In case you missed it, the biggest finance story of the week is the Bureau of Meteorology’s $96 million taxpayer-funded website rebrand.

I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I read it, mostly because Sam fights me tooth and nail to spend $100 on design at TDA.

Anyway, I won’t air co-founder disagreements this publicly, but I will say that there are 960 thousand hundreds in 96 million.

Onto the news we go.

If you’re feeling like Black Friday sales are flooding every single part of your life, you’re not alone.

The sales that began this week (but… did they?) are projected to be worth a record $6.8 billion for the Australian economy, an increase of 4% from last year.

Black Friday is the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, which is held on the fourth Thursday of November, and is seen to officially begin the holiday shopping period. Traditionally, the sales run from the Friday until the following Monday, but recent years have seen retailers begin the sales weeks earlier.

The term is believed to have originated in the Philadelphia police force in the 1960s, who saw an influx of people from the suburbs to the city on the day after each Thanksgiving to watch the annual Army-Navy football game. Inundated with shoppers on the same day, retailers followed suit and began offering discounts to entice sales. 

Both the name and the sales went national from the 1980s onwards, before heading overseas as brands hoped to cash in on global markets. Apple was among the first major retailers to offer Black Friday deals in Australia in 2013, and the practice has only grown since then.

The term was originally quite controversial in Australia as it had long referred to the devastating Victorian bushfires of 1938/39, which killed at least 71 people and destroyed more than 1,000 houses.

Almost half of Australian retailers now say that Black Friday has overtaken Boxing Day as Australia’s biggest sales event, according to a survey by Xero. Despite that, the survey found that less than 40% of retailers are planning on participating, down 22% from last year, many citing an inability to compete with larger retailers.

As Black Friday has grown, so too have consumers’ expectations. Until recently, an average discount of 20% across ranges was enough to catch shoppers’ attention, but that has now grown to 30%, according to a global survey by Boston Consulting Group.

The survey also found that more than half of people will be using the sales to stock up on essentials as they feel the pinch of the cost-of-living, and that nearly half have used or are planning on using AI to help with comparing products, finding deals or researching items. 

Men are expected to outspend women during this year’s sales, with an average purchase value of $882, $132 more than the average that women are expected to spend.

Our take? Black Friday is an excellent opportunity to unsubscribe from retailers you no longer want to hear from (because no doubt you’ve heard from them this week)!

Reporting by Lachlan Keller.

Last week, semiconductor manufacturer Nvidia released its third-quarter earnings, reporting a significant increase in revenue and profit. The figures came amid ongoing speculation of a growing AI “bubble”.

Not sure what any of this means and why you should care? Let’s jump into it!

A good place to start this story is by explaining Nvidia, the company that posted its results last week. Nvidia is the world’s most valuable publicly traded company (and the world’s first $US5 trillion company - who knew that was a record to be beaten!).

It is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of graphics processing units (GPUs). All you need to know about that acronym is that it is the technology that underpins much of the AI industry.

Nvidia’s stock reached an all-time high last month, before dropping in November. This was in line with broader trends across tech stocks. Throughout November, technology stocks have had their worst performance in months. The Nasdaq, a stock market index that tracks America’s largest companies (and most of those are tech companies), fell about 3% over one week.

Well, there are concerns that we might be seeing an AI bubble. A market bubble occurs when stock prices rise far above what they're actually worth based on a company's real performance.

The classic example is the dot-com bubble from the late 90s. Internet companies saw their stock prices skyrocket based purely on excitement about the internet, even though most had no profits. When that bubble burst in March 2000, the tech-heavy Nasdaq index fell 77%.

So essentially, there are concerns that the same thing could be happening with AI. In 2025 alone, the world's largest tech companies are expected to spend between $US300-400 billion on AI.

Despite this spending, it's not yet clear whether AI will generate enough revenue and profits long-term to justify these massive investments. Put simply, the demand hasn't yet translated into profits.

Predicting a bubble isn’t a perfect science, but there are some signs that have people worried.

Michael Burry, the investor who famously predicted the 2008 housing market collapse and was depicted in ‘The Big Short’, recently disclosed that his fund purchased over $US1 billion in bets against Nvidia. 

Essentially, he's betting that Nvidia's stock price will fall significantly. Peter Thiel, another billionaire tech investor, sold his entire Nvidia stake last week, worth about $US100 million. 

If any of you dear readers have the answer, we’d love to have it, because we could all make a lot of money. Basically, nobody really knows. The Nvidia revenue results were higher than expected, which allayed some concerns of a bubble. 

However, Nvidia is investing directly in AI companies — some of which are its own companies, such as OpenAI, and Elon Musk’s xAI, developer of the chatbot Grok. Critics argue this is unsustainably propping up sales, but many of these company heads say this partnership is critical to maintaining access to Nvidia’s chips. Elsewhere, concerns over rising energy costs and supply chain constraints could prevent Nvidia from reaching future sales targets.

And if that wasn’t enough, overnight, Nvidia’s share price tanked again, after it was reported that Meta may spend billions on Google's AI chips (i.e. not Nvidia).

So, long story short? Nobody can say for sure what’s happening. In the meantime, go watch ‘The Big Short’ again. It rocks.

Reporting by Lachlan Keller.

This week, Go-To founder Zoe Foster-Blake announced her company would retire its children’s brand Gro-To. Marketed as gentle skincare products for babies and kids, the brand sold body oil, lotion, bubble bath and shampoo.

In a post to Instagram, the Foster-Blake said: “Gro-To deserves better than we can give her. Delivering three brands to the high standard our customers expect is no longer sustainable”.

It’s been an interesting time in the news cycle for children’s skincare brands, with fellow founder Shay Mitchell in the U.S. facing backlash over her new brand, Rini.