Five interesting things that Hodges Capital research analysts discovered this week...

#1 PRIME TIME: Amazon said its Prime Big Deal Days event on October 10th and 11th outpaced last year’s holiday kick-off event, and Prime members saved more than $1B across millions of deals. The Company also noted that on the first day of the event, U.S. Prime members purchased more than 25 million items with same-day or next-day delivery, including hundreds of thousands of items delivered within four hours of purchase. Amazon noted the best-selling categories were apparel, beauty, home, and toys. The best-selling toys were Squishmallows, Catan, and Barbie Toy Boat Playset.

#2 WIDE OPEN SPACES: America’s highest office vacancies are not in the East and West Coast cities that have been shedding population and workers. They are in Texas, a thriving Sunbelt state that has been luring companies away from the big coastal cities. Houston, Dallas, and Austin top the list of major U.S. cities with the highest office vacancy rates, according to Moody’s Analytics. About 25% of the office space was not leased as of the third quarter. That was more than double New York’s vacancy rate of 12% and well above San Francisco’s vacancy rate of 17%. Vacancies are high largely because Texas developers build too much. Texas’ high vacancy rate offers more evidence that the U.S. office market’s biggest problem has not been primarily remote work. (Wall Street Journal).

#3 BETTING ON THE FUTURE: Investors are wagering on the outcome of the Federal Reserve’s next policy meeting at an unprecedented pace, as Bloomberg relays that open interest in the CME Group’s federal funds futures market for November reached nearly 600,000 contracts on Wednesday, the largest such tally of outstanding long and short positions in the market’s thirty-year history. Interest rate swaps imply coin-flip odds of a further 25 basis point hike (Grant’s Interest Rate Observer).

#4 FOLLOW ME DOWN: According to a Morning Consult survey and data from a marketing software company named Carro, 54% of millennials and 57% of Gen Z’ers would quit their jobs if they had the chance to be social media influencers. The most common reasons were “money, flexibility, and fun.” According to trendHERO, more than 64 million influencers exist globally on Instagram’s platform alone. Ryan Hilliard of HypeAuditor, an influencer analytics company, recently told NPR that someone would need 1 million followers on social media to make influencing a full-time career. Still, less than 1% ever achieve that because it is just too hard, and there are too many other people doing similar stuff.

#5 USED VEHICLE PRICES: According to Manheim, September used car prices rose 0.1% m/m non-seasonally adjusted (+1.0% seasonally adjusted) and declined 5.4% y/y (-3.9% seasonally adjusted). Manheim’s comments further implied that October used car prices may continue to deteriorate, although the UAW strike has not impacted used vehicle prices thus far. Used Retail Sales fell 10.0% m/m and 2% y/y in September. Manheim forecasts 2023 Used Retail Sales of 18.9 million, down 2.2% y/y (Stephens).

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