You don’t have to be an MBA to know that retail sales make up a significant chunk of the global economy. One estimate from eMarketer says consumers bought nearly $30 trillion worth of stuff in 2023. About $5.8 trillion, or 20%, of those sales occur online, so brick-and-mortar stores are still very much alive. Most of our direct exposure to the retail landscape is through Quantigence, our dividend-growth strategy, which includes retailers like Walmart (WMT) that have been returning money to shareholders longer than some of you have been alive. We have also made a few pick-and-shovel plays on retail through the Nanalyze Disruptive Tech Portfolio by holding a couple of digital payments stocks and a warehouse robotics stock.
One could argue that these tech stocks are fairly far removed from the retail theme, even for pick-and-shovel plays. It would be great to get more tech exposure to a multi-trillion-dollar market that has essentially doubled in just a dozen years. But most of the companies we’ve covered have been startups developing technologies like automated check
