Cracks in consumer spending emerge

Pretty brutal day for online retail stocks. Worst since last October. Worst day of the year as well. TripAdvisor on pace for its worst day ever. We bring that up. We have booking holdings. Yeah, now what’s? Why don’t you? Well, how do you view that relative to Trip? Well, TripAdvisor is a company in chaos. I mean they’re trying to sell themselves. They’ve got you know a lot of problems and it’s not just about this quarters earnings. So I I don’t think there’s any comparison. Booking is a much bigger company with a much better website. They’ve invested much more in it. They earn a lot of money. The stock just had a good quarter. It’s been, you know it’s been solid, it’s been a very good performing company and it’s gaining market share. It has a lot of market share, but trip is going nowhere I’m afraid. I mean that wasn’t a pun but so do we need, do we need Joe to to to be concerned about discretionary second worst sector of the day. You just picked up TJX and Ross. Now those are very distinct parts of the retail landscape obviously and Royal Caribbean too. OK. So let’s talk about TJX and Ross because what are they? They are off price. When did they find their peak in 2024 in late February, Why did they find their peak there? Because they had a significant appreciation from October which was consistent with the decline in yields. There is a correlation that I can find for off price with yields itself. As yields moved lower off price did better. As yields got sticky off price got challenged. The recent ads for Rawstar and TJX is, is really recognizing the strength, the qualitative nature of both of these companies and recognizing that they’re in a price position which could offer some support. But I will tell you this, ultimately it depends on where yields go from here. Shan, discretionary is tough, tough to pick the winners from the losers, isn’t it? I think it’s, I think it really depends on what your outlook is for lower income and middle and more importantly middle income consumers because those are really the tipping point. That’s the inflection point from, from a consumer perspective, I think the trends are is that we’re going to continue to see you know minimal goods inflation. We’re going to continue to see I think certainly this, this resurgence of services as a percentage of spending is not going to go back to the way it was in the post pandemic but rather pre pandemic. And I think there has been you know a little bit of perhaps froth in areas like travel because it has seemed to be very inelastic, Scott. It seemed like people are just willing to travel and continue to digest price increases and they’re starting to be a little bit more discretionary around that. So I think that the challenges here is really looking at pipeline for the next you know year and a half. Our view is that rates are going to come down and I agree I think that that will help certain parts of discretionary, but I just think you need to be more selective Now just look at Disney, I mean Disney the emphasis was all on streaming and what’s happening but if you really plug into the park not so good. You know I mean they they they raise price too much and consumer is stretched as you said and it it, it shows up alright.