The advent of a new year brings with it the prospect of new challenges and new opportunities to embrace. Whether you are the type to set New Year’s resolutions or not, for most of us turning the calendar from one year to the next usually includes some thought about what’s happened and what’s coming up. […]
Read MoreOne of the sources of a lot of conversation among talking heads and market analysts in general lies around the “reopening” concept. This theme has been pretty constant for most of the year, even as COVID variants – omicron is just the latest – have extended the health crisis well into 2022, with some experts […]
Read MoreThe Consumer Discretionary sector includes stocks that cover a wide variety of the Retail industry. Because there are so many retail companies that offer different products to consumers, it’s hard to pinpoint any kind of specific niche. In the sporting goods category, there were significant challenges even before COVID-19 became a global pandemic. Declining revenues […]
Read MoreUncertainty in the financial markets, and in the economy is usually considered a bad thing, because it makes things more difficult and stressful for everybody. Even though the major market indices have been pushing to new all-time highs for the last month, for example, there is still plenty of concern about the pace of inflationary […]
Read MoreOne of the sources of a lot of conversation among talking heads and market analysts in general lies around the “reopening” concept. With social and business restrictions easing across the United States, many of the activities we all enjoyed prior to the global pandemic are coming back into a vogue. This seems to have remained […]
Read MoreAmong the interesting trends I have been watching for most of the last two years, and that have emerged at least in part as a practical response to the global health crisis we continue to struggle with has been a shift in consumer focus towards health, wellness and fitness. Given the constant messaging about personal […]
Read MoreI find it interesting that even when conditions are uncertain, there are companies in normally cyclical industries that find new ways to succeed. Sometimes that is planned, and sometimes it happens to be the opportunistic happenstance of being in just the right place at the right time. Some of the most obvious examples of what […]
Read MorePlus, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the central bank is likely to begin tapering before the end of this year, Apple announced App Store updates, and Rivian Automotive confidentially filed to go public.
Read MoreThe past year and a half has provided a lot of interesting case studies not only in how corporations have evolved to survive and get by, but also in how consumer behaviors and trends have shifted. Broad-based shutdowns that shuttered businesses all over the U.S. at the beginning of the pandemic sent people home for […]
Read MoreOne of the best-performing areas of the economy over the past year has been the Consumer Discretionary sector, which has increased in value by about 38% over that period, as measured by the S&P 500 Consumer Discretionary Sector SPDR ETF (XLY). Much of that bullish move was driven by the consumer shift during the restrictive […]
Read MoreOne of the sources of a lot of conversation among talking heads and market analysts in general lies around the “reopening” concept. With social and business restrictions easing across the United States, many of the activities we all enjoyed prior to the global pandemic are coming back into a vogue. The most recent Memorial Day […]
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