Amazon Ads

  • Pictured below are Ebay and Amazon pages.
  • Staggeringly, everything shaded in blue is an ad.
  • Both have now replaced product recommendations with advertising.
  • It makes sense as surveys show nearly 50% of product searches start on Amazon.
  • Amazon’s advertising business now likely has the same profitability as its cloud business.

Holding Winners is Hard

  • A nice article showing that holding winners is a trying experience.
  • For example Amazon – “The near-95% crash following the tech bust is the one most people point to. The stock was underwater from 1999 to 2009! But there was a 54% crash from 2005-2006, a 58% dive in 2008 and 5 separate losses of 25% or worse since 2009.
  • Why is it so hard – “Since 1980, more than 40% of all companies in the U.S. stock market have experienced a decline of 70% or worse without recovering.
  • This link has a full analysis of the business “failures” 2017-2020 which is worth reading.

UK Retail

  • Nearly 11,000 stores (defined as retail, restaurant and leisure premises) permanently disappeared from UK retail landscape last year.
  • This is largely coming from chain stores (-9,877) with the independent market shrinking only (-1,442).
  • The article does say that many more remain temporarily closed so the full impact is not clear.

Mortgage Payments

  • Alternative way of looking at the US housing market – suggesting it isn’t as frothy as it seems.
  • Adjusted for inflation and interest rates, using median house prices and a 20% downpayment the monthly mortgage payment in the US has actually come down over time.
  • This is especially so if you adjust for the “quality” of the median house.

Growth Premium and Interest Rates

  • Chart from Empirical Research shows price paid for growth (P/E multiple divided by trailing 5 year revenue growth) against the term premium in the bond market.
  • We’re now exiting a unique period of negative term premiums and growth multiples are still high. As a result, growth stocks are at risk for possibly minor changes in perceptions of future interest rates and inflation, irrespective of what the Fed decides to do and when.

Movies

  • Movies are the second most popular out of home experience in the US.
  • the industry sold 1 billion movie theater tickets in the United States, 1 billion. It’s the third most popular out-of-home — sorry, it’s the second most popular out-of-home experience in the United States. Other than going out to eat a meal in a restaurant. If you take the attendance of all 5 major professional sports leagues together, all 150-ish teams, all sports, all games, all season long, movie theaters sold 7x the quantity of every sports event tickets sold in the United States in 2019.Source.

WeWork Resurrection

  • WeWork is trying to go public again, this time via a SPAC.
  • Below is a link to their investment deck. Lots of interesting data.
  • The company lost $1.7bn last year but expects things to improve as normal conditions return.
  • They believe a WeWork solution would save 26% vs. the cost of traditional real-estate.
  • The transaction puts enterprise value at $9bn or 6.6x adjusted 2023E EBITDA.
  • There are a lot of adjustments to EBITDA that need to be looked into and SPAC transactions have issues, but on the surface that looks a lot more reasonable than the peak valuation of $47bn.

a16z Marketplace 100: 2021

  • The latest edition of the top 100 private/start-up consumer facing marketplaces using Bloomberg real-time consumer spending data.
  • A lot has changed in 2020 for obvious reasons. The full report is here.
  • Interesting to see Turo at number 9 (up 5 places), which is an investment (they own ca. 26.8%) by IAC that few talk about.

Inflation Extrapolation

  • Nice chart from KKR showing how investors in the 2000s have over-extrapolated the persistence of early cycle inflation.
  • The reason this happens is early cycle pops in commodity prices and disposable incomes don’t flow through to core consumer prices.
  • Consumer goods themselves are also only a quarter of core CPI.
  • See page 17 of the report for details.
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