The digital advertising theme consists of companies that sell, buy or manage advertising spaces
on digital mediums such as mobile phones, in-apps, video, audio, written content, and any other
emerging digital channels. It also includes companies that make the buying and selling process
automated, more efficient, and easier through data, analytics, or software development. Sources

Privacy Concerns: 

• Consumers' preference to block ads and the rise of ad blocker software is one challenge.
• Regulators follow the consumers' preferences by limiting the use of 3rd party Cookie technology widely used to target users online based on their online behavior and preferences.
• Device makers follow the consumers' preferences and plan to restrict cross-app tracking through what's known as mobile ad IDs (MAIDs). In simple words, this is when you click on an Ad on Facebook on your phone, and Facebook can track the unique code associated with your device to see where you end up and what you do outside its properties. Apple was the first device-maker to prevent such cross-app tracking. Now, Alphabet announced a similar plan for its Android phones in the next two years.

Source 1. Source 2. 

Privacy Solutions:
The important question is whether consumers' concerns and regulators and device-makers responses through the elimination of the 3rd party cookies and limiting cross-app tracking are
barriers to digital advertisement growth in the coming years. Companies such as The Trade Desk have developed new solutions, and companies such as Alphabet are tweaking their
approach, and consumers may still voluntarily provide access to their information.

• Identity Innovation: Several software developers in the digital advertising space are adamant about continuing targeted advertisement possibilities without privacy concerns. Such intentions have led to various identity innovations, including The Trade Desk's investment in Unified ID 2.0 technology, an open-source ID framework. The technology hashes and encrypts a user's identifiable information and only makes the hashed ID accessible to the advertisers in the network. Source 1. Source 2. 
• From Individual Cookies to Cohort Cookies:  When Alphabet released its plan to eliminate 3rd party cookies, it introduced an alternative approach. Google's Chrome browser uses the users' recent browsing history to generate a "cohort identity" through this alternative approach. The identity is a unique identifier that associates a user to a cohort of users with similar behavior. While the ID is not uniquely identifiable to one specific person, it still represents the behaviors of such users. Source.
• The Power of Free: While regulators prevented the use of 3rd party cookies in regions such as the E.U., companies still choose to ask their users and visitors for consent to the use of Cookies. A significant portion of consumers would voluntarily accept the terms of use upon visiting a website. "Free" access is such a powerful incentive that convinces many consumers to willingly accept the terms and go back to business as usual.

There are two advantages to the blockchain platform. The first one is in its ledger structure.
This means once you spend money online, everyone in the network knows that money is being
spent. So, advertising blockchain can create more transparency on buying which ad inventory.
But a more exciting aspect is the ability to reward users for the advertisements they see
through tokens and enable them to share their profile and information only with companies
and ad providers they like. Assuming it is pretty easy for a user to set up an identity and
decide what to share and with whom to share, the platform can reward the user for watching
or interacting with specific ads with tokens. There is a blockchain project called Brave that
plans to achieve something similar, and it would be interesting to track its progress. Source.

What's Excluded:
The world of digital advertising is wide and ever-expanding. Naturally, some companies could
still be a part of the theme, but either there aren't too many of them, or their focus is too
arrow or adjacent to the core digital advertising activities that we exclude from the list.

1. list providers - Companies such as Salesforce.com or TechTarget play an important role in digital marketing, especially in the B2B segment. They curate, clean, and grow a database of business purchasers and decision-makers and sell such databases to
   advertisers. We decided to exclude them from this collection.
   
2. search engine optimization (SEO) - While many companies included in the digital
   advertising space offer search engine optimization services, we do not include it as a
   standalone sub-segment of the industry because it doesn't come across as a trend or
   functionality shaping the future of the industry anymore.
   
3. customer analytics: Without any doubt, effective digital advertising starts from an
   in-depth understanding of one's customers. However, to include an entire set of
   customer analytics providers in this collection is a bit of a stretch because the
   application of customer analytics is much broader than digital advertising. 

To create and refresh Stock Card's Digital Advertising theme, we followed a few steps:

1. Identified companies listed on all U.S. stock exchanges with more than $300M in market capitalization that use the word "advertise" in their company description. Afterward, we verified each companies' primary business and eliminated those focused on traditional or physical advertisement.
   
2. Identified the ETFs focusing on digital advertisements (e.g., MRAD and ARKW) and pulled their total holdings to verify any additional companies that focus on digital advertisement but are not included in the list created in step 1.
   
3. Looked up industry publications and research for AdTech and digital advertising and identified any publicly-traded companies that are not yet included in the list as the result of steps 1 and 2.
   
4. The final result is a list of 100 or so stocks in the digital advertising theme that you can access easily on Stock Card.

​You can also use those themes to create a digital advertising Screener of stocks or ETFs that
meet your additional fundamental or technical filters.

Oh, the meme stocks…
A media frenzy …
Some love it …
Others hate it …

​Regardless, the meme stock is a new phenomenon that has let the world witness the power of retail investors. Retail investors like you and I are using some old wall street tricks to gamble their way to overnight wealth possibly. 

It all started when social media and the stock market investors met. After that, fellow individual investors found themselves with some free time during the pandemic to talk and trade stocks at a high volume. Starting with GameStop (GME), retail investors saw a possibility to 'short squeeze' the stock and benefit from the proceeds of betting against institutional investors who shorted the stock. 
It's an old wall street trick but new to individual investors and entertaining enough to create a media frenzy. Not every stock can be a meme stock, though. And, despite the contrary belief, being a meme stock doesn't mean a lousy stock either.

Today, we are introducing you to our "Potential Meme Stocks" list of stocks so you can decide whether you can invest in meme stocks but still stay diligent and intelligent about it. 

Before we start, let's clarify what a short squeeze is and how it is triggered. Short squeezing a stock means using all means possible to increase the stock price above the price that other investors have bet against. When the stock price surpasses that threshold, those who have previously bet against the stock (shorted it) have to buy the stock at the new price to "cover" their shorts, which means higher demand for the stock and a higher price for the stock. For a stock to rally due to a short squeeze, you'd need an external trigger to creates demand for the stock in the first place. A piece of good news or positive chatter online could be good examples. The online chatter and the appointment of a new Chairman of the Board were some of the reasons that led GameStop’s stock to short squeeze from barely $3 to reach a $420 value.

​To be a meme stock, you'd need both ingredients: a short squeeze potential and an online chatter driven by retail investors. It's important to note that a stock can be a potential meme stock with the high possibility of a short squeeze, but if there is no external trigger (such as chatter online) to push the stock higher than the short price, the stock may never rally.

Now that we clarified the definitions let's get to our methodology to publish the Potential Meme Stock collection. 

What triggers an online chatter about a stock isn't a straightforward answer. The Stock Card analysts team took three weeks to research every possible way to define it.

• We found a website that tracks daily mentions for all stocks that retail investors talk about on Reddit's WallStreetBets subthread, the original home-to-meme stock chatter. 
• We created an average of mentions from the top 10 mentioned stocks to understand the common characteristics of a potential meme stock.
• We read the news and an endless number of articles where we found mentions of meme stocks.
• We researched a few ETFs created to track these stocks, such as FOMO and BUZZ.

In the end, we narrowed down the criteria to be a potential meme stock to a few measurable data points that create the largest list of stocks with the potential to become a meme stock. Here are the main criteria:

• Market capitalization above $50 million - to skip smaller penny stocks that fluctuate significantly regardless of their status as a meme stock.
• Average 30-day daily volume above 10,000 - to skip companies that are not actively traded.
• Percent of the float short above 15% - this is perhaps to most important criteria because there is limited possibility for a short squeeze without it.

​The result is a list of 295 stocks that meet the basic criteria to become a meme stock. From here, it's up to the social media and retail investor community to trigger a short squeeze.

Get the Potential Meme Stock collection

​We've all heard meme stocks are risky. They truly are. In a short squeeze event, the problem is the gap between the company's valuation, including its future valuation, and its current stock price widens so much that there is no way to justify the price. By nature, a short squeeze is a short-term event. It's triggered by a sudden surge in demand that will not last. That's why meme stocks are extremely volatile. It's possible that a short squeeze stock to crash and never go back up. We have no control over external market triggers or the percentage of the shorted float for any individual stock. Therefore, sudden volatility and losing all of your money are not unreasonable outcomes of a meme stock investment.

• The stock market finished the week with mixed results as inflation fears and speculation over the possible Fed's responses continued.
• Virgin Galactic (SPCE) stock jumped more than 7% after the company resumed its previously delayed test flights plan.
• Stock Card just released the list of 61 Telemedicine stocks.

The Stock Market Finished The Week with Mixed Results As Inflation Fears and Speculation Over the Possible Fed's Responses Continued

The stock market indices finished the week with mixed results. It turned out to be a good start to the day. However, by the time the market closed, both the Nasdaq index and the S&P 500 index fell into the red zone. Meanwhile, the Dow hovered above zero, but only barely. 

The economic indicator we can discuss today is the existing home sales drop for the third straight month, according to the National Home Builders Association. Home prices have hit an all-time high. It seems higher demand by first-time buyers combined with lower mortgage rates and shortages in lumber and other commodities is expected to continue for a while and make the home prices continue to rise as they have done so in the last few months. 

Virgin Galactic (SPCE) Stock Jumped More Than 7% After The Company Resumed Its Previously Delayed Test Flights Plan

Shares of Virgin Galactic (SPCE) were up more than 7% today after another green day yesterday. The company announced it would resume its test flight which has been delayed a few times in the last couple of months.

The stock price is quite far from its all-time high of $62.80 shares. But, if it manages to continue with test flights and ultimately launch its commercial flights, the stock price could rally quite drastically. 

I own a few shares, and I'm glad I held them despite the recent drops. Let me know in the comments if you end up selling your shares.

Introducing The New Telemedicine List of Stocks

We just released a new list of stocks on Stock Card. This new collection gives you a list of 61 companies that are shaping the future of Telemedicine. 

After the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it was clear that medical services would have to transform the way they do business. To overcome the challenges, health care companies started to shift their business processes to allow servicing their patients. In a way, the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic gave birth to and accelerated the adoption of a new industry, the Telemedicine industry. Now that they have invested in the infrastructure required for telemedicine, it is a lot more efficient to continue with virtual visits when an in-person visit isn't essential.

Take CVS (CVS) as an example. The company offers a whole spectrum of telehealth services to patients and physicians. If you choose to stay in the comfort of your home, you can schedule appointments with licensed doctors. Virtual visits are available at an affordable price for those who decide to stay in. Its services also include telephone-only consultations with providers, evaluation, diagnosis, treatment, and data communication between all parties.

According to Fortune Business Insights, the Telemedicine industry is expected to grow by 25% per year and shape a $400 billion market.

There is one more reason to invest in telemedicine stocks now: The market has a negative sentiment toward such companies in light of the reopening. However, many market participants miss seeing the financial incentives for health care providers to 
encourage virtual services now that they have invested in the infrastructure and know how efficient their daily processes could be.

One study has estimated "diverting patients from emergency departments with telemedicine can save more than $1,500 per visit" for the hospital. Health care is a for-profit industry in the U.S. and many other countries, and no one can argue with saving money, especially in healthcare.

To get the list of telemedicine stocks, type in telemedicine in the search bar the next time you log in to your Stock Card account. 

​The world we live in gets more digital by the day. Take the example of how we purchase and listen to a piece of music. It all started from live performances. Then humans found a way to store the music on cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs. Then came the era of digital downloading the music we like, and now we stream everything. Our favorite YouTubers may use parts of the music and create a new show or a podcast episode. The original piece of music is now exchanging hands and evolving at an unprecedented speed. The world has embraced a new technology named Non-Fungible Token (NFT) to address that specific challenge. 

The NFT technology associates the identity of the original creator of a piece of digital content with the content itself, which is non-fungible regardless of how many times it gets reused by other people. In a way, the NTF technology protects the uniqueness and the ownership of digital things in an easy and efficient way.

​Why the world is suddenly interested in NFT technology. Digital files, music, and other types of digital content are not new. What is the driver of the global interest in NFTs and how come we have never had NFT technology until now?

In order to associate a digital asset with its original creator and trace the people who have owned that asset since it was created, we need a technology that can trace that chain of ownership in an efficient and cost-effective way. Blockchain infrastructure is the answer. The same blockchain technology that powers cryptocurrencies can be used to create non-fungible tokens and identify the owners and value of a digital asset. That's, of course, a very simplistic and idealistic answer but you get the gist. Since we have blockchain technology we now can have NFT technology too.

Imagine the implications of such a technology for investors like you and us. Anything and everything digital has an original owner that can be traded in exchange for money. As investors, everything that has monetary potential is an exciting investment. We can invest in tokenized digital assets. For example, we can buy a memorable video of a unique basketball shot on the NBA's Toshot marketplace. We can also invest in the companies that enable the NBA's Topshot website to offer its digital assets to NBA fans. As stock market investors, we prefer the latter. That's why we are excited to introduce our most recent list of stocks to our fellow Stock Cardians: the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) list of stocks that allows all of them to participate in the future of digital assets.

Because the NTF technology is in its infancy phase, the landscape is still evolving and growing across a few dimensions. We started our research by identifying markets that can take advantage of this revolutionary way of exchanging things digitally. Music, games, and collectible things, such as unique tweets from a celebrity, are examples of such markets. Then, there are digital marketplaces where people can exchange those unique digital content. Of course, we need the actual software infrastructure that enables such transactions. Those are broadly the subsegments of the NFT landscape as the industry evolves and grows. 

• NFT music
• NFT games
• NFT collectibles
• NFT marketplaces
• NFT software

On Stock Card platform, you can find a list of stocks associated with each of those sub-segment. 

One thing you would notice is that the number of publicly traded companies playing in the NTF market isn't too big. As is the case with all other emerging technologies, the innovation starts with smaller, more agile startups. As publicly traded stock market investors, we are at a disadvantage of not having access to those smaller private companies. However, there are still more prominent and established public companies with a lot of cash and an appetite for experimentation taking the lead in moving the NTF technology forward. Those are the companies we have added to the NFT list of stock and we would refresh the list in the weeks and months to come. 

​Take Nike (Ticker: NKE). The company already knows that its die-hard customers are interested in creating, owning, and trading uniquely designed limited-edition sneakers. We have spoken about the market for second-hand sneakers in the previous episode of the Daily Roll with our CEO. The savvy folks at Nike HQ have asked themselves if their sneakerheads (a way to call a person interested in owning and collecting several limited-edition sneakers) are interested in the actual sneakers, would they also be interested in a digitized limited-edition sneaker design? If you are not a sneakerhead, you are rolling your eyes and laughing at that notion. But, just like how you and we like to invest and trade stocks, it shouldn't be hard to imagine other people may be interested in buying and trading unique sneakers. Of all people, stock market investors should understand how it feels to buy, hold or exchange a highly desirable item. So, let's not judge?! Okay?! Going back to Nike, the company is experimenting with the idea of tokenizing its sneaker designs and that's how a digital pair of shoes is born.

​Just like the Nike example, we looked for other companies that have already dipped their toes into the emerging NFT landscape, and we found and published a list of 36 companies across five subsegments of the NFT market. Have a look at the list and dip your toes in this rapidly evolving and new market.

​As is the case with investing in most emerging technologies, we face a few risks. The most important is the "hype" risk. When a new technology emerges, the media, social media, and the participants in the market are excited about the future potential and possibilities. The excitement typically creates unrealistic expectations and disregards the challenges that are in the way of developing commercially viable use-cases of the technology. As a result, the stock prices surge exuberantly, and we run the risk of overpaying for a commercially nonviable business opportunity. Make sure you are aware and consider such risk in your investment plan as you learn about the Non-Fungible Tokens and invest in companies leading or playing a part in shaping its future. 

Regardless of who we are and where we live and come from, we all must have looked at the sky at least once and wondered:

• What's out there?
• Who is out there? 
• If others are living on other planets and galaxies, what are they like? 

Some of us keep wondering and dreaming. Others write stories and make movies about galaxies far, far away. Some others look for ways to invest in those stars and galaxies or invest in companies paving the path to get us to those stars and galaxies. Inspired by the questions wandering in our minds and excited to invest in companies on a mission to answer the questions humans have longed for an answer for centuries, we are excited to introduce our most recent stock collection today. Say hello to the Space Travel and Exploration list of stocks. 

We started our research by identifying direct exploration and space travel companies. Such companies manufacture probes, rockets, and unmanned robots to use on other planets. From there, we extended our research to space travel enablers who create the necessary tools, hardware, and software for such exploration. Solutions such as ground-based operations to support the interstellar missions, highly advanced materials for outer space usage are excellent examples of space travel and exploration enablers. In the end, we summarized the world of Space Travel and Exploration into four subsegments: 

• rockets (spacecrafts)
• space launch services
• space exploration equipment
• satellites

​The result of our research is now available to you on Stock Card's Featured tab. You will find 49 companies in this collection pushing humanity for its next leap, working in areas where most investors have never assumed possible.

​As always, you are investing in future-shaping companies that come with an inherent risk. Many smaller companies focused on space exploration, and travel are unprofitable. Some haven't yet turned a single dollar in revenue, and the larger ones would still need billions of dollars in investment before making money from space travel and exploration. Should you choose to invest in stocks from Space Travel and Exploration, make sure to go for cash-rich companies with substantial competitive advantages. Those are some of the criteria that would protect your investment even if the sector goes through the typical stock market ebbs and flows.