Cocktail Investing

  A Look at the Official Kick-Off to the 2017 Holiday Shopping Season Download Episode Coming off the Thanksgiving holiday, this week Tematica’s investing mixologists Chris Versace and Lenore Hawkins discuss the meaning of the litany of data points for online shopping on Thanksgiving as well as overall results for Black Friday. Expectations were running high for continued wallet share gains by digital shopping, a key aspect of our Connected Society investing theme, and they did not disappoint. What was surprising was the percentage of holiday shopping done via smartphones. Both the objective data, and as Chris and Lenore share, the anecdotal evidence, point to brick & mortar retail traffic over the holiday shopping weekend that was hardly robust. Per data from ShopperTrak, brick & mortar retail sales fell just under 2% year over year. No wonder retailers like Kohl’s (KSS) and JC Penney (JCP) were trying to put a positive spin on things by talking up their digital shopping. We continue to see brick &