DB: “The equity selloff since last Friday remains modest so far, in keeping with regular 3-5% pullbacks that have occurred every 2-3 months historically. However, this was accompanied by the sharpest weekly decline in equity positioning since the collapse back in March 2020”
Hulu remains a clusterfuck. Comcast potentially pulling tons of content, despite owning 1/3 of it. Disney and Comcast in arbitration about strategy and valuation. Disney treating Hulu like a stepchild. President of Hulu leaving to run Comcast owned Peacock wsj.com/articles/comca…
Zillow didn't like what the models were telling them to do, so they "turned up the dials".
On Q2 earnings call they said:
"We've been testing price elasticity in this hot housing market and we saw rapid conversion gains throughout the quarter as we improved our offer strength"
"The employees' accounts suggested that Zillow's iBuying problems had less to do with a glitch in its computer-driven, algorithmic approach to purchasing homes or unpredictable swings in prices and more to do with the overexuberance of human managers" businessinsider.com/zillow-insider…
"leadership wanted to be aggressive on acquisitions and incentivized all teams to err on the side of growth, which manifested in system overrides."
"A hidden scaffolding of financial incentives underpins the policing of motorists in the United States, encouraging some communities to essentially repurpose armed officers as revenue agents searching for infractions largely unrelated to public safety." nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/…
"Fueling the culture of traffic stops is the federal government, which issues over $600M a year in highway safety grants that subsidize ticket writing. Although officials say they do not impose quotas, at least 20 states have evaluated police on number of traffic stops per hour"
So billion prices project is now Pricestats and they have an index with state street if anyone wants to pull that. the creator is an economist and has some interesting stuff.
from a paper in Sep, here are changes in online prices across countries through May.
here is a reweighting of the CPI by a more relevant covid consumption basket, also broken down by low and high incomes
Here are his estimates of stockouts by product category in the US, and a cross country comparison
SNAP: "we remain very confident in the underlying performance of our advertising products and when we look at incrementality testing, when we look at first-party data, like on platforms swipes or installs, we see those conversions happening at similar rates they did in the past"
FB: "Targeting is a longer-term challenge. DR products are built on user-level conversions and as a result of iOS changes, we don't see same level of conversion data coming through.. have to rebuild our targeting in optimization systems to work with less data.. multi-year effort"
SNAP: "our first party measurement tools and studies continue to show our ads are effective.. approximately as effective as prior to these changes. it's the really loss of signal required significant changes to our overall technology and we believe mostly a measurement challenge"