S&P 500: “2,805 is an important area of resistance (and also happens to be our current year-end target for the S&P 500).” – Peter Cecchini, chief market strategist, Cantor Fitzgerald.
S&P 500 at Near-Term Support
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.
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.
The average HSA accountholder has about $2,000 in their checking account, meaning those fees range from 1.5% to 2.7% of the balance, according to Morningstar.
Alibaba’s sales during its 24-hour Singles Day shopping event rose 22 percent to $30.8 billion from a year earlier, a new record, according to CNBC.
Facebook was said to fire executive and virtual-reality wunderkind Palmer Luckey for donating $10,000 to an anti-Hillary Clinton group, sparking a backlash from colleagues, The Wall Street Journal reported.
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.
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.
Mergers and acquisitions in the public relations industry are likely to be frequent in the next few years as publicity firms with digital know-how find buyers. Almost all (92 percent) of respondents to a recent survey of independent PR firms said they have been approached by a potential buyer in the past two years, while more than half of firms (54 percent) said it was “likely” or “very likely” that they would sell by 2021, according to law firm Davis & Gilbert.