Motley Fool Money - Who Won Black Friday, Cyber Monday?

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

More shoppers bought from Shopify merchants and foot traffic declined in physical stores. (00:14) Bill Mann and Ricky Mulvey discuss: - Shopping data from the holiday weekend and what retailers should be cautious of. - South Korea’s tense political situation, and what it means for the country’s companies. - Why Wall Street is rewarding a more focused AT&T. Then, (18:20) Dave Hatter, cybersecurity consultant at IntrustIT, continues his conversation with Ricky about big tech data collection, and how you can better protect your information. Check out the Giving Done Right Podcast: https://givingdoneright.org/ Companies discussed: SHOP, INTC, T, CPNG, KRX, LON: BC94, TSLA Host: Ricky Mulvey Guests: Bill Mann, Dave Hatter Engineer: Rick Engdahl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Sometimes champs become chumps and chumps become chants. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. I'm Ricky Mawvey. I'm joined today by Bill, man, Bill, good to see you. Hey, Ricky. How you doing it, brother? I'm doing pretty well. We are wrapping up the weeks of Black Friday in Cyber Monday.

We're going to get to the topic in a sec. But did you do any shopping? Do you get in on those deals? I feel like the man family got in on some of the deals, although I myself don't celebrate Black Friday or Cyber Monday. So I am sure deals were had on my behalf. Okay. Well, you're fun.

I'm sorry. That's a little shopping. I got jeans. And then they have this countdown clock for American Eagle where they're like, by the end of this countdown clock, you're not going to get these 50% off American Eagle jeans anymore. I log on this morning. And they're like, surprise, surprise. We've extended it another day.

So I'm believing retailers a little less. now. Yeah. Okay. You know what? I did think about it. We did actually get one thing. We did get our holiday cards from Shutterfly and they had a countdown and then we were awfully close to missing out on the countdown because we couldn't get all of the functions together. We almost ended up with either generic cards on Black Friday or personalized cards, but too late. The countdowns can get you. I think we need a law that says if you're doing a countdown, it needs to be a real one. It's got to be real. When you're mayor of Earth, you're going to make that happen, I'm sure.

Something like that. All right, I'm going to give you a data salad as we break down some of these Black Friday numbers. And then you can respond to it because you're the analyst. Look at that. Shopify announced that its merchants did $11.5 billion in sales over Black Friday Cyber Monday, which they have given the acronym BFCM. And they're really leaning into that acronym. So sales on Shopify.

up about 24% from the year prior. Adobe data found found that shoppers were spending about 10% more online. So Shopify getting more of a lion's share of those sales. And then also there is a company that I found out about this morning called Sensormatic Solutions. And they found that in-store shopper traffic on Black Friday is down 8% compared to 2023. All right. That's a mix of numbers. Using the analytical brain of Bill, man, makes sense of it. What's your response? I'm still having a hard time with the acronym. I love the fact that we've made up holidays and then made up an acronym for them. I think maybe the acronym was the point. Yeah. And if you look at the Shopify release, it's, I'm a Shopify shareholder. I like Shopify. They're like, if we can master BFCM, we can do anything,

was the point that I got. And I, you know what? I like that. It's a message to all the haters. They've saved three syllables in the process, though. You know what? It's about shortening the type. I'm trying to get us to an investing conversation here. We're staying on acronyms. You brought it up. Okay, that's fine.

Be impatient with the listeners' time. Yeah, so their sales were up 24% from the year prior. I think that there's a definite relationship with the fact that people are viewing, going into stores, at least in this country, as being. being a much more inconvenient process and increasingly so. So a 24% rise at Shopify definitively comes at the cost of something else. So it's not that there is 24% rise in sales all told during Black Friday Cyber Monday. Okay.

I just had to bully you into getting some stock. I'm sorry. Did you notice I tapped out on the acronym? Yeah, that's fine. We had a listener email the other day that was a little worried that we don't like each other because we give each other a hard time on the show. And I should clarify, the reason Bill and I give each other a hard time is precisely because we like each other.

Anyway, back to the show. Are there any retailers this holiday season or just generally that are impressing you with their online game is that's where more shoppers are going? Yeah, I think one of the ones that has done it the best is Walmart. And I'm specifically impressed with Walmart. Walmart because it wasn't that long ago when Walmart was really being accused of having missed on its online presence. And then it went out and bought Jet.com and it really just launched them into having a much

more full, valuable process online that actually tied in with their stores really well. And as we look at some of the physical retailers, there's an article in NPR about Black Friday. And I'm wondering if some of these retailers that are seeing their sales slip a little bit, possibly, are sort of creating their own bed bath and beyond problem, which is maybe training customers to only come in if they're getting an incredible deal. Sort of like the Michael Scott Paper Company, if you remember that from the office. And there's this management consulting partner commenting that, you know, the retailers who are slashing prices by 40%. Those are the ones who are really drawing in customers looking at a company like Forever. 21 or brand Forever 21, which offered 50 to 70% drawing lines to the stores.

Whereas you got a company like H&M only offering 30% off, nobody's going there. But ultimately, if you're offering, if you're a retailer offering 50 to 70% off, you get the sugar rush on Black Friday, but could this create long-term problems for these companies? That almost sounds like a pre-liquidation rather than a sale. But we've seen this in the past, and one of the great examples, do you remember? remember when Ron Johnson took over J.C. Penny and he had been the mastermind behind the Apple stores? I'm familiar with this story, but I don't remember it happening. So the shares of J.C. Penny

shot up when Ron Johnson came in. And one of the first things that he did was to eliminate or to greatly curtail the discounting and the coupons that J.C. Penny was doing. And ultimately, I mean, exactly to your point and Michael Brown's point, it failed simply because J.C. Penny had conditioned its shoppers just to wait for the coupon. So the absence of the coupons didn't cause a change in behavior from them unless you believe not shopping at J.C. Penny at all is a change of behavior. So this is the Peter Lynch thing that will encourage you to look for throughout the holiday season. The brands that you're invested in, the brands that you shop from look at how they discount because if it seems a little too good, that might not be a good long-term thing. We'll bring it back there. I want to talk about this South Korea story because this is

kind of wild bill. And I don't know how much commentary we have just because how quickly this thing is changing. The president of South Korea, Yun Suk Yul, declared martial law in the country. He said that the decision was made to protect freedom and constitutional order. President Yun also said that this will help remove North Korea supporters. I wrote that and then I was double-checking the outline before the show. Then 190 lawmakers unanimously agreed to lift the president's martial law decree to the extent you can explain, Bill, what is going on here? It's funny because the shortest war in history lasted 40 minutes. It was the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896, and this was barely longer than that. I think the really important point is that this has nothing to

do with North Korea. It really has to do with the fact that Yun is really afraid of being impeached. There have been a lot of protests in South Korea about allegations of corruption and abuse of power. A journalism professor at UMass Amherst named Hiso Jong put together a really, really impressive article describing what has been happening in Korea. And we just haven't really been paying attention to it because I think of other rather large geopolitical events that are going on right now. But ultimately, I think that this is the end stage of an incredibly unpopular politician and leader making a desperate play to remain in power and maybe out of jail. And before we get to the companies that are impacted, this is something we do not.

It has happened in the United States before throughout our. history, it's not something that thankfully happens often. Yeah. But for those unfamiliar with this game, what does it mean for a country to declare martial law or a president to declare this? Yeah, basically what it means is that you're replacing the civilian government with military rule. So this is actually something that South Korea, fortunately or unfortunately, has a long

history of being under martial law. And it's basically when military commanders are given pretty much unchecked authority to make an enforced law. So those laws don't come through Parliament anymore or whatever the competent jurisdiction is. They come from the military apparatus. And what impacts from this story is it continues to shake out? Are you going to be watching on companies like Samsung and Kupang, which are both down a little bit today?

Yeah. If you look at the movement of the South Korean Juan, it was down about 2%. And these companies were down about 6%. And that is in U.S. dollar terms. So that kind of tracks and coupon shares have done okay during the day. I think it's just a matter of people being uncertain about what's happening. But really when you talk about martial law, you're talking about a restriction on freedoms, a ban on public gatherings or political activities. It does not have that much to do or shouldn't have that much to do with the companies that are based in South Korea, even one like coupon where almost all of its business is within Korea. Let's move on to this, not even a story, really a conversation that you were having on the morning show. This morning, it's available to members of any Motley Full Premium Service. You can access it in the video library if you can't miss it.

If you are unable to make it at 9 o'clock Eastern every Monday through Friday, Dylan and Tim Byers yesterday were sort of talking about Intel. And you've brought in this framework, which is the champ to chump pipeline. because there's a couple things that are true in investing. Multiple things can be true, which is that winners keep winning. And we've seen that with a company. How about Walmart that you talked about earlier? The dominating retail, and it's continued to dominate retail for quite some time,

even with the growth and rise of Amazon. But also champs can become chumps. And you can see these long downward trends as investors try to catch these falling knives. What are you looking for in these stories? where you're like, maybe this champion company is starting to become a chump. Well, so I had a great conversation with New York University professor, Aswath Demoder, in last February, and it's available at the Motley Fool. And we talked about life cycles of companies, and the life cycles of companies have really contracted over the last,

call it, 50 years. So you had companies, you know, like GE and GM that could go through cycles and still come out okay on other side, basically in the same position where in the last, let's call it 20 years, you had companies that were world beaters like Nokia that fell to being basically irrelevant. You know, at Yahoo, there are other ones that are like that. So the question now is one of, you know, of whether Intel is on its way from being a champ to a chump. And Intel itself obviously has a lot of issues that are facing it.

they've just replaced their CEO, Pat Gelsinger. But when Gelsinger came in in 2021, they already were facing these issues. And he wanted to bring manufacturing greatness back to Intel, which means that this is a company that was already in the last three years in the midst of a massive restructuring. And restructurings, I mean, I guess it's a little bit simplistic to say that they're hard to do. But when you're talking about a business that has the competitive factors that Intel is facing, thrown on top of that, the rapid shift that AI has brought in compute, you're talking about something that's incredibly hard to do.

And Intel has not done a good job of it so far. And sometimes restructurings can work out to the benefit of shareholders. You look at a company like General Electric, which its spinoffs were kind of seen as like the death melt for this company, GE proper now is up about 90% year over year. Over the past five years, it's up more than 200%. So when people, investors are looking for these storylines, I've noticed a few things. One is that life cycles for companies don't move at the patterns of human life cycles.

And there's also something where, you know, to crib a line from the Detroiters, great show on Netflix, by the way. Well done. People are looking for chumps of the week. and when you're a company that's the chump of the week, you get beaten up. And I've got a few examples where if you're willing to look past this company being the chump of the week, you'd do all right. So I'm going to throw some at you.

Crowdstrikes outage. Remember that earlier this year? Everyone was going to lose faith in crowd strike because the outage created all this chaos and people are going to move to more cybersecurity, different cybersecurity platforms. We'll check out Palo Alto. Netflix, when it lost subscribers a few years ago, this is. the end of Netflix's growth story. How about Charles Schwab? When it was going to collapse, post-Silicon Valley Bank, interest rates, they're rising and no one's going to keep cash there anymore,

and they're not going to be able to pay that out. Maybe Google, alphabet, when it fell behind in artificial intelligence, it's really not going to be able to race and catch up to what Microsoft is doing. And then, of course, we have meta. It's spending way too much money on the Metaverse. It's forgotten. It's fastball, and it's no good anymore. Those companies have all come back. And I can name a few companies that haven't as much. We can talk about Boeing until you mentioned earlier. But when we look at the comeback stories from being chump of the week, what do those have in common? Simply, they have great managements.

These are innovative companies that have continued to innovate. So what you're talking about with these companies, and I don't know that I'd put crowd strike into this pile because it is a newer company is, is you have companies that have reimagined what the reason for existing is. That's the incredible thing that's happened at GE is that they shed a number of their businesses. And it was almost like their reason for existing was for one part of the business to support the other. Well, that's great. But if the entire exogenous function of the business starts to collapse, it's not going to work. So when they shed those businesses, it meant that they all had to refocus, but they could not have refocused well

without good management. So that's what I think that you're ultimately seeing a platform of innovation and these companies really catching a break with top shelf managers. I'll see if I can get you

to bite on the management at AT&T because John Stanky running the show there and this is a company now that is really trying to get focused, or I should say is definitely getting focused, There's good reporting on it in Puck by Bill Cohen. He's been on the show before. And he looked at essentially that AT&T brought in these cable assets,

overpaid for them, but then was able to get rid of them. And it worked out okay for them. And now you have AT&T telling a story to investors that we are going to expand through fiber internet in 5G. Don't worry about direct TV anymore. We're done with that. We're focused and we're going to return a lot of capital to shareholders. $40 billion is the goal.

And if you like dividends, we're going to pay you high dividends, is interest rates decline. This is a company that's getting focused. The market has rewarded it. And it was at one point a chunk of the week. Yeah. Is this comeback story interesting to you as an investor when you look at the management team that's both made mistakes and also come back from them? There's a research group called Stern Stewart. And they have something called the economic value added in which you go through the process of deterrent

which parts of your asset base are actually adding value. And I really, I'm impressed with the moves that AT&T has made, as, you know, as Bill Cohen has pointed out, because they are being very unemotional about them. They're not, they have, they have said, these are assets that are no longer adding value to us. Maybe they will be more valuable with someone else. And it's one of those instances where you're seeing perhaps the buyer and the seller of the same asset have benefited from that transaction. Bill, man, you certainly are not a chump of the week.

Thank you for your time and your insight. Appreciate you being here on Motley for Money. Thank you, Ricky. All right. Your normally scheduled segment with Allison and Brod, that's going to run tomorrow because today is part two of my conversation with Dave Hatter, a cybersecurity consultant at Interest IT. talk about big data and the information that you're giving to big tech companies. Some of the best lessons don't come from a classroom. They come from experience.

On the power of advice, a new podcast series from Capital Group, you'll hear from CEOs, investors, and founders about how they built careers, took risks, and reinvented themselves. If you're starting your own journey, this is the kind of advice you won't want to miss. Available wherever you get your podcast, published by Capital Client Group, Inc. I find myself when I think about the big data stuff, I become cynical. I understand.

For right now, there's even essentially image AI search engines. So you can take someone's face, and I don't want to say which websites you can do this, but you can take a photo of someone's face and then you put it through an AI search engine, even if it hasn't seen the photo before, they're going to be able to identify that person. This shouldn't be a secret for anyone who's gone through a TSA screening where they're taking a photo of who you are and they can pretty quickly tell who you are. A little bit more comfortable with the TSA doing this than private businesses. But I want to turn this for a sec. What can people do then to protect their data a little bit?

Because if your information is out there in ways that you don't even know about, I don't know how you can knowingly protect it. Yeah, that's a very important question and a difficult question to have a concrete answer for. The good news is there are things you can do. And the first step is just being away. that it may not necessarily be in your interest to sign up for every app you run across and to give everything that asks for it, you know, free permission to collect every piece of data about you as possible. Now, you know, some folks will tell you I'm a 10-4-Hat guy and I go to extremes on this. I'm the guy, and I have an Apple phone. I'm the guy that turns off the location services until I need them. Verizon's my cell phone carrier. In order for my cell phone to

work, it must connect to their system. So of course, it's tracking you all the time. It can't work unless I do that. So I'm knowingly, I know how it works and I'm knowingly making a tradeoff there. But Apple doesn't need to know where I am every second, right? So even though it creates some friction and it's a little bit more inconvenient for me, I turn the location services off on my phone. So it's being aware that enormous amounts of data. And one of the things I would encourage people to do, Ricky, if you want to get some insight into it, take a look at the Apple App Store privacy tracking label. So this is another way Apple's been kind of a leader. A couple years ago, they basically mandated that if you want to deploy an app to Apple phones through their store, which really is the only

realistic way to do it, you must supply information to the consumer about the information you want to collect. So they've got these privacy labels that are somewhat similar to like a nutrition label on food. And when you look at these things, they'll show you exactly what information that manufacturer slash software vendor is collecting. And when you look at some of them like TikTok, another one of my favorite things to get all wound around the axle on is TikTok. I'm not a fan. It's unbelievable the amount of information they're collecting out of your phone. It's basically anything they can get their hands on. Now, if you understand that and you're okay with it, great.

I'm not okay with it. I have a minimum number of apps on my phone. So some of the things you can do, once you're aware that it may not be in your interest to give up all of this information is to think about how can you limit your digital footprint. And some ways you can do that without going complete Luddite or Ted Kaczynski out in the woods somewhere, right, is to start thinking about, A, trying to work with vendors that tend to be more privacy-friendly. Now, no one's perfect. And again, even folks like Apple could change their stance tomorrow. But Apple tends to be more privacy-friendly. It's not installing every app you run across.

Like, there's not a chance I would install TikTok. Any app that's coming from China and is collecting the kind of information they want, not a chance I would use that. So it's doing that research and thinking about what you're giving up. I think there are some big data projects that I'm actually pretty excited about. For me, one of them is self-driving cars. I don't see how you do. I mean, Tesla has talked about it. They get, I mean, they're tracking drivers' faces right now to make sure they're paying attention to the road. And Tesla has come out and said, we need millions of hours of driving data in order to train this model because we can't do a rules-based approach.

We have millions of hours of driving data. And then we treat this system like a game. play a game called be a safe driver, and you need to do that with mountains of basically personal information. Are there any big data projects that you're optimistic about? Well, first off, I'm not entirely pessimistic about all this stuff either. So much of this is still in its infancy, and I think over time, A, consumers will start to wise up and realize that things that are so-called free aren't really free, and there's a trade-off there. And I would be much happier personally to get out of this surveillance capitalism model

and pay for the services that I want, so I don't feel like, you know, they have to suck up all my data. So again, I'm not necessarily against all of this stuff per se. It's the way it's been implemented, and it's the privacy washing and the lack of informed consent. I think those things over time will work themselves out to a large degree. And clearly, there are systems in place today that could not have happened, would not happen without large amounts of data that are needed to power these things. Now, you mentioned self-driving cars. At the moment, I'm not a lot. a fan, Ricky, and I'll tell you why. Go for it. As a guy who has written

millions of lines of code, I mean, I spent 25 years as a professional software engineer, I created a lot of bugs. You know how many of those bugs I've created on purpose? Zero. But I'm a human being. I make mistakes like everyone else. And the idea that I'm going to get in a car that is controlled by software

written by human beings, and it's going to drive me down the expressway at 75 miles an hour, and I'm going to trust that to make all the right decisions. I'm just not there. I'm not saying I'm not saying it will not eventually get to a place where I would love it. Because admittedly, I'd love to be able to get in a car and have it take me where I want to go and be able to do something else. To me, that would be amazing because I don't like to drive.

However, I just, again, this stuff is very immature. There are concerns about hacking these things. There have been recalls of vehicles where they've been hacked. There's a big recall from Chrysler back in 2015 due to some hackers demonstrating how they could hack these things. So the idea that I'm going to be in a missile moving down the road at 80 miles. an hour that Chinese hackers can take over and drive me into the local oil processing plan or something. Again, I'm going to pass on that for now. I do think there is tremendous potential for that, drone delivery and the idea of AI and software-powered drones being able to do

things. Robotics. I think there's a lot of potential for this stuff in the future, but we're still in the earliest days of this where much of this is funded by collecting your data. And again, using it in ways you can't understand or see or predict or prevent. So, yeah, I'm optimistic about the future. I'm pessimistic about where we are currently and the trajectory. But I do think people are waking up. There's a lot of organizations out there doing good work like Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy Information Center, raising awareness about these things. And I think as more people wise up, we will eventually move to a place where this stuff will make a lot more sense and will be a lot better for the consumer than it is today. So I'm not I'm not all doom and

gloom. It's just we're in a bad spot right now. I'm going to try to get you more optimistic on the Tesla. Okay. So so I don't I don't I don't drive a Tesla. I drive something else. But I understand the threat of of you know, yes, they could be hacked into. That's a potential. But when you look at the miles driven per one accident and this is Tesla's report, they say it's seven million miles with Tesla is using autopilot technology, and the United States average is under a million. So I think Tesla has gotten to a point where it seems like the autopilot is working out in a pretty safe way for millions and millions of miles. I don't know how much proof you need before you get into a car with how safe they're already proving to be. And it's not lines of

code that software engineers are writing. It's training data based off massive amounts of video. It's software, though, that's processing that data and ultimately making the decisions about what to do. So, yeah, you're right. They're using enormous amounts of data to train the models, but at the end of the day, there's still code running in there that's making those decisions. Code has bugs, code has backdoors. Code can, you know, sometimes it's like a piece of corrupt data makes something blow up. There's a great article, I would recommend. It could be a great topic for a different day.

The coming software apocalypse from the Atlantic. It's not even about cybersecurity. It's about legacy software and shoddy software and the fact that we now depend on so much software that's so interconnected. You know, my software calls your API. Is that Tesla calling some API somewhere that introduces a bug? Maybe. So again, I understand your point. And I'll be honest.

I would trust Tesla more than any other vendor. Have you seen the Waymo cars out in San Francisco where someone runs up? Yes, I have. It puts an orange coat on the hood and it just freaks out. So, again, I think we will get there. I absolutely believe that. I am just not personally going to put myself or my family at risk because I know too much about software and I just don't trust these things yet. Dave Hatter, that's a good place to end it.

No, I really enjoyed the conversation. I like having people out here that disagree with me that encourage us fools to think a little bit differently and maybe break us away from our preconceived notions. He's a cybersecurity consultant for interest IT. I've known him for a good number of years and I'm happy to have you on Motley for Money. As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motleyful editorial standards

and are not approved by advertisers. The Motleyful only picks products that would personally recommend to friends like you. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.