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Catching up on some conference appearances for the companies that I follow, and I thoroughly enjoyed this one with SentinelOne's CFO and VP of Investor Relations. Good color on win rates vs Microsoft EDR and Crowdstrike, as well as how leadership is seeing Attivo and Scalyr/Dataset fitting into the product portfolio moving forward.

I won't do a full summary for this one but I'm happy to answer any questions about takeaways.

Piper Sandler issued their Spring 2022 'Taking Stock with Teens' report not too long ago, with the aim of investigating trends amongst US teens. with respect to commerce, payments, fashion gaming, and more.

Here are 5 of the more interesting takeaways.

TikTok is now the #1 favourite for teens at 33%, with Snapchat taking a passenger seat (31%), and Instagram riding in back at 22%.

In terms of actual usage, the top three are reversed, with Instagram commanding the majority of monthly active usage. $SNAP $META

Athletic apparel is growing in popularity as teens' favourite apparel brands.

Nike continues to be number one, taking up a 29% share, but Lululemon is growing in mindshare and ranking. $NKE $LULU

As cable continues to dwindle (down 8% in the last 4 years), Netflix and YouTube take up an equal footing in terms of teens' daily video consumption, both at 30%. $NFLX $GOOGL

Teens predominantly use Apple Pay as their smartphone payment system, followed by Venmo, Cash App, and PayPal. PayPal does lead in BNPL penetration, however, followed by Afterpay, a Square company. $SQ $PYPL $BAC $AAPL $WFC $JPM

For greater context, 32% of teens surveyed do not have a traditional bank account. Cash remains the most popular payment mechanism, followed by debit cards, credit cards, checks, and BNPL accounts for just 5% of monthly usage.

Findings show that 26% of teens own a VR device, but that 48% of owners seldom use it, and only 5% are frequent users.

Of those who don't own one, 32% (the majority) are not interested in purchasing one. $META

iPhone ownership remains close to record highs with 87% owning one, with 87% suggesting their next phone will be an Apple one $AAPL. Ownership of Smart Watch reaches 35%, at record highs. Plans to buy an apple watch decline. $AAPL

Lastly, for laughs, because the opinion is about as useful as a chocolate fire escape, teen economists believe the economy is set to worsen (71%), compared to 46% last spring.

That was more than 5, but thanks for coming to my ted talk.

The full report can be found here:

Bank of America's $BAC latest consumer report (titled, 'Going on a bear hunt') had some interesting data to observe about the American consumer. They state that they "remain cautiously optimistic about for the consumer".

• Data shows growth in consumer spending, but inflation is challenging household purchasing power. Total credit and debit spending was up 9% YoY in May, with total transactions up 7%.

• Despite bearish signs for macro, BAC say they are "struck" by strong momentum on service sector spending.

• Household median checking and savings are higher than pre-pandemic, and households don't appear to be relying on credit cards to meet rising bills.

Bank of America's aggregated credit and debit card spending was up 9% YoY in May. Within this, credit card spending was up 16%, while debit card spending was up 4% YoY. Overall Bank of America total payments data growth (across cards, Automated Clearing House (ACH), Wires, Billpay, peer-to-peer (P2P), cash and check), was 6% higher YoY in May, influenced by the timing of last year’s tax payments. Total transaction volumes were up 8% YoY.

"Looking into card spending, in the 28-day period ending May 28 Bank of America card spending (credit and debit) per household was up 4.3% year-over-year (YoY). This was a moderation from the 6.8% YoY for the month of April. It is noteworthy that the spending growth rate is less than the current rate of major inflation measures in the US, namely the Consumer Price Index and Personal Consumption Expenditure inflation, which stood at 8.3% YoY and 6.3% YoY, respectively, in April. This suggests that inflation-adjusted spending (“real” spending) growth for households has slipped into negative territory."

They state that "Over the same period in 2021, the level of card spending was rising fairly sharply, reflecting the bounce-back following the easing of COVID-related restrictions as well as the impact of stimulus payments. The impact of both of these has tended to depress the year-on-year growth rate of card spending for the 28-days to May 28. As Exhibit 1 confirms, the current level of credit and debit card spending per household remains well above the 2019 level, and the current level is tracking broadly flat over recent months."

Consumer sentiment has dwindled, however, as the focus is drawn to the inflationary outlook and the Federal Reserve's rate hikes. "Exhibit 2 illustrates that consumer sentiment has been declining since around the middle of 2021, though the deterioration is considerably worse on the University of Michigan’s sentiment measure than the Conference. Board’s confidence measure. Both measures are similar but not identical in design and it could be that the impact of inflation is having different effects here. Specifically, the University of Michigan measure is more sensitive to financial conditions while the Conference Board measure is more related to labour markets."

Bank of America suggests that rising gas prices are one factor that weighs heavily on consumer sentiment, arguing that "Gas prices are of course highly transparent for consumers and this was likely one reason for consumers becoming less optimistic. It appears that the impact of these higher gas prices is felt by the lower-income households in particular".

"As gas spending takes up a larger share of consumer wallet, other areas of spending appear to be coming under increasing pressure. It appears durable goods spending has been largely taking the hit from higher food and gas prices. As Exhibit 4 shows, durable goods spending, which includes furniture, electronics and home improvement, was down 11% on a YoY basis for the seven days to May 28."

"But while goods spending appears to have weakened as higher inflation bites, the same is not true so far for services spending. This is important because over 60% of consumer spending is on services. Exhibit 5 illustrates the YoY growth rates for the 28

days to May 28 for a number of leisure categories. All growth rates remain very strongly up compared to a year ago. Of course, some of this will reflect the re-opening of the economy and the switch back into service spending and away from goods. Looking by the income distribution, the % YoY rates for services spending are the strongest for the higher income group (households with annual income >$125k) who has had the biggest pent-up demand for travel and entertainment.

Not all service sector spending takes place using debit or credit cards. Exhibit 6 shows a selection of service sector related spending using ACH/Wires spending channels. Some of the change over this period may reflect changes in the way people are paying for things – using fewer checks for example. But the big picture is that compared to May 2019, childcare, professional services, utility payments and a range of other services spending are all showing very strong growth."

"The overall consumer outlook is difficult to read, as there any number of cross winds currently. It is clear that ‘bearish’ sentiment has increased. And on the downside higher inflation presents households with a real challenge, along with any slowdown in the overall economy as the Fed hikes rates likely to impact households. But on the upside, the labor market is continuing to generate strong wage growth, which can at least partly compensate for higher inflation. And when we hunt through the data we still see positive momentum in services spending.

Additionally, when we look at the current median deposit levels in savings and checking balances, it appears that households continue to have higher ‘buffers’ relative to before the pandemic. Another favourable sign is that the share of credit card spending per household to total card spending per household remains around 2019 levels. In other words, it does not appear that households are having to spend more on credit cards to pay rising

bills. If we only focus on households with annual income less than $50K, we also find that credit card spending as a share of total card spending was around the same level as in May 2019 (Exhibit 9)."