Based on discussions and experiences at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, Piper Jaffray analyst Michael Olson thinks the first major wave of Virtual Reality, or VR, adoption is taking place in the areas of performance training, education, theme parks and arcades. Over the next six to 18 months, Olson sees adult content, TV series linked experiences and live sports as the drivers of in-home VR adoption, he adds. While noting that Facebook's (FB) Oculus was not at CES this year, Olson said he sees the social network giant and Google (GOOG) as the leaders in VR.

In a regulatory filing, Alphabet disclosed that its CEO Sundar Pichai sold 22.5K shares of common stock on April 17th in a total transaction size of $3.54M.

Welcome to "#SocialStocks," The Fly's weekly recap of Wall Street's reactions to social media stock news. UPPING PARENTAL CONTROLS: The... To see the rest of the story go to thefly.com. See Story Here

Truist raised the firm's price target on Alphabet to $170 from $158 and keeps a Buy rating on the shares. The firm is expecting the company to report "solid" Q1 results driven by "healthy" user engagement that continues to drive more ad spending across Search and Social, helped by an ongoing recovery in pricing. Conversations with digital ad agencies suggest that the momentum seen in Q4 was sustained in Q1 across Search and YouTube, though the management's commentary for Q2 may be cautious given the macro environment, with continued emphasis on investments in Cloud and AI, the analyst tells investors in a research note.

The U.K. plans to hold talks this month with Apple (AAPL), Meta (META), Alphabet (GOOGL) and others to push a voluntary charter granting parents more control of social media use by young teens, Bloomberg's Ellen Milligan reports. According to people familiar with the matter, ministers want to launch a consultation later this month to gauge ways of limiting the potential harm to children caused by social media, and the proposed voluntary charter may involve tech firms agreeing to alert parents when their children are repeatedly looking up disturbing content. Reference Link

Apparel & Footwear Analyst Kummetz discusses recent earnings for CAL, NKE, SCVL, Google trends and weather analysis and March Footwear Survey results on an Analyst/Industry conference call to be held on April 19 at 12 pm.