Seeking Alpha by Adding Beta

As holiday shopping season is upon us, millions of people would be shopping for gifts for their loved ones and for themselves. One week from now, Americans would have finished their Thanksgiving dinners and shopped till drop during "Black Friday" followed by "Cyber Monday" and "Terrific Tuesday" and "Wonderful Wednesdays" and so on. Retailers can be quite creative in coining the terms as we had seen with "Singles Day (11/11)" in China and "Prime Day (7/11) by Amazon". Thanks to Expanding Amazon Jungle , retail landscape is changing dramatically. In last 12 months, Amazon stock is up by 50% while combined market cap of key retailers (Target, Macy's and others) have gone down by 40%. Market is sending clear signals who is winning retail wars. And then there is Walmart. Last week Walmart published it's quarterly results and surprised everyone with kind of progress it had made. So what does it has to do with "Rumble

The quote "Vision without Execution is Hallucination" has been attributed to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Both of these men were great visionary and made profound difference in human-kind by executing on those visions. Why is this quote so important in today's world? As earnings season is wrapping up, we see incidence of "execution" or "hallucinations" in almost every earnings report. The companies which have great vision and great execution (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Intel, Nvidia, Netflix and many others) did extremely well and got rewarded with stock price gains. Apple being best of them would become first trillion $ market cap company in few weeks. Steve Jobs was great visionary but what made today's Apple is Tim Cook's almost flawless and laser-sharp execution! Tim Cook had added more than $500 Billion into Apple's market cap in less than 6 years. That's double of what Steve Jobs added during nearly two decades

Finally long-awaited GOP and Trump Tax Act was published last week after last minute delay of 24 hours. What started as "biggest tax reforms this country had seen ever" campaign promise turned out to be just another GOP "give-away" to its benefactors! This is what happens when you try to govern one-sided which limits tax cuts to fit within $1.5 trillion deficit increase over decade. If only discussions included all sides the way President Reagan did with 1986 Tax Reforms, we would have seen much different proposal. I am sure you must have read many articles to try to understand your personal tax situation. So I am not going to repeat them here. You can refer to Tax Act details in article by Tax foundation.   Being a movie buff, I wanted to look at Tax Act in light of one of all time favorite movie " The Good, the Bad and the Ugly ". Similar to the movie plot, the actors of this Tax Act are trying to find "fortune" in buried cache of over $20 Tri