- The good: the Nasdaq 100 rose 0.4% to close at a record high for three consecutive sessions, the first time that’s happened since late July.
- The meh: the S&P 500 finished down less than 0.1%.
- And the ugly: the Russell 2000 sank 1%.
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Only three S&P 500 sector ETFs finished in the green: communication services, consumer discretionary, and utilities. Healthcare, materials, and industrials were the worst performers.
Trivia time: Test what you remember about last week with our Snacks Seven Quiz. Here’s the easiest question: |
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Do you really, truly need a $350 ice cream machine sitting on your kitchen counter all day? Celebrity chefs like Alton Brown have railed against kitchen unitaskers, and sure, probably no one needs an expensive device whose sole purpose is to make ice cream, but one company is making a new generation of shoppers feel compelled to buy just such products: SharkNinja.
The company’s successful strategy includes: |
- Releasing 25 new products every year, once every two weeks, produced by a team of more than 1,000 engineers around the globe.
- A focus on product “desirability,” which SharkNinja’s chief design officer, Ross Richardson, told Sherwood News is “giving you something that’s super cool but you’ve not been able to get access to.” It’s the modern-day must-have tchotchke.
- “Treating every launch as a social story rather than a hardware release,” one marketer told us. In other words, it has to look good and play well on social media — especially TikTok.
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Spending enough money to ensure reach: the firm spends about $1 in every $9 of its annual sales on advertising.
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Add this all together and you have a fancy ice cream maker that launched on a Tuesday morning and was soon selling at an unbelievable clip.
Of course, SharkNinja’s success isn’t just in ice cream makers, but has captured market share in “boring” appliance categories as well. Four in every 10 vacuum cleaners sold in the US this year are made by SharkNinja, and its market share is rising in blenders and more, as this chart shows. |
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So far, SharkNinja’s ambition to be the QVC for a new generation is working. The company’s stock has soared more than 300% over the past five years, and it saw record sales of $5.5 billion last year. It’s also obsessive about not just meeting customer demand but surpassing their expectations for ordinary products, as Richardson revealed to us with a fascinating anecdote about how the company improved its vacuum cleaners.
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Stories we’re obsessed with |
- How crypto is creeping into the home mortgage market
One in five Americans hold some crypto, and allowing it to be used as a reserve for mortgages could open the gates to homeownership for some of them. Shifts in financial regulation during the second Trump administration, like the passing of the GENIUS Act and a recent order for mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to explore the use of crypto to back mortgage lending, could be the start of a “sea change” for the industry.
- Concerns about rising government debt aren’t just an American problem
Global public debt is always something of a hard concept to get your head around. Planet Earth doesn’t owe that money to Mars or anything like that; instead, it’s the sum of government debt worldwide. And per data from the UN, it reached a record $102 trillion last year, and our chart shows just how fast it’s grown since 2000. But while government debt is growing in the US, UK, Germany, France, and even Japan, none of those are where the squeeze is being felt most.
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Tesla just got a permit to test its autonomous vehicles in Nevada, and earlier this week, Amazon launched its self-driving Zoox service to the public for free at several locations along the Strip. Meanwhile, Google’s Waymo, which already has an operational robotaxi service in five cities, announced that it would begin testing in Vegas this year.
See a video from inside Tesla’s Vegas Loop. |
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