Yesterday was a painful day to hold equities, although the percentage losses were nowhere near records. A couple of subscribers have asked me to evaluate the macro headwinds buffeting valuation and the read-through from the results of both Cisco and NetApp on some of our portfolio names. I do not purport to be an economic…
It was announced after the close of the market that VMWare is in negotiations to acquire Pivotal’s public shares at a price of $15. In response to the announcement, Pivotal shares are now trading around at $14, up almost 70% from where the shares had been trading before the announcement. The transaction is probably getting…
Earnings season for the companies whose quarter ended 6/30 is winding down now, and it will be a week or two before the results of companies whose quarter ended 7/31 start flowing in any volume. NetApp does report this week, but as it has already preannounced and talked about its view of the market ,…
I have been asked by several subscribers to comment about the putative FedNow payments system, tentatively scheduled for release in 4 or 5 years. It has been described as an “existential threat” to Square, a significant commitment in our high growth portfolio with a weighting of 8%. I doubt that FedNow will evolve such that…
Friday was not a fun day in which to be engaged in high-growth tech names. Almost all of them, except those with some unusual parameter, were being sold aggressively by investors in the wake of NetApp’s preannouncement and its comment that it is seeing a macro-slowdown in storage demand. And in addition, Arista’s commentary that…
Over the course of an earnings season, I review something in excess of 50 reports and try to write commentary with regards to 20-25. That means I might miss some things both in terms of not commenting about every name and in not spotting every correlation. And for better or worse, just about every earnings…
Citrix The other day a subscriber asked me if the results of Citrix for this past quarter constituted either an earthquake or a shock? For subscribers unfamiliar with the source of the words in the question, they come from a well-known Cole Porter song of the 1930’s. Part of the song goes, “is it Granada…
Summary Health Catalyst came public last week. The company sold shares at $26-they are now trading in the $40 range. The company is a leading vendor in the Health Care analytic space with a proprietary data warehouse/date integration platform. The company has a variety of pre-packaged templates/applications that can dramatically improve the operational performance of…
For the most part, this earnings season has been similar to many others in terms of seeing few outright misses. IT firms continue to beat estimates, and continue to raise guidance. That said, there have been some high-profile casualties. The most prominent name that has been sold on earnings has been ServiceNow. The reality is…
Earnings season has gotten underway in earnest. It is very early days, but the IT space is reflecting a continuation of strong demand growth. It has been interesting to see that the early semi-conductor earnings are also showing growth better than had been expected. While the rest of the economy seems poised between recession and…