November 19, 2021

Today's Topics

Hi, we've got 3 charts for you today:

  • Pandemic winners and losers. We check in on 9 stocks that have had quite a ride.
  • Clubhouse. Downloads are slowing again for the buzzy audio app.
  • Macy's. 163-years-old and still going strong.
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Last year, much was made of the "lockdown winners" in the stock market. As soon as it became clear we would all be inside for the foreseeable future, markets and investors tried to quickly adjust to what would be the "new normal".

We've selected 9 stocks that have had an interesting time of it, checking in on where their share prices are now.

The good

Some stocks boomed, and then kept booming. Etsy, the online marketplace for vintage gifts and homemade crafts saw its share price rise during the early days of the pandemic — and they haven't looked back since, gaining 555% since 2020. DocuSign, which lets organizations manage contracts and agreements electronically (no need to sign in-person), has also had a pretty smooth ride, up 257%.

But no company was the face of "pandemic winner" more than Zoom. The video-conferencing site has seen the shine come off pretty dramatically since last year, as expectations got ahead of the company's economic reality, but even so it's hard to put Zoom in any other bucket than "the pandemic was good for business".

The bad, then good

Few sectors got hit as hard as travel. Online travel company Expedia saw its shares shed almost 60% of their value, but they've since made a roaring comeback, as lockdowns have faded and we booked all those vacations we missed out on. Airbnb had a similar experience, going through a brutal restructuring for its employees, before business picked up and the company managed to get its IPO done. Since then it's up 38%.

Live Nation Entertainment, which is the parent company of Ticketmaster and other live event platforms, also managed to weather the storm, gaining 57% since the start of 2020, despite the turbulence of the early pandemic.

The ugly

Airlines, like American Airlines and Delta, still aren't back to where they started, with many taking on debt or issuing equity to get them through the tough times of reduced air travel. Then there's Peloton, which has done an even more extreme version of Zoom. Technically, shares are still up 60% on where they were at the start of 2020, but with everything moving in the wrong direction at their recent results, and the company still burning cash, that might not last.

Earlier this year Clubhouse, which lets users join impromptu audio conversations, had a lot to celebrate. The app was about to hit the one-year anniversary of its launch, downloads were soaring and it was fending off investment interest from just about every venture fund in Silicon Valley, in the end raising an undisclosed amount at an eye-watering $4bn valuation.

Since then, things have cooled. Even after a much-hyped Android launch, downloads are now running at just over a million a month, way down on the ~9 million at the app's peak.

Growing pains

An interview with co-founder Paul Davison reveals how it felt to be in the midst of that crazy hype, as the user base just kept growing and growing through word-of-mouth. That sounds like a good problem to have for a start-up, but not if your platform isn't ready for that kind of volume, which is why the team tried to slow things down with an invite-only system.

Clubhouse copycats

Clubhouse's overnight success prompted a lot of big tech, and small tech, to explore the audio room feature. Twitter launched Twitter Spaces. Facebook launched audio rooms. So did LinkedIn. Slack made something called Huddles. Whether it was those copycats, the timeline of the pandemic, or just a natural occurrence, Clubhouse got what it wanted — things are slowing down a bit.

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Macy's is making a comeback.

The department store, first founded back in 1858, is channeling the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" mantra, this week announcing it was launching a "curated digital marketplace" for "carefully selected third-party merchants".

Macy's vs. Amazon

20 years ago if you needed to buy some jeans, a new toaster, some clothes for your kids and some new bed sheets you probably had to hit a few different stores... or one big department store. The internet changed all that, threatening the fundamental draw of the department store model — and many department stores didn't make it.

But as the biggest in the country, Macy's had scale to lean on in its fight against the online giants. The company closed stores, got leaner and launched its own online offering, which today represents 33% of all sales at Macy's. With this new platform launch, Macy's will presumably only take a slice of each sale, meaning it doesn't have to hold inventory (à la Amazon).

More Data

1) Why did Cambodian users account for 50% of global traffic for Facebook's Messenger voice function? Good story from Rest of World here.

2) The top 25% most-active Twitter users are responsible for 97% of all tweets, according to data from Pew Research Center.

3) Ever wondered what gets you through that first filter when applying for jobs? A software engineer experimented with how many buzzwords they could fit on their resume.

4) Choosing between comfort and style? That's a thing of the past thanks to the Public Rec All Day Every Day Pant.**

5)Visa and Amazon are clashing over transaction fees, with Amazon banning Visa credit cards issued in the UK last week. If this spills over into the rest of retail it'll be a big deal — Visa accounts for 58% of the European payment network.

6) IBM has announced the development of a 127-qubit quantum processor, almost doubling the previous record (64). Good explanation here of why that might mean massive leaps forward in computer processing power in the future.

**This is a sponsored content.

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