Brief: Crime during Covid, teen vaccinations, Triple Crown, SimilarWeb IPOs

Friday, May 14, 2021

Short talking points

1. Crime has dropped 8% during this past year of COVID lockdowns. A 26% fall in theft drove a reduction in crime recorded by police.
2. Drive to vaccinate children gains speed as CDC authorizes vaccine use for teens aged 12 and up.

Long talking points

1. The 2021 Preakness Stakes horse race will take place this Saturday, May 15th at 5 pm EST. The Preakness is held in Baltimore, Maryland, and is one leg of the American Triple Crown. The other two are the Kentucky Derby (Louisville, Kentucky) and The Belmont Stakes (Elmont, NY). The triple crown is awarded to a three-year-old thoroughbred if he wins all three races in one season. A horse only has one chance to win the triple crown because these races are only for three-year-olds.
   1. The Thoroughbred is a horse breed best known for its use in horse racing. Although the word thoroughbred is sometimes used to refer to any breed of purebred horse, it technically refers only to the Thoroughbred breed. Thoroughbreds are considered “hot-blooded” horses that are known for their agility, speed, and spirit.
   2. Triple Crown – The Triple Crown is a series of three Thoroughbred races each spring, at different tracks and distances over the course of five weeks.
      1. Kentucky Derby – Saturday, May 1, 2021 was the 147th running of the 1 1/4-mile Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville, KY. (Up to 20 horses in the field) The winner of this year’s Kentucky Derby was Medina Spirit. However,  he failed to pass a post-race drug test. Additional testing is planned which puts his win in doubt.
      2. Preakness – The 146th Preakness, its 1 3/16-mile second jewel, is set for Saturday, May 15 at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, MD. (Up to 14 horses in the field)
      3. Belmont Stakes – The 153rd running of the Belmont Stakes, the series’ 1 ½-mile final leg, is scheduled for Saturday, June 5 at Belmont Park in Elmont, N.Y. (Up to 12 horses in the field)
2. SimilarWeb (SMWB) stock started trading on NYSE yesterday in IPO!
   1. SimilarWeb is a popular analytics firm that makes the website traffic and analytics information of almost every relevant website available to the public for free.
   2. Here is their website: https://www.similarweb.com/
   3. They didn’t make a big splash on day 1 but they raised $180 million in the IPO at a valuation of $1.8 billion. They opened at $22 per share and closed at 0.6% down.
   4. SimilarWeb has long been a favorite resource of tech startups for competitor analysis. Just enter in a popular website that is similar to yours and you will see the number of users they get and their main sources of traffic. It gives a small window into the marketing blueprint of these websites.
   5. A friend of mine once told me he wrote a script in Python to scrape their reports for websites in his niche. He was trying to find patterns in how these companies were marketing to get his bearings in the domain. Hehe, that’s kind of funny 🙂
   6. Here are screenshots of our favorite KPIs from their reports. We used the website Hubspot as an example. Hubspot is a popular marketing and sales platform that brings together a variety of functionalities that allows marketing and sales departments to manage all their activities in one place. But to be honest, I think their blog is more popular than their platform 😉