Stocks

Interesting, and often contrarian, Snippets on individual companies and the stock market.

Stocks

Cardboard Demand Plummets

  • “Demand and output for cardboard boxes and other packaging material fell sharply in the fourth quarter of 2022“.
  • “the most severe quarterly decline since the Great Financial Crisis (2Q09).”
  • Operating rates have fallen as a result leaving 20% of capacity idle. Excess inventory (which has fallen) remains high.
  • “To Josephson, the end of 2022 in the packaging world had “echoes of the Great Financial Crisis everywhere one looks,” he wrote in the Sunday note“.
  • Source (h/t).
Stocks

RISC-V

  • RISC-V, the royalty-free open-source instruction set architecture, is worth keeping an eye on especially as Arm convulses its way back to the stock market.
  • The December 2022 summit (and this great write-up) offered a deep feel of the status of RISC-V.
  • Bold statements abounded – “It’s really important that you get this. RISC-V is inevitable. RISC-V is going to have the best processors. And RISC-V is going to have the best ecosystem.”
Stocks

Bottom Fishing

  • Nice chart from JPM
  • “As shown below, in the history of US recessions (with the exception of the dot-com collapse of 2001), equity markets bottomed well before the bottom in GDP, payrolls, S&P 500 earnings and housing starts and the peak in household/corporate delinquencies. The ISM survey has been the most reliable coincident indicator of a bottom in equities“.
Stocks

Gasoline Use Distribution

  • 10% of US motorists drive 30,000 miles or more and use 32% of all gasoline consumed.
  • This is more than the bottom 60% put together.
  • It is likely they also tend to live in rural areas and drive SUVs/pickup trucks, ubiquitous in those parts of the US.
  • Transitioning these users to EV will be crucial.
  • Source (good article).
Stocks

Amazon Ads

  • Fascinating development harks back to this.
  • “Direct-to-consumer brands moved 20–30% of their marketing dollars in Q4 2022 from Meta to Amazon due to the former’s declining performance metrics for ads. The shift occurred despite a recent reluctance from DTC brand to sell products on Amazon because of limited access to and ownership of sales and customer data—but now that brands are receiving only $2 back for every $1 spent on Meta ads (they used to get $8 back), they are more willing to work with the e-commerce giant. According to Advantage Unified Commerce, an estimated 75% of brands report customer acquisition is cheaper on Amazon than other media channels.”
  • Source (h/t Pipe).
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