Traditional retail from high end to low is struggling. That includes department stores, single brand outposts, outlets, big boxes, and malls. Spending on traditional categories like apparel is down. The proliferation of online buying options means it’s harder to figure out how bricks and mortar should work. Observers always pay attention to changing consumer demand […]
News & Insights
Get Ready For Brand China
The rub with China has always been they are excellent at volume manufacturing but when it comes to developing global brands they are non-starters. Li-Ning the famous Chinese gymnast tried to develop a global athletic brand to rival Nike and Adidas. No traction so far. Apple earns the lion’s share of the profits from its […]
Seeking: Easy Work, No Heavy Lifting
Mark Twain is famous for saying, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”. The best and truest wisdom has no sell-by date. Timeless wisdom holds true regardless of the time or circumstance. Charles Ellis is one of Wall Street’s most noted observers. The following piece is from a speech he gave in Toronto in […]
The 2-Minute Thought: On National Identity
Image source: Wikipedia What makes a German identify with being European as well? Why did Corsican separatists lose their passion for independence from France after European Union? Do the youths of South Korea identify more with being citizens of South Korea than they do with being ethnic Koreans (in North or South Korea)? For their […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Is It Time To Buy Bank Stocks?
Source: Marketwatch It’s hard to be a bank. It has been since the financial crisis. It was really hard in 2008-09; it was hard in 2011 when people thought Europe was coming undone; it’s hard now too. Year to date, the KBW Bank Index (blue line in above chart) is vastly underperforming the broad market […]
On China capital outflows . . . the U.S. middle class . . . no more quarterly earnings guidance?
Some notable quotes from what we’ve been reading today: “Private citizens [in China] are now allowed to take up to $50,000 per year out of the country. If just one of every 20 Chinese citizens exercised this option, China’s foreign-exchange reserves would be wiped out.” -Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard economics professor in “The Great Escape […]
The Gifts That Keep On Giving…And Giving…And Giving…
Online sales have come of age. We all know this. Check out the chart at the bottom. Sales have grown explosively. According the MasterCard Advisors it is expected that online sales grew by 20% in 2015. Logistics companies like FedEx and UPS have been running like crazy trying to get everything delivered on time. Not […]
Gentlemen Please…Please…Start Your Engines
The world has gotten off to a pretty nervous start here in 2016. As of this writing the Shanghai Stock Exchange is down 16% year to date and the S&P 500 has hit “correction” territory, down 10% from its highs. So what gives in the Middle Kingdom? China, as the chart below shows, has slowed […]
Surprise! 2016 May Be Different
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said there are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know and those who don’t know they don’t know. Yet every year, strategists and commentators go through a New Year’s ritual of making bold, often mistaken predictions about the economy, markets, and geopolitics. Given their poor track record, a cynic […]
What Investors Should Do Now
Investors are not very good at handling market downturns. Research has shown that we feel the pain associated with investment losses more acutely than the pleasure of gains. Our ability to stick to a carefully considered investment plan deteriorates as losses mount and perhaps most dangerously, our reactions lag economic reality (see graph below). Consider […]
Coffee and Chocolate – What’s Not to Like?
In the investing world, popular opinion is not always your friend. Investors’ tend to “follow the herd” and this often leads to overpriced securities and ultimately, poor investment returns. But with recipes, things are a little different. The best are handed down from generation to generation. In the kitchen, follow the herd. Our recipe this […]
A Botanist’s Delight
In the old days, and I mean really old days, 150 million years ago, India was attached to Africa. It split off and moved east to where it is today and on its way it left Madagascar all by itself in the Indian Ocean. The island is not that well known but if you are […]
