Why world's largest Single-Day shopping festival is meaningless

The World's Largest Single-Day Shopping Festival has come and gone. And more records have been set

They’re meaningless. 

Savvy investors would do well not to get caught up in the fluff and hype of Singles Day, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s annual extravaganza. 

The figure that grabs all the headlines is gross merchandise value. This is often written as sales, which is somewhat confusing, if not misleading. Some use the term merchandise sales, a nice middle ground. 

Two years ago we argued that GMV is the world’s most useless financial metric. That was an assessment based not on gut feeling but an examination of the correlation between GMV and revenue: There wasn’t one.

Jack Ma seemed to agree, months later admitting