Reviewing a busted recommendation The last 13 months have been a humbling experience. I feel bloody but try to remain unbowed. It has been next to impossible to make successful recommendations-at least as I define successful. Even companies that I have recommended on SA such as Adobe (ADBE), Wix (WIX), Trade Desk (TTD) and Arista…
What are the investment merits of Adobe at this point? Recommending any software names these days is a contrarian undertaking. Investors, with a dearth of evidence, or historical analogs are convinced that somehow the business outlook for software companies is highly correlated to the business cycle. They are terrified about negative estimate revisions. And they…
Salesforce-A recommendation for a perilous market The title of this article comes from a quote by Ray Bradbury, a well known author, whose most famous work was “Fahrenheit 451.” I thought it particularly appropriate after the months of share price bloodletting. I have not written about Salesforce (CRM) on the SA platform for about 4 years now. I…
The New Decline: What’s been going on? More than a few subscribers and some readers on SA : How low is the market going? What should I be doing? How much longer will this bloodletting last? One subscriber wrote to me that he has been nauseous. He asked how I stay calm. The reality is…
Summary SaaS companies turned it a stunning share price performance in 2020. The CLOU index which I consider the best way of measuring share price performance rose by 80% during the course of 2020. More than a few SaaS names rose by 2X-4X. Concerns exist that SaaS names will not reprise their performance in 2021.…
A Mournful Wednesday It was just one of those days The skies were dark and the heavens were weeping. If you are a tech investor and are looking for growth names Wednesday was either the worst of times or an opportunity. While there is no particular index that tracks high momentum/highly valued growth names, a…
Zscaler/Crowdstrike-some thoughts about their announcement Yesterday, as part of an investor event, ZS and Crowdstrike announced what could be an interesting integration of the two solutions. While some of what I write here might be considered an over-simplification, the two companies offer complementary solutions to different parts of the cyber-security problem. The core of the…
This has been a week without a whole lot of drama in the software space so far as share price action. But there have been some interesting developments worth noting. My take on the week to date is that the software space continues to lead a relatively charmed life. On balance, while this year is…
PVI do not often write previews of quarterly results-mainly because without some kind of informational advantage, which is very difficult to come by these days, much of the preview is pure guess work or simply a reprise of guidance. I spent more than a couple of decades attempting to preview quarters for institutions with some…
Summary Adobe reported a quarter with very typical results-better EPS, better revenue growth and a strong outlook. The shares have been pummeled, down a bit more than 7% since the earnings release. Guidance was perhaps misunderstood and mis-appreciated. The company is projecting reported non-GAAP EPS of less than the prior consensus. The company has a…