Sale of 1200 shares of Shift4 (entire position); Purchase of Digital Ocean-Starter position; Adding to positions in Snowflake, Figma and Samsara. We made some changes in the high growth portfolio today. We eliminated the Shift 4 position. We got impatient and despite not getting the dead cat bounce, we decided to take the medicine and eliminate the…
Overall, the crop of earnings reported this past week has been underwhelming from the perspective of share prices, but reasonably positive in terms of a lens looking at demand growth. No signs of SaaSpocalypse or anything like that. In this blog, I will stick to the companies that reported this past week, and will discuss…
Reviews of Shift4, Affirm, Procore, Datadog and Figma Loads of earnings to consider. One of the strongest earnings quarters in recent years-certainly in terms of IT companies and apparently pretty generally amongst the S&P-even outside of the Mag 7 group. Has it pricked the bubble mentality? Not so far it seems. This is one sample…
A subscriber shared this post with me. Jared Isaacman @rookisaacman on “X” Fiserv had an Argentinian tailwind that caught up with them (among other issues). FOUR doesn’t. And I would hope those that like FOUR do so based on the fundamentals over the last two decades and not because I post on X. Earnings in…
Investors remain focused on AI hardware stocks, and in general have ignored or sold high growth enterprise software stocks. This has created some valuation anomalies and we moved to bulk up positions in stocks that have been on the wrong side of investor love. How long this paradigm will last is not really knowable. My…
The fintech sector has been weak this morning and we chose to jump in and add to our holdings in Pagaya, Affirm and Shift4. We entered a limit order in Pagaya shares at $32.01 and it got filled. Honestly, I was surprised. Pagaya shares are now down by more than 21% in the last month.…
The market continues to trade in a consolidation mode, and we took some actions today. Although objectively the inflation news was reasonably positive, and initially stocks rose, selling resumed shortly after the opening. The consolidation trade may last until earnings season gets underway. Or it may last until the next Fed policy meeting. My ability…
We made some changes in our cyber-security holdings in the high growth portfolio. We eliminated the starter positions we had in both Palo Alto and Cloudflare. We also eliminated the position we had in Arista Networks. The positions were too small to be meaningful. The shares of Palo Alto and Cloudflare had appreciated modestly since…
Summary Shift4’s Q2 reported headline misses were misleading—revenue less network fees grew 29% and cash flow hit record highs, with strong take rates and robust backlog. The Global Blue acquisition is transformative, offering major cross-sell and some expense synergistic opportunities, yet the market underappreciates its likely impact and overstates integration risks. Valuation is at historic lows: EV/S…
This morning we made some changes in our high growth portfolio, selling the balance of the Shift 4 position and adding to positions in Datadog, SentinelOne, Unity and GitLab. The details are as follows: We sold 500 shares of Shift4 at 104.29. This eliminated the position and raised $52,140. To reiterate, our sale was related to the appointment…