@GSElevator – #1: If you need a list of instructions for the work Christmas party then go ahead and get wild, you’re going to get fired soon anyway.
1. Quote Of The Week / 2. Click-And-Mortar Overtakes Brick-And-Mortar/strong> / 3. Holding Ten Baggers Is Harder Than It Looks / 4. Interesting Links / 5. Joke Of The Week
1. QUOTE OF THE WEEK
From the FT… China Healthcare: Missing a beat
- Chairman of the Novartis China
2. CLICK-AND-MORTAR OVERTAKES BRICK-AND-MORTAR
For the first time ever in retail’s biggest weekend, more people shopped online in the U.S. than went to brick-and-mortar stores. The keystone for brick-and-mortar stores has long been instant in-store availability of products for immediate use. But online retailers are partnering with an ever expanding array of options for rapid delivery. Retailers that fail to embrace online and mobile shopping will fail to survive.
On Monday, a new single-day record was set with the online purchases of more than $3 billion in goods. Online sales are even more dramatic in China, where Singles Day last month saw online sales soar 55% to $14.3 billion - 70% of which were made on mobile devices. In the US, IBM Watson reports that mobile devices accounted for 36% of total online purchase value on Black Friday and 57% of all online shopping traffic.
Over 103 million people in the U.S. shopped online over Thanksgiving weekend, while less than 102 million shopped in stores. ShopperTrak estimates that sales in brick-and-mortar stores over the 4-day holiday weekend fell 10.4% this year to $20.43 billion. By contrast, online sales rose 19.8% on Thanksgiving and 12.1% on Black Friday for an overall 2-day gain of 14.3%, according to First Data.
A Jeffries’ survey that found twice as many people expect to shop exclusively online this holiday season as in physical stores alone—36% to 18%. The startling statistic hidden in the metric is that 82% of respondents plan to shop online this holiday season. Generation Z is about to disrupt retail… by 2020 people born in the late 1990s will be the largest group of shoppers worldwide…[they are] impatient shoppers quick to dismiss companies that can’t cater to their whims.
3. HOLDING TEN BAGGERS IS HARDER THAN IT LOOKS
A common theme among the decade’s biggest winners; they tended to be very expensive relative to their peers based on traditional valuation metrics. Today I want to look at another trait these winners share, volatility and big drawdowns.
A few things stand out in this table:
- Nine of the ten biggest winners were all cut in half. Even the best stocks gave investors plenty of sleepless nights.
- Even though these winners returned 23x what the S&P 500 did, only Apple and Priceline hit all-time highs more often.
- The average standard deviation for these stocks was more than twice that of the S&P 500. No pain, no gain.
- These stocks spent on average 34% of the time in “bear market territory”. A third of the time more than 20% off their all-time high.
4. INTERESTING LINKS
TV really does rot your brain [NPR]; T.Boone Pickens interviews Carl Ichan [YouTube]; Notes and thesis from Ira Sohn London [marketfolly]; Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics interviews Ben Bernanke [Freakonomics Radio]; Seasonality in momentum strategies [alphaarchitect]; US listed Chinese firms re-listing in China [WSJ].
5. JOKE OF THE WEEK
