Below is my weekly video for members of Macke's Retail Roundup.
Stocks ending a good week with a *thud as Tariffs take their toll. Not that there weren't any promising signs (see: Levi's and our old favorite, Aritzia).
I've got a breakdown of the cross-currents as the market settles in for a long, hot summer in this week's strategy session!
There is no time off from stock research. Not in the consumer space. Everything you do, everything you consider doing, on vacation is a datapoint. I can't afford to relax on vacations. I can't learn much going to the same malls over and over again. Drawing investing conclusions based on one visit to the mall is for civilians. I need reps and variety. I don't go to 1 Starbucks and time the transaction. I go to all of them. Don't believe me? Here's the Starbucks at the Vancouver convention center at 11am on a Thursday. Service time from order to pick-up: 3 minutes and 52 seconds. Just as fast as NYC last winter. Starbucks is higher today because a divestiture of the China business is valuing the division at $10b, which is higher than expected. I'd love Starbucks to leave China but I'm really stoked to see the Vancouver Starbucks matching the speed of the units in Annapolis, NYC, Claremont, Los Angeles, Seattle and everywhere else I've been in the last year.
Starbucks can only divest its China business once. They can serve coffee faster 11 million times a day. Both of them are good for...
It didn't seem to impact Jeff Bezos' wedding but shares of Amazon have made almost no progress so far in 2025. With YTD gains of only 2% $AMZN is underperforming the S&P500, not to mention fellow Three King Merchants Walmart and Costco:
I'm talking my book, and Amazon isn't quite the bargain it was before ramping off the Tariff Pause (more on that below) but shares of Amazon are probably the best deal consumers are going to find during Summer Christmas ("Prime Day" to laypeople) this week.
Here are three reasons to buy Amazon now:
1. The Consumer is Spending More Than Expected... at least at the good merchants
I hear the objections to this already. Retail sales were down in May. And according to surveys (or at least the headlines interpreting consumer surveys). At this point May was 100 years ago. In the here and now Amazon's Prime Day has been extended to 4 days, which essentially matches the week long copy-cat sales offered at Target, Walmart and the other retailers who have been trying to compete with Amazon's...
