Consumers, Tech Infusions & AI

With good incomes and debt that isn’t growing faster than incomes, consumers have been spending apace over the past quarter, but selectively. Jackie shares insights into what they’ve been buying and passing up, gleaned from the quarterly conference calls of two retail giants, Walmart and Home Depot. … Also: Changes to the composition of two Dow Jones indexes—the DJIA and DJTA—bring more technology exposure via Amazon and Uber. Exposure to high-flying tech stocks has given an outsized boost to the performance of several S&P 500 sectors’ indexes lately. ... And in our Disruptive Technologies segment: How WPP uses AI to optimize its advertising and marketing services.