🎯 Retailers traffic growth, lonely adults

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Welcome back to Trendline!

Thank you for your valuable feedback on the newsletter format. Based on your input, I'm making some changes to deliver more focused, high-quality content:

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• Each featuring 5 carefully selected or original charts

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Now let’s get into today’s post:

1) Consumers are flocking to Chilis: Brinker (owner of Chili's) delivered a stellar Q4-24, with earnings 50% above expectations. Foot traffic data confirms this momentum - Chili's saw 29%+ YoY growth in January 2025, leading a group of surprising retail winners. Other standouts include Barnes & Noble, Five Below, and Warby Parker (reporting earnings on Feb 27, 2025) - all showing strong foot traffic growth.

2) Gasoline car sales have peaked: Globally we are buying fewer cars than before and electric cars (EVs) are slowing growing their share. Fossil fuel based car sales peaked in 2018 and have been declining since.

Yet electric cars (EVs) are just 3% of the 1.5 billion cars globally (2% in US). This isn't a story of EVs taking over - it's a story of potential. With 97% of cars still running on fossil fuels, EV makers are staring at decades of opportunity ahead.

3) Gene-editing stocks crash hard: Gene-editing stocks have lost upto 90% of their value since 2021 despite breakthrough technologies. Like the dot-com companies of 2001, they're struggling to convert scientific wins into revenue. The technology works - but the market also wants financial viability. Will we see a turnaround?

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4) We are lonelier, doing less meaningful things: Young adults in US now spend 4x as much time gaming alone, and almost half as much time shopping or socializing with others. This reshaping of how we spend our time will have profound implications for society, with several effects already taking place (e.g. rise of mental health issues, addiction to online gambling)

5) Don’t buy meme coins: Analysis of 252,000 Trump Token wallets shows most investors made nothing or worse, lost money. A tiny fraction made gains while everyone else paid for it. Don't buy meme coins - the data is clear about who really wins (it’s the “whales”)