Leading into Black Friday, we saw a lot of videos like this one, guys. Check this out. Where is everybody? Like, there's nobody here. Dude, what the Is this Black Friday for real? Guys, the line at Starbucks is longer than. Any other line. Apparently coffee is the hot ticket item this Black Friday. I'm just absolutely mind blown. Guys, there's nobody here. Look at the. Line Starbucks, Starbucks is is busy.
The rest of Target dead. Nothing was selling Black Friday. It was going to be a failure. Shopping mall centers are entirely empty on Black Friday, even the day after Black Friday. We have companies like Best Buy with too many TV's. They've gone unsold. They couldn't clear up their inventory. They literally have stacks of TV's, entire aisles of TV's that
have gone unsold. Now, I saw a lot of these videos highlighting how slow Black Friday was, how nobody was excited about the shopping holiday, and how your companies, your stocks, and the economy are going to be doing poorly. The consumer is exhausted. They've extinguished all of their spending power. But what if I told you there's a different answer here, a different part of the story not being shared. Here's Amazon, for example, explaining how their Black Friday went.
We. Had a huge Black Friday last week and in fact it was our highest sales. Most items sold Black Friday in Amazon's entire history. So very excited about that as you said. On average, customers ordered more than 1000 items per second throughout the day, she says. This was their biggest Black Friday ever, and they sold, quote, 1000 items per second, not per minute, but per second all of Black Friday. Shopify also has something to say about Black Friday.
We saw peak sales per minute globally on Black Friday was 4.2 million per minute. That was right around noon on Friday, 12 O1 Eastern Time. And last, just to compare, last year peak sales permitted globally on Black Friday was about 3.5 million around the same time. But in total, in aggregate we saw but $4.1 billion sold on Black Friday. That's a 22% increase since the last year's Black Friday, which is about 3.36.
They also hit record high Black Friday sales, and in aggregate, it does seem like Black Friday shopping was a success. It was up 7.5% over last year, according to Adobe Analytics. Now we also have the frustrating news for the bears that the market is not dropping. It continues to surge upwards and there's reason to believe that this may be sustained. Investors today are holding record high cash balances.
And then finally Elizabeth Warren took to X, formerly Twitter to post that there is now a sandwich shop monopoly. You heard that right. We're talking about Subway sandwich and Jimmy John's. They have formed a sandwich shop monopoly and they need to be stopped by the government. So as always, we have a lot to get to. Let's go ahead and jump in. Now I want to start off by taking a look at the Black Friday predictions. We had a lot of videos like the Surface over the weekend.
If you're online, a lot of these type of videos were trending where. Is everybody like, there's nobody here? Dude, what the Is this Black Friday for real? Guys, the line at Starbucks is longer than. Any other live these videos show an empty Target at 6:00 AM. This is Black Friday morning and traditionally this type of holiday brings a lot of shoppers. They surge in they look for deals. In fact, I remember back in 2014, 2015, that Black Friday resulted in people literally
struggling for deals. They were reaching over each other. They're trying to grab packages from each other. We've all seen them before. The video and images of people fighting over saving a few dollars on a smart TV, well, now we're seeing videos of empty stores and overstocked merchandise. So what's going on here? Watching these type of videos is very misleading and it doesn't paint an accurate picture of what's going on with the economy.
There's a couple key things that have affected Black Friday shopping this year. The first thing impacting lower store traffic this year, especially in retail locations, is the deals have been extended outside of a single day. A lot of these retailers are offering their deals ahead of Black Friday. They started on Thursday or they start Black Friday sales earlier in the week. This, of course is going to affect in store traffic because the deals are being extended out of a single day.
It makes it so there's less of a rush in that single day to get an item. And on top of that, many retailers like Best Buy and Target are offering price protection through most of the holiday shopping season as well. So even if you bought the item earlier at a higher price outside of the deal, you can retroactively get the deal.
So obviously when Target's offering buyers protection and expanding the holiday outside of Black Friday, it doesn't create as much shopping urgency on the day itself. So in terms of Best Buy and Target, these companies aren't seeing a rush of shoppers racing for deals because they've expanded those deals all throughout the holiday season. Now, I don't invest in Target or Best Buy. The only physical retailer that I own is Costco. That's my pick. I think it's the best physical
retailer now. I went to Costco on Saturday following Black Friday and it was packed, but that was no surprise because it's packed every weekend. So I'm not sure if Black Friday impacted Costco at all. But outside of the fact that sales have now been expanded to multiple days, they're not just on Black Friday. I think there's another big factor leading to lower traffic in store, and this is the biggest factor overall.
People are not buying as much stuff in stores as they were two years ago or five years ago or 10 years ago. Online sales is taking market share. We can take a look at Amazon, for example. If we look at just the revenue incremental gain from 2020 to 2022, the revenue went from almost $400 billion to over $500 billion. So they gained roughly $100 billion in these two years, $100 billion is about the same amount of revenue that Target does per year.
So they gained an incremental target in a two year period. Now a portion of this of course is AWS, another portion is advertising, but most of this revenue comes from online retail. Online retailers like Amazon and Shopify continue to gain market share every single year against their physical retailer counterparts. That's why these companies are up two and 5% today, and the statistics that Amazon shares this year are incredible. Here's one of the spokesperson from Amazon's warehouse.
On average, customers ordered more than 1000 items per second throughout the day and our top selling categories included home, kitchen, toys and beauty. I'm going to share a few of our top selling items as well. Those were Amazon Fire TV sticks. Those are always popular. This next one I'm really excited about because it's from a small business seller. It's a really fun game called. Taco Cat, Goat, Cheese, pizza. Check it out.
And on Prime Video. Our top selling movies were Barbie, Oppenheimer, and the latest Mission Impossible. Now Amazon didn't give a lot of stats here. They said that they sold 1000 items per second on Black Friday, which is a stat that I have a difficulty wrapping my mind around. But they didn't share how this compares to last year. What does the percentage change from year over year? But just to put it in perspective, I mean, when we hear online shopping numbers
from Adobe, they suggest. Sales were up 7 1/2%. MasterCard says online sales were up 8 1/2%, and Salesforce says they were up 9%. So how much did Amazon see an increase over a year ago from Black Friday? Again, it was our biggest Black Friday ever. We were all about saving, you said. That what what percentage increase? I don't have those numbers handy, but we're just excited
that we had a great season. We're we're geared up for Cyber Monday. You can tell that Amazons being careful about what they share and what they don't share. She'll not answer the question yet about what the percentage gain was year over year. We just know it was the biggest year ever. Now either way, whether Amazon slightly beat their last year's record or whether they crushed it with a year over year gain, we don't know that for now. But we know that the stores were not empty.
It was not what the videos showed online, the anecdotal footage of people walking through empty locations. And Amazon isn't the only outlier here. We can also look at Shopify, which Amazon and Shopify are similar but different. In a lot of ways, Amazon is the centralized place for sellers to all sell under the Amazon.com URL. Shopify everyone sells on their own unique URLs, their own shopping experience. They can make the website look and feel how they want.
Both of them have millions of third party sellers selling on their platform and Shopify, along with Amazon had an incredible, record-breaking weekend. We saw merchants crossed the $1 billion mark before midnight EST on Black Friday, which was a couple hours earlier than last year. And so you know while it's still early on Cyber Monday, I think the the, the, the, the thing we're seeing is that shoppers are voting with their wallets to buy from brands they love both online and in store.
We can talk about in store too and and those brands are on Shopify. Shopify is partnered with Amazon and a lot of social media companies to make what they call a retail shopping operating system. And I do think this company has a very good corner of the Internet. They have really carved out a terrific business for themselves. We're creating a retail operating system which means whatever you want to do from Shopify you can do that.
But but you know the success of this Black Friday is is owned by our, our merchants and and they're doing really well. You know something that I just a new stat that I just got is over 30,000 of our merchants. For them, Black Friday was their best sales day ever on Shopify. Now I'll be getting more data from Amazon and Shopify after Cyber Monday to see how this entire weekend panned out. So we have Amazon and Shopify.
And overall, the report from Adobe Analytics is that Black Friday shopping had a 7.5% increase in online sales year over year, a total of $9.8 billion, a further indication that price conscious consumers want to spend on the best deals and they are looking for those deals online. It's actually incredible to look at the revenue by day, every single day. Adobe's tracking the revenue online with what they can see. And keep in mind these numbers aren't exactly correct. They are estimates.
MasterCard and Visa will have their own analysis as well. They show the same trends, but they're not perfectly matched. On a normal given day, we have anywhere from 2 to $4 billion in revenue, and then on Black Friday it spikes up to 9.8 billion. So this is almost like a week's worth of sale in a single 24 hour period. Another interesting thing to look at is the actual deals on Black Friday. There's some people that suggest that there's not really any good deals.
The companies aren't marking down their products and that is not accurate, at least judging by Adobe Analytics. They track the price of each item and we can see the electronic toys and apparel typically have anywhere from a zero to 5% discount leading up to Black Friday. Then going into the week, we have toys discounted around 9%. And then on Black Friday itself, the prices plummet. Electronics on average are 26% cheaper, toys are 28% cheaper
and apparel's 24% cheaper. So customers are actually getting good deals on Black Friday. Now, after seeing all the objective data of how successful Black Friday was both in physical retail and online retail, what do we make of these type of anecdotal videos illustrating how empty all these retail locations are? And many people, hundreds of comments saying that the economy is going down the tubes, that nobody has money to spend, that nobody's buying anything this weekend.
I think this is a clear illustration of being careful with the anecdotal evidence you're receiving online, because in many cases it lacks full context. Target, for example, expanded their Black Friday sales prior in the week, so there's multiple days of it as well as most of these companies do a lot of the selling online, they price match, they fight aggressively for your sales.
So if you're just looking at some pieces of evidence, like an opening of a company at 6:00 AM and concluding that the economy's in trouble, I think you're going to be mistaken. I don't have any problem with anecdotal research and looking at things on the ground in person for yourself. In fact, I think that's an important part of doing
research. Part of the reason that I first looked at Texas Roadhouse was because I've gone to the company over the years, for the past decade, and I've just seen how busy this company is every single weekend. Without fail, it's packed. And I noticed that trend over time. So that got me my initial research on the company. That was anecdotal evidence that was taken from first hand account. But the research can't end there. You can't buy and sell just based off of your own anecdotal
experience. What if the Texas roadhouses around my home are unusually busy and they're not as busy other places? That's why I look at the actual fundamentals of the company and see if my experience aligns with the overall fundamentals of the company, the direction it's going, see if what I'm seeing is an outlier or the norm.
So I not only look at how busy it is in my current locations around my home, but I also check different area codes and see what the wait time is over in Texas, over in California, all across the US Anecdotal experience can lead us into great investments. It can initiate our start into doing research on a company, but we should have formed final conclusions about a subject based on five second clips posted online. And unfortunately, that's what a
lot of people did. In order to spread fear and doom and gloom about the economy, they took a couple of video shots of empty stores and concluded that that's how the entire U.S. economy is doing, and obviously that's not the case. So even though people love to be pessimistic, it sounds smarter to be pessimistic. You sound like you're more educated and you're looking at things with this nice skeptical bent. I'll continue to have my optimistic approach because I
think it's correct. Overall, right now, people are spending money, they're employed, they're making money, people have extra money to spend. And I believe investors that continue to buy good companies that offer great products and are very competitive, they'll do better over time than the investors that continue to be skeptical, pessimistic and dumish.
Now, during all of this news and chaos over the weekend, we also heard that Amazon has officially passed up both UPS and FedEx to be the biggest delivery business in the US. A decade ago, Amazon was a major customer of UPS and FedEx, and some executives from the incumbents and analysts mocked the notion mock the Amazon could someday supplant them. And if we put up the growth here over time, it's actually incredible to see how fast Amazon has caught up to UPSU.
went up a little bit from 2019 to 2020, then it basically had a flat year from 20 to 21. While UPS was having that flat year, Amazon delivered over a billion extra parcels year over year. So Amazon made substantial gains. And then from 2021 to 2022, UPS actually had a down year, while again Amazon made substantial gains. Now I can't say that I'm shocked by this trend. I've said for a while that Amazon will engulf UPS and FedEx. Right now, I think there's going to be a strategic shift.
UPS and FedEx are going to move away from delivering standard packages and items that Amazon delivers. I think they'll still focus on delivering furniture and home appliances, big and bulky things that Amazon isn't focusing on. But I predict over time UPS and FedEx will have their growth halted and be stagnant over the next five years as Amazon continues to grow. Now moving on from all the Black Friday news, we also have news of the overall economy and stock
market. For example, the stock market this year is up around 18%. It's been a great year to be an investor. My Portfolio for reference is around 22% time weighted return this year and 23% money weighted. So it's had a great performance year to date. That's $93,000 in the green now. Anytime the stock market races up in a year like this, investors can become apprehensive about buying. Now they can become a little bit more restrictive, but in some cases, that's not the best decision.
There's a lot of people that predicted that 2023 would be a bad year to be an investor, that the stock market was going to go down, the bear market was going to continue, the valuations were far too high and there would not be a rebound. And they've all been proven incredibly wrong on this topic. But despite being objectively proven wrong for 2023, they don't admit they're wrong. They just say that it's going to happen next year. That's when the big stock market
crash is going to happen. Bears are never wrong. They're always just a bit early and they always push back their claims The next year. We're seeing that happen yet again. Right now, we actually have evidence that investors can continue spending more. This year, investors are plowing cash into stocks and bond funds. Invesco's QQQ exchange traded fund, which tracks the tech heavy NASDAQ 100 index, reported its largest weekly inflow in history the week of November 13th.
Funds that track the high yield bond indexes, the higher risk portion of the corporate bond market, reported two highest weekly inflow records in the middle of November. So we know right now a lot of investors are buying stocks. That's why prices are going up and a lot of investors have huge cash balances and money market funds earning A yield there. They say for the first time in a long time, cash is a competitor
quote. But I think as soon as short term rates start to tick down, you're going to see large inflows to other assets. So people are parking their money in cash right now, but they're not going to want to sit it there forever. I think there's multiple ways to view this data, but I think it's ultimately bullish for stocks that people have a lot of cash. That means that there's more money sitting on the sidelines for if a dip happens in the
future. If we do have some type of 5% or 10% pull back, a lot of people have a cash balance to buy up that pullback, making a long sustained bear market less likely. So even though right now cash is a competitor, I still see it as a positive thing that so many people have cash. Now moving on, we have to address this post from our favorite senator, Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren has become a
bad take machine. Most recently, she's gone on a campaign against buybacks, illustrating that she doesn't understand how they function in the capital markets or the consequences of them. But out of all the bad takes she's given, I think this one might finally take the cake. Let me go ahead and read this, and this is a direct quote. We don't need another private equity deal that could lead to higher food prices for consumers.
The FTC is right to investigate whether the purchase of Subway by the same firm that owns Jimmy John's and McAllister Deli creates a sandwich shop monopoly. Yes, you heard that right. That is the exact words. She's concerned that a company that owns both Subway and Jimmy John's is going to create a sandwich shop monopoly. So no longer is Congress concerned about the industrial
military complex. No longer are they concerned about abusive billing practices from pharmaceutical companies that hold products that are available nowhere else. But they're concerned about one of the most commoditized items in the world, a sandwich. A deli sandwich, which is available at every retail location, available at every deli, the most purchased food item in the world being a monopoly because two chains are owned by the same owner. Now you know me, I'm a big fan of monopolies.
In fact, I try to invest in monopolies when I can. A lot of the companies that I own, like S&P Global and MasterCard and Intuit, have very monopolistic characteristics. They have dominant market share. They have very concentrated industries. They're at the very top of the food chain. Their companies have incredibly high barriers to entry, and you can't really get their products many other places. That's the characteristic of a
monopoly. Out of all the companies that I own, most of them are monopolistic. But there's a couple that are not monopolistic at all. Food joints are not monopolies, and I've never referred to Texas Roadhouse as a monopolistic company, or Chipotle for that matter. They have brand value, they have name brand recognition. They offer a good product at a good price, so people are willing to pay for it.
They do have rapid store expansion, but they also have a characteristic that many monopolies do not have, which is intense, fierce competition every single day at every single location. There are many alternatives to Chipotle and Texas Roadhouse, just like there's many alternatives to Subway and Jimmy John's. Even in the sandwich category alone, there's many
alternatives. But outside of the sandwich category, there's literally thousands of food joints to go to. But there you have in 2023, the big concern for Elizabeth Warren is the quote sandwich shop Monopoly. That's all for this time. See you in the next one.