A roundup of what The Globe and Mail's market strategist Scott Barlow is reading this morning on the World Wide Web.
Illinois-based Sears Holdings Corp. announced Wednesday that it was considering a sale of all Canadian assets, supporting the "Death of the North American mall" meme. The news immediately conjured a whole host of short-term and longer-term strategic questions about Canadian retail.
In the short term, who is going to buy Sears Canada assets? This question is of particular interest to mall operators like RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust who must be wondering who the new anchor tenants will be in their properties. Interlopers from the U.S. like Nordstrom Inc. and Target Corp. are possibilities.
Longer term, the viability of shopping malls as a social hub can also be questioned. The Death of Malls meme, which I'm following closely without fully believing (I do that a lot), was the focus of a recent New Yorker feature which featured this quote from a real estate company CEO,
"Within ten to fifteen years, the typical U.S. mall, unless it is completely reinvented, will be a historical anachronism—a sixty-year aberration that no longer meets the public's needs, the retailers' needs, or the community's needs,"
Billionaire venture capitalist and premier technology hypeman Marc Andreessen's website featured an interesting argument this morning that the Software as a Service business model, a key component of Cloud computing, will eventually take over the corporate software space and that current pundits, "have it all wrong".
For what it's worth, I'm a big believer in Cloud computing growth but prefer companies at the the more basic, institutional levels. Companies to look at in this area include Red Hat Inc. and F5 Networks Inc.
One of the investment themes I've been closely following AND believe is that yield-based sectors like corporate bonds are vastly over-owned, have very little potential upside and are not compensating investors for mid-term risks of losses. Reuters supported this thought this morning with "Evaporating inflation may have taken pricey debt too far."
Alphaville points to the "New Fragile Five" nations, largely in Africa, where weak current account situations may presage big losses for bond and equity investors.
Diversion: I'm a big fan of capitalism, for all its faults, but this video explains nicely why I think consumerism is the one of the biggest wastes of intellectual capital in human history.
Scott Barlow