Stock Market Bulls

  • A few hedge fund managers, worth listening to, continue to be bullish.
  • David Tepper is one. “I love riding a horse that’s running” and continue to do so to a point”
  • Stanley Druckenmiller is another:
  • “I revealed a very bullish posture intermediate-term since October when Powell guaranteed he would not rescind the insurance [rate] cuts unless inflation was persistently above target,” Druckenmiller recalled. “Since then, both have worked out, and the Fed is still whining about inflation being below target.”
  • Trump “election prospects have increased with two trade agreements and big win in Iran, which the Democrats have responded poorly to,” Druckenmiller added. “So I am still ‘riding the horse’ and bullish immediate term,”
  • Disclaimer: Make sure you do your own work and use common sense when investing!

RICS Survey for UK

  • December post-election RICS survey was rather positive.
  • JPM write via AlphavilleThe RICS survey, which was post election, “showed a marked and regionally broad-based improvement in its forward looking questions,” says JP Morgan Cazenove. “The expected prices balance leapt from 1 to 23, expected sales shot up from 13 to 31 and new buyer enquiries surged from -5 to 17. These are comfortably the highest levels reported since before the referendum and, in one reading, have swung from below to above their long-run averages.
  • Full charts in the link.

Cancer Mortality Rates

  • New stats from the US Cancer Society show that between 1991 and 2017 the mortality rate of cancer has dropped 29%.
  • According to the report, this was due to lower smoking rates, improved early detection methods and advances in treatment.
  • This trend means more than 2.9m lives were saved since 1991.
  • Really amazing.

Dotdash

  • Dotdash, a business created by IAC from the remnants of About.com, is a very interesting business you probably haven’t heard about.
  • It reaches 100m monthly users, is profitable ($40m of EBITDA) and growing.
  • It is also unique event in digital media – a turnaround.
  • “Our job is to make great content that loads quickly with relevant non-intrusive advertising,” he insists. “If we execute, the search results will be fine.” His critics call this naive, but Vogel is trying to build a billion-dollar publishing business, not a search colossus. He’s betting that Google will drive traffic to the best content.

Fintechs Threat to Banks

  • Interesting chart from Alphaville.
  • This is analysis from the behaviour of 688,000 mobile banking users for 3 months of 2019.
  • The x-axis shows the proportion of people who use each of the major banking apps at least once a month.
  • The y-axis shows the proportion of those people that use that banking app exclusively.
  • It suggests that high street banks not only have the highest share of mobile app usage, but also a far more loyal base of users.
  • Lots of further interesting stats inside the article.

Dishwashers

  • Interesting article about what has been going on with dishwashers.
  • In summary they have gotten a lot worse.
  • In order to reduce water use from the original 15 gallons to 3 gallons, cycle times have increased. The chart (source) is striking.
  • The wash results have also gotten a lot worse due to chemical regulation.
  • Consumers think that by buying a newer model these problems will be solved but the reality is that an older model will do a better job.
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