March 9, 2022

Today's Topics

Hi, 3 charts for you today:

  • US stocks. Most are in the red this year.
  • War in the modern age. The rise of open-source intelligence (OSINT).
  • Lululemon. The apparel retailer is getting into footwear.
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Taking stock of US stocks

US stock markets aren't having a good start to the year. In the S&P 500 index — which oddly actually has 505 members — 131 stocks are in the green in 2022, compared to 374 in the red. Among the worst performing stocks are some big names including Netflix (down 42%), Meta (-44%), Moderna (-50%) and PayPal (-50%).

The energy exception

All told the index itself is down a little over 13% this year, with every single sector in the red — except energy, which is now up 40% for the year thanks to rising oil and gas prices.

That trend is unlikely to significantly reverse itself anytime soon given the news yesterday that both the US and UK are set to ban or phase out Russian imports of petroleum products. This week gas prices in the US touched the record high from 2008 of $4.10 per gallon.

We're all too familiar with the tragic scenes coming out of Ukraine on social media.

Russia's invasion has been covered like no other conflict, with smartphones and the internet giving locals the ability to document and then widely disseminate what is happening on the ground, almost instantly.

Much of that information is disorganized, but not all. A great article in Rest of World put us onto the world of Open-Source Intelligence, or OSINT.

The rise of OSINT

Sorting through social media videos, satellite imagery, security camera footage, troop movements and even talking to locals, OSINT researchers are trying to put the puzzle pieces of war intelligence together, publicly. But these aren't professionals.

One popular Twitter account is @IntelCrab — which is run by a college student. That account has exploded in popularity over the last few weeks, gaining 80,000 followers in February by curating and combining various sources into timelines and stories.

For some OSINT researchers Google street view is a key tool which they use to try and map videos and photos to specific locations — looking for easily identifiable landmarks, buildings or features. A fence, a particular tree or an unusual roof could all be clues to where a battle or an attack might have taken place.

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This week apparel brand Lululemon announced a big move: it's getting into the shoe game.

The first-ever Lululemon shoe, targeted at women, will put Lululemon directly into competition against industry giants like Nike and adidas — both of which sell billions of dollars of footwear every year.

It's all about brand

High-end athletic apparel is mostly a marketing game - and it's one that Lululemon is incredibly good at. Convincing someone to buy a $100+ pair of yoga pants, or shoes, that likely only cost a fraction of that to make, requires some serious brand power.

For Lululemon that brand power shows up in their financial results when compared to their peers Nike, adidas or Under Armour.

The latest full year financials show that Lululemon makes the highest operating profit margin of any of those companies, translating every $1 of sales into around $0.19 of profit. That's better than the $0.16 that Nike churns out, and roughly double what adidas and Under Armour make.

Will that branding prowess translate smoothly from $100 yoga pants into $140 shoes? Time will tell.

More Data

1) Data from Google reveals that Russian searches for flights, visas and other emigration avenues have spiked dramatically in the last few weeks, as Russians seek to leave the country.

2) Glass Animals song Heat Waves was released back in 2020 — but it's just hit number one in the US, in its record 59th week in the charts.

3) Happy International Women's Day for yesterday! Here's a bot that tweeted out data about the pay disparity between men and women at each organization that was posting about IWD on Twitter.

4) The price of Nickel - a key input in electric vehicle batteries - soared past $100k per tonne yesterday, more than double where it was a month ago.

5) Everything Product Teams need to know about Data Onboarding — a free e-book guide from our friends at Flatfile.**

6) How old are the politicians running the US? Interesting box plot of the data here, split by party.

**This is sponsored content.

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