BAML: Investors boost holdings of U.S. stocks, REITs, healthcare

Rob Williams

Investors bought the October correction and boosted exposure to U.S. and emerging-market stocks, REITs and healthcare. Meanwhile, while their allocation to the global technology industry dropped to the lowest level since February 2009, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s monthly fund manager survey. 

“Ominously, no signs of investor rotation from tech to ‘value,’ i.e. banks, small cap, industrials, EAFE” were seen, according to the report from an analyst team headed by Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist at the bank.


Survey: Digital marketers face greater ad-measurement challenges

Rob Williams

Almost three-fourths (71 percent) of marketers said evaluating the effectiveness of digital media investment has become more difficult in recent years, particularly in India and China, according to programmatic media platform Xaxis. In addition, 86 percent of marketers plan in the next one to two years to boost spending on “outcome-driven media,” which describes advertising whose effects can be precisely tracked by measurements such as cost per in-target reach, in-store footfall, cost per incremental site visitor or cost per sale.


Source: Xaxis

Source: Xaxis

Study: Smart-speaker shipments triple to 22.7 million

Rob Williams

Smart-speaker shipments almost tripled (up 197%) to a record 22.7 million units globally in the third quarter from a year earlier, putting the voice-enabled devices on track to exceed 100 million in use during the final three months of 2018, according to researcher Strategy Analytics. Amazon remained the top-ranked vendor in the third quarter with a 32 percent share followed by Google at 23 percent. China’s Baidu boosted its share from just 1 percent in the second quarter to 8 percent in the third quarter, the fastest growth among smart-speaker makers. Baidu, Alibaba and Xiaomi are vying leadership in the fledgling smart speaker market in China.

IDC: Mobile market to grow 1.2% a year until 2022

Rob Williams

The global mobile market is set to expanded at a five-year compound annual growth of 1.2 percent through 2022, driven by increased mobile data usage and expanding M2M applications that offset declines in spending on mobile voice and messaging services, according to researcher IDC. Worldwide spending on telecom and pay-TV services will rise by 0.6 percent in 2018.

Survey: Millennials rank ‘new landscaping’ as top home renovation

Rob Williams
Source: Pixabay.com

Millennial homeowners ranked “new landscaping” as their top priority for renovations, more than kitchens and bathrooms, as outdoor entertaining and sharing pictures on social media are key activities. About one-third of the group ranked the backyard as the top choice of what to look for when buying a new home, according to image-pinning site Pinterest and Chase Home Lending.