Category Archives: etf

Facebook’s Dominance In App Ecosystem Is Striking, Above Alphabet

Facebook ( FB ) completely dominates the app field, taking a 60% market share in February, led by its WhatsApp and Messenger properties. Alphabet ( GOOGL ) followed Facebook in app downloads, with YouTube being the most popular, according to an analysis by Nomura. Netflix ( NFLX ) also showed impressive strength, while Spotify outpaced Pandora Media ( P ). “With apps representing about 80% of total time spent on mobile, the importance of app trends is difficult to understate,” wrote Nomura analyst Anthony DiClemente in a research report. “App user trends have major implications for industry and company-specific shifts in consumer behavior, and ultimately advertising spend trend.” User engagement trends are leading indicators of mobile ad spending. DiClemente estimates mobile ad spend should reach $75 billion globally in 2016, growing 44% year over year. Alphabet and Facebook scored big in a recent survey of advertisers, receiving the highest budget allocations and the best return on investment of digital media properties. DiClemente examined 14 of the most prominent social apps on both the Apple ( AAPL ) and Alphabet Android operating systems. The apps covered were downloaded a total of 217 million times in February. In the analysis, using data from SensorTower , DiClemente said Facebook properties held the top four spots in the global app download ranking and comprised a full 60% of the 217 million downloads. WhatsApp and Messenger held the top two spots, with nearly 40 million downloads each. For comparison, the Facebook flagship app was downloaded 30 million times in February, while Instagram posted 22 million downloads. Messenger is generally stronger in the U.S., while WhatsApp remains the preferred messaging service internationally, DiClemente said. “The strength of Facebook’s app portfolio reinforces our view that Facebook maintains a user growth and monetization runway,” DiClemente wrote. YouTube was by far the most popular suit of apps by Alphabet. It was downloaded 12.5 million times, far outpacing Google Gmail. But many Google apps come preloaded on Android phones and likely understates Google’s prominence, DiClemente wrote. Following YouTube, music sharing site Spotify tied with Netflix, with both showing 7.9 million downloads. Spotify competitor Pandora had 5.3 million downloads. Pandora still leads in the U.S., but Spotify is beating Pandora by 75% in global downloads. At Netflix, international downloads surpassed domestic totals following January’s expansion into 130 countries. Alphabet and IBD 50 company Facebook carry best-possible IBD Composite Ratings of 99. Both were up more than 1% in midday trading in the stock market today , with major stock indexes up. Image provided by Shutterstock .

The Fox And The Hedgehog

“The fox knows many things while the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Click to enlarge Photo: Jeremy P. Gray The Greek poet Archilocus noticed this almost 3,000 years ago. We often see two different types of people. Some people go everywhere and study everything – pursuing contradictory ideas. They’re eclectic, diffused, and omnivorous. On the other side are souls who pursue a singular, unitary vision, an all-embracing organizing principle that gives the world coherence. We see this all around us. In literature, Dante was a hedgehog: he wanted to give the world a great poem about heaven and hell. Shakespeare, on the other hand, was a fox. He wrote plays about everything and everybody. In history, George Washington was a hedgehog – with the simple idea of American greatness – while Thomas Jefferson was a fox. And in modern life, outstanding business leaders are hedgehogs: think of Steve Jobs with his focus on design and functionality. And superior investors are often foxes: Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, John Templeton. Both approaches are necessary. In business, a company needs a singular vision to cut through the clutter and make the main thing the main thing. It’s too easy to get distracted by the crisis of the day and never spend time or energy on what’s crucial. Hedgehogs get things done and keep their teams focused. But with investing, foxes rule. A portfolio needs to be diversified, limiting its exposure to any single area – reducing risk – while spreading its assets among an array of industries that generate new products and ideas – improving return. Investors need to be fox-like and flexible. And they have to be interested in everything, from genomic sequencing to quantum computing to chain-store sales to bitcoins and block chains. Investors should leave no stone unturned when searching for value. Foxes and hedgehogs each have an important role to play. A lot of times, they end up married to each other. Which one are you?

How To Bake A Highly Deficient Cake

What happens when you leave out a key ingredient in the recipe for baking a cake? We won’t keep you in suspense. What you get is a highly deficient cake, but how it is highly deficient can tell you quite a lot about what the omitted ingredient contributes to a competently executed cake! At Bristol Science Centre, Nerys and David illustrate what we can learn by baking four different cakes – one batch with all the ingredients the basic recipe calls for, then other batches where either the margarine, eggs or baking powder has been excluded from the recipe. The following video illustrates how the resulting cakes baked with a single missing ingredient differ from a proper cake baked with all the ingredients. The same principle applies to data analysis. For instance, if a set of economic data omits the contributions of one particular sector of the economy, and that sector turns out to contribute a large share to the performance of the overall economy, the analysis produced using such data that excludes the omitted sector’s contribution will be highly deficient, because the data itself is not adequately representative of the economy being analyzed. Much like what happens when you bake a cake without one ingredient and compare it with a cake baked with all of them, the deficiency becomes very evident when you compare the results of the deficient analysis with the results of analysis performed with data that does not omit the missing sector’s contributions. If a professional baker omitted an ingredient in a cake recipe, then their competence would certainly be at issue. If they weren’t aware that the ingredient was missing, it might all be chalked up to simple ignorance on their part – the kind of mistake that many of us all make from time to time, that we acknowledge, learn from and do not repeat. But if they were aware of the deficiency and then went on to claim that the results of their deficient recipe were just the same as a properly baked cake, then their integrity would certainly also be at issue. We wonder how many people would continue to buy the “cakes” of such a highly deficient professional baker!