Retail

Years ago, being a hedge fund manager was something worth bragging about – I would know.

Starting in 1983 on the floor of the Chicago Board of Exchange, I ran multiple successful hedge funds, helping clients (and myself) make beaucoup bucks in the stock market. At times, I was outright braggadocios about my successes, like many other hedge fund managers. Some even beat out the yearly gains of the stock market year after year…

But that was ages ago, and hedge funds aren’t bragging anymore.

It’s retail – small traders and investors – that ought to be celebrating success, and I’ve got a new play so you can be celebrating the very same profits.

Click here to read what retail outperforming hedge funds means for you.

You’ll notice something different in today’s BS.H.

I’m in Baltimore – finishing up some exciting research, which you’ll hear about in the coming days.

But in the meantime, I want you to focus on four plays to make before kicking back for the holiday weekend.

So far this year retail bankruptcy filings total 43, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

That’s only 5 fewer than the 48 bankruptcy filings by retailers in 2010, the worst year for retail during the Great Recession, and we’ve still got four and a half months left in 2020.

There could be dozens, or hundreds, more bankruptcies by the end of this year. I say hundreds because according to S&P Global in 2008 a whopping 441 retailers filed for bankruptcy.

Here’s what’s happening behind shuttered and reopened stores to demand, to supply chains and vendors of apparel companies; and who’s going to make it and who’s not.

What investors, analysts and retailers call the Amazon effect, I call the “Amazonation” of retail, of America, which happens to be just the tip of the “Retail Ice Age.”

Bricks and mortar retailers in the U.S. were just starting to come to grips with their own self-inflicted mistakes when Amazon.com Inc. (NasdaqGS:AMZN) shone an even brighter light on an even bigger mistake they were making.

Now, retailers are facing an even more deadly existential threat to their bricks and mortar as well as their online existence, no thanks to the coronavirus…

Everyone knows shopping has changed forever. Online shopping is in, bricks-and-mortar stores are out.

Maybe not forever, but with cities, counties, and states prone to stay-at-home orders, no thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, shopping in physical stores is less appealing than ever.

Shopping malls, with their higher density, which get closed quicker than standalone stores and take longer to open, have been hit even harder by the pandemic and changing consumer habits.

For malls, suffering systemically, it’s the end of an era and the end of the line for many of them.

However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t opportunity in their downfall…