much tryptophan. And then there’s the December holidays, and New Year’s Eve and Day.

Around this time of year, about 90% of us, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine, make a resolution to lose weight, diet, and exercise more. All as millions of us begin to worry about our expanding waistlines, and promise ourselves next year will be different. 

Many of us will join Weight Watchers, or WW, or even Medifast.  Or, they’ll look to join a gym.

Look at Planet Fitness (PLNT) for example.  

For the last several years, the stock tends to take off around the holidays.  It’s even starting to do so again now after plummeting. We saw it take off in late 2020, in late 2021, and again in late 2022.  Now, we’re seeing it happen again

We may even see similar moves in oversold stocks like Medifast, which currently sits at double bottom support. Even Weight Watchers is starting to push aggressively higher. In fact, after bottoming out around $7.45, it could push higher again.

These are just a few of the stocks you may want to look into as we near New Year 2024.

By Gloria Dickie and Valerie Volcovici

Countries moved a step closer on Saturday to getting a fund off the ground to help poor states damaged by climate disasters, despite reservations from developing nations and the United States. 

The deal to create a “loss and damage” fund was hailed as a breakthrough for developing country negotiators at United Nations climate talks in Egypt last year, overcoming years of resistance from wealthy nations.

But in the past 11 months, governments have struggled to reach consensus on the details of the fund, such as who will pay and where the fund will be located. 

A special U.N. committee tasked with implementing the fund met for a fifth time in Abu Dhabi this week – following a deadlock in Egypt last month – to finalise recommendations that will be put to governments when they meet for the annual climate summit COP28 in Dubai in less than four weeks’ time. The goal is to get the fund up and running by 2024. 

The committee, representing a geographically diverse group of countries, resolved to recommend the World Bank serve as trustee and host of the fund – a tension point that has fuelled divisions between developed and developing nations.

Housing a fund at the World Bank, whose presidents are appointed by the U.S., would give donor countries outsized influence over the fund and result in high fees for recipient countries, developing countries have argued.

To get all countries on board, it was agreed the World Bank would serve as interim trustee and host of the fund for a four-year period.

Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s special climate envoy, said in a post on X that Berlin “stands ready to fulfil its responsibility – we’re actively working towards contributing to the new fund and assessing options for more structural sources of financing”.

Others were less optimistic.

“It is a sombre day for climate justice, as rich countries turn their backs on vulnerable communities,” said Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at nonprofit Climate Action Network International.

“Rich countries … have not only coerced developing nations into accepting the World Bank as the host of the Loss and Damage Fund but have also evaded their duty to lead in providing financial assistance to those communities and countries.”

The committee also recommended that developed countries be urged to continue to provide support to the fund, but failed to resolve whether wealthy nations would be under strict financial obligation to do chip in.

“We regret that the text does not reflect consensus concerning the need for clarity on the voluntary nature of contributions,” a U.S. State Department official told Reuters.

The U.S. attempted to include a footnote clarifying that any contributions to the fund would be voluntary, but the committee chair did not allow it. The U.S. objected to that denial.

Sultan al-Jaber, who will preside over the COP28 talks, said he welcomed the committee’s recommendations and that they would pave the way for an agreement at COP28. 

(Reporting by Gloria Dickie in London and Valerie Volcovici in Washington DC; Editing by Andrew Heavens)