Dick's Sporting Goods Cracker Barrel Wayfair

Susquehanna Financial Group forecasts that Dick's Sporting Goods Inc. DKS, -1.57% will be the last national athletic retailer in business after the coronavirus pandemic thanks to factors including its balance sheet and digital capabilities. Other athletic retailers include Hibbett Sports Inc. HIBB, 2.51% and Foot Locker Inc. FL, 5.73%. "Dick's is reaping the benefits from heavy investment in its omnichannel capabilities over the past several years, enabling the company to be extremely flexible and nimble in the way it serves customers," analysts led by Sam Poser wrote. "This flexibility has been evident during the crisis, when selling through the brick-and-mortar channel has not been an option." Dick's Sporting Goods was able to transition to curbside pickup with ease thanks to these investments, analysts say. And they highlight a 250% jump in e-commerce sales in the second quarter thus far. Analysts say there could be some "fleeting" pent-up demand due to the coronavirus pandemic, but also say Dick's Sporting Goods has a "structural advantage" that will help it versus the competition in the long run. Susquehanna rates the stock positive with a $48 price target, up from $31. Data from retail intelligence company Placer.ai shows that in some states including Arizona and South Carolina traffic returned to year-over-year growth by May 20. Dick's Sporting Goods reported wider-than-expected losses on Tuesday. The stock is down 1.3% in Wednesday trading, and has slumped 24.7% for the year to date. The S&P 500 index SPX, 1.07% is down 3.6% for 2020 so far.

Shares of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc. CBRL, +9.74% soared 11.4% in Wednesday trading after the restaurant and retail chain was upgraded to buy from hold at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey. Analysts moved their price target to $133 from $117. SunTrust cites near-term dine-in same-restaurant sales, which are down 32% for the week ending May 29, with the company expected to offer dine-in service systemwide on June 30. Analysts also think Cracker Barrel's "rural exposure and everyday value [mitigates] COVID and economic risks." Cracker Barrel announced fiscal third-quarter earnings on Tuesday. The company posted a net loss of $161.9 million, or $6.81, after earnings of $50.4 million, or $2.09, last year. Adjusted loss per share was $1.81. Revenue totaled $432.5 million, down from $739.6 million last year. The FactSet consensus was for losses of $1.06 per share and revenue of $477.8 million. Same-restaurant sales were down 41.7% for the quarter, and same-store sales were down 45.5%. Cracker Barrel stock has slumped 22.5% for the year to date while the S&P 500 index SPX, +1.06% is down 3.7%.

Wayfair stock is trading sharply higher Tuesday, getting a lift from bullish comments from Piper Sandler retail analyst Peter Keith, who says tailwinds the online home-furnishings retailer saw in April largely continued in May.


Wayfair’s (ticker: W) strong first-quarter results, reported on May 5, triggered a surge in the company’s shares that has not really stopped. Revenue in the quarter rose 19.8%, which was a bit ahead of estimates, but the stunner was the company’s disclosure that second-quarter revenue at that point...



Wayfair Stock Has Rocketed 700% Since March. Why There May Be More Gains Ahead.

Biotech, Preventive Medicine, Health and Longevity

Biotech’s smart money is already focused on disease prevention, boosting immune systems and longevity
‘Health is the new wealth’ thanks to the coronavirus pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic will change the global business landscape to its core. Investors are switching their attention from what was previously considered important — sectors such as real estate, tourism and hospitality — to what is truly important: human health.

The pandemic clearly will provide a tremendous boost to the biotech and bio-medicine industries, with a particular emphasis on preventive medicine. Recently, for example, two venture-funded rounds of more than $1 billion each (Arch Venture Partners and Qiming Venture Partners) were finalized. Meanwhile, several biotech companies closed sizeable funding rounds (e.g., Mabwell biotech’s recent $278.5 million Series A injection, iTeos Therapeutics’ recent $125 million Series B2 financing, Affinivax's recent $120 million Series B round, among others).
Accordingly, expect to see a dramatic rise in the volume of investments going to healthcare in general, and preventive medicine in particular, including diagnostic and prognostic technologies. Money will also be earmarked for the detection and neutralization of diseases in advance of their pathological progression. All of this funding has one major goal: to strengthen the performance of the human immune system.
Our frontier technology-focused consortium, Deep Knowledge Group, understands the scale and scope of the progressive healthcare and longevity industry, and of what “longevity” actually means in practice. Specifically, instead of focusing exclusively  on what can be considered as core geroscience (R&D-stage therapies focused on treating the hallmarks, or root causes, of biological aging), our framework includes other relevant sectors, ranging from the biomedical to the technological and financial. In our view, the longevity industry encompasses anything promoting a healthy life in all its forms: physical; psychological and financial.

From a biomedical perspective, one of the biggest factors is optimizing the performance of the human immune system. You cannot live long if you are not properly protected from pandemic threats. For example, supercentenarians — people who have lived at least 110 years — possess certain features fostering a strengthened immune system, thus neutralizing diseases early in their lives and enabling greater protection from microbes, bacteria and viruses.


To advance such understanding, we expect investors to prioritize the sub-sectors with the greatest potential for disruptive impact: digital health; biomarkers of longevity, and in particular, artificial intelligence for healthcare, drug discovery, preventive medicine, and longevity, which is a major priority for our longevity-focused investment fund, Longevity.Capital.

Enhanced immunity is one of the most fundamental ways to improve health outcomes in the elderly, the group most at risk for infection, pathology and death during pandemics. Anti-pandemic (immune system optimizing) strategies and approaches for maximizing healthy longevity go hand-in-hand — another reason why the current pandemic will lead to a rise in longevity-focused investment.

Health is the new wealth
COVID-19 will reshape biotech, preventive medicine, precision health and longevity efforts in substantial and largely positive ways. One of the secondary goals behind the creation of Deep Knowledge Group’s new COVID-19 MedTech Analytics IT-Platform was exactly this — obtaining a deeper and more tangible understanding of how trends in biotech investment and industry development generally will change and adapt in the wake of the current COVID pandemic.

This platform is designed to serve as a comprehensive database of the most relevant entities, technologies, and developments in the COVID-19 MedTech ecosystem — aggregating, profiling and visualizing the companies, organizations, scientists and technologies at the forefront of neutralizing the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuring the health and safety of individuals and nations. The platform aims to cover all major sectors and relevant activities in the global COVID-19 MedTech landscape, from science to technology, R&D, treatment, diagnostic and vaccine development, and practical applications occurring globally, providing data on particular scientific and technological sectors and geographical regions.

The COVID-19 pandemic will bring significant investments and developments to the biotech and bio-medicine industries, as well as a shift from treatment and healthcare (which can in practice be viewed as “sick care”) towards early-stage prevention, diagnosis, and tangible, data science-driven enhancement of the immune system and extension of the healthy period of life. This trend in turn will lead to an increase in global financial growth and stability by reducing the economic burden of age-related diseases, and by neutralizing the significant risks an aging population poses to the health, stability and vitality of national economies.

Our previous assessment of the longevity industry’s growth predicted a market value of $27 trillion by 2026. Yet considering the impact that COVID-19 is making on biotech investments, we see this figure as being much larger. COVID-19 will grow the rate and size of biotech investments generally, and investments in preventive medicine, precision health and healthy longevity in particular.

Health is the new wealth. The pandemic is causing many people to realize what is truly important in life, and to view their personal health and longevity as the most valuable asset class of all.

Private Companies Go Public

After a few months of slim pickings, the U.S. initial public offering market is expected to reopen with a bang this week with the biggest deal of the year expected to price later Tuesday.

Warner Music Group Corp. is returning to public markets after nine years of being private and is expected to raise up to $1.82 billion by selling 70 million shares priced at $23 to $26 each.

“It’s going to be the busiest week in quite a while,” said Kathleen Smith, principal at Renaissance Capital, a provider of institutional research and IPO-related exchange- traded funds.

Warner Music, one of three large companies that dominate the recorded-music industry, is the parent company for prominent record labels including Atlantic Records, Warner Records and Elektra Records, and mentions artists Ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Cardi B, Twenty One Pilots, Lizzo and Katy Perry in its filing.

See now:Here’s why Netflix and HBO Max are the top streaming services worth paying for in June 2020

In its most recently completed fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2019, it had profit of $258 million on revenue of $4.48 billion. In the two previous fiscal years, Warner Music had net income of $312 million and $149 million, and revenue of $4.01 billion and $3.58 billion, according to the filing.

After going public in 2005, Warner Music was taken private by Access Industries Inc. in 2011 for $3.3 billion. Rival Universal Music Group was valued at roughly $34 billion last year in investments from around the globe. Access will still have control of the company, once the deal is complete.

Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs are lead underwriters with BofA Securities, Citgroup and JP Morgan acting as joint bookrunners. Another 23 banks are acting as co-managers. The company has applied to list on Nasdaq, under the ticker symbol “WMG.”

The IPO market has had a dry period during the coronavirus pandemic, with only a few small biotechs and blank-check companies, or special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) venturing forth, according to Smith from Renaissance Capital. Blank-check companies have no set business until they acquire one with the money raised in an IPO.

While the secondary market has been on fire—May’s dollar volume of share offerings is the biggest since 2014, according to BTIG, as companies moved to bolster liquidity positions—new issuers have had to wait for an equity market recovery from its pandemic lows, that has now arrived.

Proceeds from IPOs are down 64% in the year to date, compared with the same period a year ago. The number of deals that have been completed is down 42% from a year ago, excluding SPACs, she said.

But the Renaissance IPO ETF has set fresh records in recent weeks, thanks to the inclusion in the fund of recently public digital companies and others that are benefiting from working-from-home products and services, such as Zoom Video Communications Inc. ZM, 0.55%, Slack Technologies Inc. WORK, 2.77% and biotech Moderna Inc. MRNA, -4.93% which is developing a COVID-19 vaccine, she said.

The ETF has gained 26% in the past month and is up 21% on the year, easily outperforming the S&P 500’s SPX, 0.33% one-month gain of 8.4% and year-to-date decline of 5%.

“The performance of the IPO ETF IPO, 0.72% is what fans the flames and drives issuance,” she said. “And the deals that have priced are trading well, which gives investors the confidence to look at new issues.”

Warner Music and other private companies that come to market soon “will get the red carpet treatment,” she said.

In a further sign of improved market sentiment, ZoomInfo Technologies Inc. ZI, , a platform that generates sales leads for businesses, raised the expected price range for its planned deal early Tuesday to $19 to $20 a share from a previous $16 to $18. The company is planning to sell 44.5 million shares to raise $890 million at the top of that range.

J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley are underwriting the deal. For the three months ended March 31, the company recorded a loss of $5.9 million, narrower than the loss of $40.2 million posted in the year-earlier period. Revenue roughly doubled to $102.2 million, from $54.6 million.

Two other pending deals will offer clues as to investor appetite for new paper; Chinese gaming company NetEase Inc. NTES, 2.56%, which is planning a secondary listing for its stock on the Hong Kong stock exchange on June 11, and online use-car seller Vroom Inc. VRM, , which is hoping to capture part of the market that rival Carvana Co. CVNA, 17.74% has enjoyed since it went public in 2017.

“NetEase will be a test of whether Chinese IPOs can get done, and Vroom will test appetite for money-losing but fast-growing companies,” said Smith.

NetEase’s move is seen as defensive as the U.S. cracks down on Chinese listings and seeks greater disclosures from issuers.

Vroom reported a first-quarter net loss of $27.1 million, narrowing from $41.1 million in the year-ago period. Vroom’s revenue rose to $375.8 million from $235.1 million a year ago. Vroom’s revenue is primarily from its retail vehicle sales, which accounted for $308.7 million in the first quarter.

After that, Smith is expecting a burst of activity in the summer, when the many venture-capital and private-equity backed companies currently on the sidelines come to market to raise much-needed capital.

The November presidential election is expected to prompt another pause in activity, if 2020 behaves like a typical election year, she said.