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Investors pulled more money from U.S. mutual funds last week than they have in any seven-day period in the past two and a half years.

Net redemptions reached $28.6 billion in the week ended Dec. 16, according to a statement from the Investment Company Institute, a trade group. It was the biggest weekly outflow since June 2013, ICI data show.

Source: Investors Pull Out of Mutual Funds at the Fastest Rate in Two Years – Bloomberg Business

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More than 3 million people decided it was worth $99 to get that last-minute present delivered from Amazon Prime last week.

Amazon [stckqut]AMZN[/stckqut] announced Sunday that a staggering 3 million people joined the membership service during the third week of December, a major record for the company. More than 200 million items were shipped for free over the holiday season this year, Amazon said in a press release Sunday.

More than 3 million people signed up for Amazon Prime in the third week of December.

Amazon doesn’t say how many Prime members exist, but some have estimated as many as 13 percent of Americans – 41 million people – subscribe to the service. That means Amazon boosted its membership by more 7 percent in just week, something that’s pretty much unheard of for a retailer.

Source: Amazon dominates the holidays: Prime adds 3 million members in a week – Puget Sound Business Journal

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Starbucks Corp. [stckqut]SBUX[/stckqut] stands to reap big benefits from the Christmas season through a robust gift-card business that experts say drives loyalty and traffic to the company’s cafes.

“Starbucks has pioneered the development in gift cards,” said Brian Riley, executive adviser and a gift-card expert at CEB, a professional services firm. “They’ve gone beyond the gift card as a transaction device.”

Instead, Starbucks has turned the Starbucks Card into a way to enlist new, repeat customers from the first use.

Starbucks said on Tuesday that it expects a record number of gift-card purchases on Christmas Eve based on the nearly 2.5 million that were purchased in the U.S. and Canada on that day last year. Between October 2014 and September 2015, $5.1 billion was loaded onto cards in those two countries, the company said. Nearly all of the money put on Starbucks Cards — between 97% and 98% — is redeemed, according to Sanja Gould, a spokeswoman for Starbucks.

Source: No one does gift cards like Starbucks – MarketWatch

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With the S&P 500 down about 3% this month, the stock market is having one of its worst Decembers on record. Absent a late comeback, what has tended to be the stock market’s best month is looking like a big disappointment.

But why? A good starting point for looking at this selloff is prices. The S&P 500 is trading at about 16 times expected earnings, according to FactSet, putting it at its most expensive level, other than earlier this year, of the past decade. And the cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio popularized by Yale University economist Robert Shiller , which seeks to smooth out temporary swings in earnings, is now above 26 times. That puts it well above its half-century average of 20.

When stocks are expensive, they are more vulnerable to bad news. One reason investors haven’t minded paying up for stocks in recent years, however, is that with rates so low, the alternatives of Treasurys have seemed so unattractive. The Federal Reserve’s decision to raise rates last week may helped provoke a reassessment—not because rates are no longer extraordinarily low, but because it is easier for investors to imagine a day when they aren’t with Fed officials projecting they will raise rates by a full percentage point next year.

Source: Why Markets Aren’t in the Holiday Spirit

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Holiday shopping isn’t what it used to be.

A National Retail Federation survey on Sunday found that more people shopped online than in stores during the Thanksgiving and Black Friday weekend, a sign of how quickly and deeply American shopping habits have changed.

This year, crowds at malls were thinner and stores were calmer over the Black Friday weekend. But online shopping, especially on mobile phones, surged as more retailers offered the same promotions online, often before items became available in stores and shoppers relished the joy of grabbing a deal while lounging at home.

Consumers spent an estimated $4.45 billion online Thursday and Friday, with Black Friday sales rising 14% from a year ago, according to Adobe Systems Inc., [stckqut]ADBE[/stckqut] which tracks purchases across 4,500 U.S. sites. It estimated that more than half of Black Friday shopping came from mobile devices. At Wal-Mart Stores Inc. [stckqut]WMT[/stckqut] about half of online orders since Thanksgiving have been placed on mobile devices, almost double the amount last year, according to the retail chain.

Source: Online Shopping Tops Stores on Black Friday Weekend