Trade Organizations and Statistics

Trade or professional organizations can be good sources for otherwise hard to find statistics on sales, volume, value, industry trends or other news. Many times these figures are cited as definitive as possible sources.

There are organizations for toys, chocolate, automobile sales, and so on.

They have stats like this:



You can do a google search for their websites or.....

you can search our database Ward's Directory and be sure to select advanced search and search the Encyclopedia of Associations by keywords. More clicks but better results.
 

Book Review: Reminiscences of A Stock Operator

This may be the best book ever written about trading stocks. Sure, it was written a hundred years or so ago, but the market behaves very similarly today. 

Jesse Livermore made millions in the glory years of early 20th century stock trading. He DID NOT use inside information either - just tape reading (the record of price movement).

Here's some major takeaways from the book:

1. Learn to read a chart (book doesn't discuss chart reading, just advises you to learn it)
2. Learn to trust your instincts, read the chart and ignore hot tips.
3. Learn that the market forms ideas that it is slow to abandon.
4. Learn to trade current events
5. Learn to recognize deceptive tricks (And this book has a lot of classic examples that still get used today!)

Wonderful writing really gives you a sense of early 20th century stock plungers: the bucket shops, the trips to Florida for fishing, catching the train, going broke in Boston and starting over in Cleveland, the crusty characters at the local stock brokerages and more. 

What Investors Can Learn From Accounting Standards

Here's a way to get a little more insight when looking at a company's financials.

One size of analysis does not fit all - and contracts, depreciation, costs, inventory and other financials may be handled very differently owing to the reality of the industry.

Retail, housing, airplane manufacturing, cosmetics and more all experience these metrics differently.

1. Go to Checkpoint.

2. Make sure the drop down box is tuned to accounting, audit and corporation finance.

3. Set Tab to Search

4. Look to the right - you'll see AICPA Audit and Accounting Guides



It's a great way to see what analysts are seeing when they upgrade or downgrade a company!

UTEP Border Economics

Found this site the other day: UTEP Border Economics. 

Lots of unique statistics and papers dealing with cross-border trade between the US and Mexico.

10% Rule of The Spread of Ideas

From a few years ago, but still interesting.

Sociological theory: Ideas don't go anywhere until they are adopted by approximately 10% of the population. After that, there's a good chance they continue to spread and  become the majority idea.

This is important to understand as a marketer.

What are Trade Journals?

What are trade journals? These periodicals feature real-life nonacademic experiences of people on the ground in a particular trade.

They contain management advice and hard numbers, among other things.

I've used trade journals to track down profit margins for Alamo Draft House locations, measuring sales from adding healthy items to restaurant menu and the process of opening an indoor ski run.

Use the following databases (be sure to limit your results to magazines in the tab):
ABI inform,

Business Source  (Open the source types on the left)

 

InfoTrac Small-Business Collection  (see below for limiting to trade publications)

History Of Video Games

As you probably know, Austin is a center of video game creation and the industry.

Check out our books on the history of video games here.

Company Strategies in 10-K

This was a real assignment. 

Looking for a summary of a company's business strategy? The 10-K annual report form is one possible source (available on the company's internet site, through Mergent or the SEC's Edgar database

In this example, Ross Stores explains its strategy of sourcing and pricing. This material usually comes in their business description, which is Part 1 of a standard 10-K format and early in the doc. You may also do a CTRL-F word find for keywords.


Here's a partial excerpt from their 2013 10-K:

By purchasing later in the merchandise buying cycle than department, specialty, and discount stores, we are able to take advantage of imbalances between retailers’ demand for products and manufacturers’ supply of those products. Unlike most department and specialty stores, we typically do not require that manufacturers provide promotional allowances, co-op advertising allowances, return privileges, split shipments, drop shipments to stores, or delayed deliveries of merchandise.
For most orders, only one delivery is made to one of our four distribution centers. These flexible requirements further enable our buyers to obtain significant discounts on in-season purchases.

The majority of the apparel and apparel-related merchandise that we offer in all of our stores is acquired through opportunistic purchases created by manufacturer overruns and canceled orders both during and at the end of a season. These buys are referred to as “close-out” and “packaway” purchases. Close-outs can be shipped to stores in-season, allowing us to get
in-season goods into our stores at lower prices.

Packaway merchandise is purchased with the intent that it will be stored in our warehouses until a later date, which may even be the beginning of the same selling season in the following year. Packaway purchases are an effective method of increasing the percentage of prestige and national brands at competitive savings within our merchandise assortments. Packaway merchandise is mainly fashion basics and, therefore, not usually affected by shifts in fashion trends.

Interesting Subject Headings For Marketers

I came across the subject Headings below.  Follow the links to find books on marketing and public opinion. Public opinion -- United States. National characteristics, American.  Social psychology -- United States.  Consumption (Economics) -- United States.

The Death of Hollywood and the Politics of Monopoly

Ever notice Hollywood doesn't make creative, adult-oriented films anymore? Sure, there are great. American films for grownups but they tend to be indie.

Wonder why?

Here is one answer by the great writer Matt Stoller:

"Both the Paramount Consent Decrees and the Fin-syn rules were designed to break creative industries into a three-tiered structure: production, distribution, and retailing. Producers were prohibited from vertically integrating into the traditional distribution business. That way, there are fewer conflicts of interest in the content business; producers had to create high quality work, and if they didn’t, distributors could choose to sell someone else’s art. Policy removed power as the mechanism of competition, and emphasized art."

What Do P/E Ratios Really Mean?

Taken from p. 143 of Active Value Investing, the classic book from Vitaliy N. Katsenelson.

P/E (price per earning) refers to the amount of money stock investors are willing to pay for the stock as reflected in its stock price. First, determine how much the company is earning per share. Then check the stock price. Divide the current stock price by the earnings per share number. You have the P/E ratio!

So is a high P/E a good or bad sign? Depends.

A new growth stock will typically show much higher P/E ratios than an established company. Once a company stops growing rapidly, the P/E ratio will actually decline. 

Katsenelson quotes the legendary Benjamin Graham as giving a P/E figure of around 8 as about right for a company with solid fundamentals but low growth.

Katsenelson includes a cool chart on p.143 that shows appropriate levels of P/E in relation to expected levels of growth.

Ad$pender - The Problem of Zero Results

Ad$pender is usually a wonderful database that gives you advertising budgets for categories of products, companies and brands.  You can use the database from off-campus with your regular net ID and password.

HOWEVER, a common problem is building your query and getting no results.

This is because a data point is missing. Instead of n/a in your results, you just get a big fat zero for the whole thing. Through trial and error, you'll have to adjust your query in order to get results.


I'll let AdSpender explain.

What does “There were no results for the report you requested” mean? This means that there was no activity found for the report you ran. This could happen for a number of reasons. For example, the brands included in your report may not have had any activity during the time period you requested, or perhaps dollars or ratings were not yet available for the time period you included in the report. In this situation you should check data availability or change some of your selections before running your report again.

Note: This tutorial is excellent, but it starts with the old library page. AdSpender still works exactly the same - just find Ad$pender here.

Business at the Movies: Margin Call

Margin Call is a great way to understand the beginning of the financial crisis and the financial derivatives that caused it.  Set in a fictionalized Wall Street trading firm, the company math whiz discovers that the company mathematical models are geared to a theory that doesn't match the reality.  The problem is, so many people believed the theory was infallible that the firm could not survive any mistakes because no reserves were set aside (why would you?).

That's the quickest way I know how to describe how derivatives and some of the other mathematical models melted down.

Margin Call features a great cast including Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Simon Baker, Demi Moore and Stanley Tucci,