Happy new year and welcome to the 7,374 new faces that joined us during the break!
We hope everyone found peace and rest over the holidays, and that our annual review (2021 in 25 charts) kept your chart-cravings at bay. We're so excited to chart another year with you.
Today we explore:
RIP your old BlackBerry
Classic BlackBerry phones, once an aspirational product and the very height of mobile technology, are officially joining the growing list of defunct smartphone makers. As of yesterday BlackBerry will no longer run support for any phones running BlackBerry 10, 7.1 OS and earlier.
BlackBerry's fall from grace is quite remarkable, considering its grip on the higher-end of the cellphone market was at its tightest just a decade ago in 2011 — a year when the company brought in more than $20bn in revenue.
Even as the iPhone and other touchscreen models began to drive out the clickity-clack of BlackBerry's tiny keyboards, some power users - including former President Obama - clung dearly to their BlackBerry's, refusing to switch despite their increasing obsolescence.
But even with a few die-hard fans, BlackBerry's life as a smartphone maker looked increasingly tenuous and by 2016 — just a few short years from the heyday of 2011 — revenues at BlackBerry had fallen by ~90%.
Greener, smaller, pastures
Since then BlackBerry has re-imagined itself. The company's focus has been on building itself into a software company that sells "intelligent security software and services to enterprises and governments around the world". Re-inventing itself has been a slow and difficult process that the company is still churning through. In its last two fiscal years revenues have dropped another 30%.
BlackBerry has sold the rights to the name BlackBerry to third parties, one of which promised to release a 5G BlackBerry in 2021, but very little has been heard about it - so don't hold your breath.
Early evidence from the UK
The silver lining (if there is one) is in the early evidence from the UK.
Benchmarking cases, hospitalizations and deaths to their respective peaks from last winter (credit to John Burn-Murdoch's work on this) shows that the more serious COVID metrics are still way down on where they were last winter — despite cases surging to all-time highs.
There is of course a lag between cases and the more serious outcomes, which is why watching the UK data over the next few weeks will be a crucial indicator for how the US Omicron wave (and waves in other well-vaccinated countries) might play out.
Same again, please
US stock markets (S&P 500 index) closed out 2021 with a total return of 29% — adding another green bar to the long history of US stock market appreciation.
That means that for the last 3 years US stock markets have gained — on average — 26% a year, and two of those years were during a global pandemic. It also means that it is the best 3-year stretch since 1997-1999.
The gains made in equity markets last year were spurred on by the same forces at play in 2020; supportive monetary policy, significant fiscal stimulus from governments and the relentless upward march of big tech. Indeed, just a few of the FAATMAN group of stocks — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Microsoft, Alphabet and Nvidia (sorry Netflix) — now account for somewhere between 25-30% of the entire S&P 500 index, depending on the day. Apple alone is almost 7%.
How long can the party last?
The most worrying indicator that could stop the music is inflation — which has returned in pretty much every market in the world, to varying extents. To combat inflation central banks are almost certainly going to raise interest rates. Will stocks hold onto their gains if interest rates finally move from historic lows? We wish we knew.
1) The great resignation continues — a record 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs in November, according to the latest data, edging out the record of 4.4 million from September.
2) Test results in American schools dropped substantially during the pandemic, according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, with a correlation between the amount of in-person schooling in a given school district and pass rates.
3) After 90 years at the top, General Motors is no longer the #1 automaker in the US. The crown now belongs to Toyota, which outsold GM, selling 2.33 million cars last year.
4) Rare comic books, wine, whisky, sports cards, sneakers, cars... the world of alternative assets is huge — and no-one knows more about it than our friends at alts.co.**
5) According to Chinese state media, China's fusion reactor (often dubbed "China's artificial sun") ran at a temperature five times hotter than our sun for almost 20 minutes in its latest experiment to hopefully one day produce clean energy.
6) Need a new way to procrastinate this year? Probably not, but here's a word guessing game called Wordle, designed by an engineer just for him and his partner to play, which is now going viral.
**This is sponsored content.
