Brendan Schema

Taking things less seriously and leaning into genuine curiosity can help foster a better relationship with whatever that thing is. I found this out the long way. open.substack.com/pub/bschema/p/…

While I don’t disagree that the ad doesn’t show what the brand/product does… It just generated an incremental 250k+ views from this post alone. If you can get people talking, you win. All PR is good PR — at least in Super Bowl context.

Decided to take another swing at this writing thing... here goes nothing. open.substack.com/pub/bschema/p/…

You will probably find out why I am majoring in finance and not digital marketing. But you might be able to learn a bit about AI and SEO.

As a project this semester I am currently building a website and racing fellow students to optimize it in search. You can watch my site go from the work-in-progress it is now to (hopefully) something fantastic. schemaseo.info

“Marketing companies have finance teams and finance companies have marketing teams. So just go out, learn, do, and you will be fine.” @timmchiusano

What was the most impressive or disappointing portion of Apple’s earnings yesterday? $AAPL Most impressive to me was Services revenue. With an all time high of 2.35 billion active devices, the growth is still there.

Amazon delivers 20,000,000 packages per day. That is about 7.3 billion packages a year.

CVS is testing a new feature in some locations — unlocking protected merchandise via the CVS application. Reports thus far are saying the enhancement to locking up merchandise is working well for both customers and employees. Have you seen this in stores yet?

31 Years of Stock Market Returns in one chart:

@MGStockTalk Wouldn’t be surprised if that is next on Uber’s bucket list.

My portfolio has taken an $UBER to the moon. Gotta love it.

@joecarlsonshow I would argue that Target has an ability to do something similar however no lever for volume like Costco. Target turns a $10 purchase into a $100 one. Costco turns the prospect of saving money into spending absurd amounts of it.

I saved $15 by having Costco rotate my tires. During the half hour they took to rotate them, I walked around the store and spent $200 on random stuff. Nobody has this game down better.

Do you see this as a positive or negative thing?

If you are planning a retirement, do not count on Social Security. It was never intended to be the sole source of retirement funds and may or may not even exist by the time you retire.

$JPM JPMorgan is in talks to take over the $AAPL Apple Card from current issuer, Goldman Sachs. JPMorgan is looking for concessions, including a discount on the $17b of outstanding balances and the spreading out of billing dates. The Apple Card boasts over 12 million users.

@Couch_Investor @joecarlsonshow If Nike wants to be viewed as a premium brand, which they do, they cannot beat the others on price. Inexpensive = cheap in consumers minds. They would undercut their own brand equity.

@joecarlsonshow They can try to beat the others on price. It's still Nike.

A summary of how Nike $NKE screwed up, in 5 steps: 1) They moved everything online and in their mobile app, removing a ton of product from places like Amazon and dozens of physical retailers. 2) They thought that the immediate success in revenue growth and margins was a good thing, they pat themselves on the back for doing a good job in moving everything on their own apps and cutting costs of retailers. 3) After removing all their product from Amazon and retailers, other top competitors quickly filled the shelves that Nike left open. Adidas, New Balance, Sketchers, ASICS gained a bunch of exposure. 4) New brands that nobody knew about realized there's a bunch of new shelf space with the absence of Nike hogging all the distribution. On brand, Hoka, Brooks, etc filled up this new available distribution, gaining awareness, brand value, and revenue growth. Nike had done essentially the exact opposite of what Google did. Google defaulted themselves everywhere, making it so competition was impossible. Nike took their presence away from every place possible, inviting in new competitors. 5) Now customers are fully aware of the top performing shoes like On, Hoka, Brooks, Altra, and have fallen in love with them. Nike is trying to catch up with their designs and technology, but it's too late. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. It's likely that competition will be more difficult now than ever in their history.

Apple —> Healthcare

If I told you there's a company that sells devices that track your heart rate, tracks your steps, tracks menstrual cycle, warns about dangerous noise levels, measures blood oxygen levels, runs ECG's, alerts emergency contacts if you fall, detects if you get in a car accident, warns you about heart arrhythmia, tests your hearing for hearing loss, works as a hearing aid. You'd say, "that sounds like a healthcare company" Most big tech companies have been pushing into healthcare, but I would rate Apple's efforts as by far the most successful. They are selling hundreds of millions of devices that double as medical devices. What does this mean? I'm not entirely sure right now. Just an observation that Apple is winning at healthcare.

@vasamartinez In all honesty, the lack of @drinkolipop

What stands out?

@MnkeDaniel The Psychology of Money by @morganhousel

If you could only read one thing about investing for the rest of your life, what would it be? (Can be a book, a PDF, etc.)