Netflix reported second quarter results earlier this week that “blew away” expectations according to many financial news outlets. It wasn’t a beat on earnings, which actually missed expectations, or a beat on revenue which was inline with expectations. Subscriptions are the metric Netflix investors care most about. Netflix's beat on subscriptions pushed the shares up almost 14% for an increase in market value of about $10 billion.   The jump in Netflix shares yesterday pulled the shares of the rest of the FANG group higher with it. Young Research’s Bubble Basket is now back near its … [Read more...]

Howard Gold, a columnist at MarketWatch, explains that Millennials are making the same investing mistakes their parents made. But rather than making those mistakes on a clunky old desktop, they're making them on their smartphones. Millennials' favorite stocks are those without dividends, and instead of trading for value, they're trading the stocks of companies they're familiar with. According to TD Ameritrade, the five stocks most owned by its millennial customers are—wait for it—Apple Inc. AAPL, +0.26% Facebook Inc. FB, +2.39% Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +1.35% Tesla Inc. TSLA, +1.03% and … [Read more...]

"After 2 months of Blue Apron @ $10/serving, customers can always return to the Trader Joe's freezer case, and a nice social experience, @ $2.79 per serving,” writes a commenter at WSJ re: food delivery IPO from Blue Apron which looks to be having trouble attracting investors. The company had hoped for shares to sell for between $15 and $17.  Instead they are priced for $10. The Wall Street Journal reports that investors may have been worried about profitability, a welcome change from recent history. The outcome is far from what Blue Apron anticipated when the company launched its … [Read more...]

Blue Apron is a company that sells meal prep kits delivered to your door. Rather than shopping for food and then deciding what recipe you can make with what you've got on hand, Blue Apron and other meal prep services will sell you a recipe and the ingredients for it. The company describes its service like this: Blue Apron is a fresh ingredient and recipe delivery service that helps chefs of all levels cook incredible meals at home. We take care of the menu planning and shopping (providing you with fresh, locally sourced ingredients in pre-measured quantities), so all you have to do is cook … [Read more...]

The Wall Street Journal ran a feature on Apple yesterday which included the chart below. The article highlighted the transformation of Apple from a purveyor of personal computers to one of the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world. The chart shows the percentage of revenue that comes from various apple products. As you can clearly see, in the span of ten years Apple has completely transformed itself into a company almost entirely reliant on mobile phones. Apple should be applauded for its success over the last decade, but if there is any industry where the past is rarely … [Read more...]

For four years MSCI has talked with Chinese regulators about including Chinese "A-shares" in its Emerging Markets index. Until now the restrictions on access to Chinese markets have prevented MSCI from including the shares. But yesterday MSCI announced that it would include Chinese shares in the Emerging Markets index, with a selection of 222 large cap stocks making the cut. Reuters reports: The bulk of the shares will be financial and industrial companies, many state-owned. According to Credit Suisse, among the 222 stocks on the simulated list of constituents for the new proposal of China … [Read more...]

The proliferation of the no-thought required approach to investing (index investment) along with other quantitative and algorithmic based strategies has created some disturbing cross-currents for the dwindling group of fundamental investors. Here J.P. Morgan (via Zerohedge) estimates that only 10% of trading volume originates from fundamental discretionary investors. That is a truly stunning statistic If 90% of the volume in stocks is driven by value-agnostic investors, the obvious implication that we see is bigger booms and much bigger busts that are far removed from underlying … [Read more...]

Janus Global Unconstrained Bond Fund manager and market guru, Bill Gross, sounds scared of today's stock market. At the Bloomberg Invest New York summit on Wednesday, Gross said "If there’s a common factor it’s the expansion of credit. And the credit that’s being generated by central banks. Money is being pumped out into the system and money that is yielding less than nothing seeks a haven not only in bonds that are under-yielding but in stocks that are overpriced." … [Read more...]