Home improvement outperforms other consumer sectors

On November 30, 2011, Bloomberg reported shares of Home Depot Inc. and Lowe’s Cos. -- the two largest U.S. home-improvement retailers -- are outperforming other consumer discretionary stocks as the worst of the declines in the housing market may be over.

Americans are on pace to spend $337.3 billion on their homes, with annualized private-residential fixed investment rising 3 percent from 2010 for the three months ended Sept. 30, Bureau of Economic Analysis data show. This is only the second such increase since 2006 and unlike 2010, wasn’t boosted by government tax-credit stimulus programs including one for appliances, said Scot Ciccarelli, a New York-based analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

$816 million online sales in one day

Black Friday Internet sales in the US totalled $816m, a 26% gain on last year, claimed Comscore. IBM Coremetrics put the rise at 24%. By comparison, Visa Europe said it believed November 28, 2011 will be the UK's busiest Internet shopping day, with £303m spent online.

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is treated by many retailers as the start of the Christmas shopping season. They offer one-off discounts to mark the occasion.

Amazon was the most popular destination, with 50% more visitors than any other retailer.Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple were next in line, said the analytics company. Around 50 million Americans visited online retail sites on Friday, November 25, 2011, according to Comscore.

Close to 123 million Americans planned to make an online purchase on Cyber Monday (November 28, 2011) according to a survey commissioned by the US National Retail Federation, an industry lobby group. That would be a 15% increase on last year.

Concentrated Solar Power market

NOV 2011:  A report from Pike Research forecasts that the global Concentrated Solar Power market will continue to experience ups and downs between now and 2020, rising dramatically from $2.1 billion in 2012 to $5.1 billion in 2013, and then experiencing a gradual decline to $2.0 billion by 2016 before resuming gradual growth again to $4.9 billion by 2020. Despite this volatility in market value, the cleantech market intelligence firm forecasts that total installed capacity of CSP will increase significantly by the end of the decade, rising from 1.7 gigawatts (GW) in 2012 to 35.0 GW by 2020.

HSBC and BoA ATMs

HSBC has 3,789 automated teller machines in the UK (using the Link network). Coast to coast, Bank of America has more than 18,000.


There are more than 7,000 banks (that is banks, not branches) in the US and that does not include investment banks, credit unions and the like.


Not all US banks will make electronic fund transfers to non-US banks.