There Are No Good Reasons to Buy Stocks

If the market is to keep on rising, there will need to be new answers about why to buy

The big economic surprise of 2017 hasn’t been how good the U.S. economy is—it has grown moderately faster than last year—but how well the rest of the world has done. Barclays economists estimate global gross domestic product will advance 3.9% this year, better than last year’s 3.3% gain, and better than the 3.5% they forecast at the outset of the year. That helped profits at multinationals, in particular.

.. it is the early stages of an economic upswing, when demand is rising much faster than costs, that profits really boom.

One Plan to Save Twitter: A Paywall

One analyst suggests that Twitter’s best hope is charging users $5 to $10 a month, even if that means losing 80% of its users.

Nathanson says that were Twitter to lose 80% of its monthly active users and charge $5 per month, it could bring in almost $4 billion in annual subscription revenue, which is about 75% more than what he currently forecasts for 2017.

.. President Trump’s embrace of the service might be finally helping user growth, but if Twitter’s user base plummets, it’s hard to see Trump continuing to use the service as his preferred vehicle of communication. With a paywall, Twitter would have to find a way to become even more of a news service and less of a generalized sounding board for complaints.