We made some significant changes in our income/stability portfolio. We eliminated our entire position in shares of Dassault Systemie. We felt that there were more interesting companies that are paying dividends in which to invest. While slow growth is not necessarily something that motivates a sale, we obviously look to find companies with greater growth.…
Summary Microsoft reported its earnings and guidance for the coming quarter, slightly below expectations, leading to questions about the impact of generative AI on the company’s growth. The market meltdown and subsequent recovery affected stock prices, with Microsoft experiencing a decrease in share value before a bounce back. Microsoft’s capex growth is substantial, with a…
Summary The best strategy to invest in the AI revolution is to focus on the pick and shovel vendors in the space. These companies serve as toll takers on the road to the deployment of AI based applications. AI needs lots of storage and thus we recommend shares of Pure. AI needs unified storage/compute and…
Microsoft announced what it calls Entra SASE, a solution that is designed to compete with modern security offerings from Zscaler, Palo Alto and Cloudflare. The announcement includes two specific solutions: Entra Internet Access, which is a secure web gateway for SaaS apps and internet traffic as well as Entra Private Access. Internet Access will be…
Summary MongoDB is the dominant competitor in the market for NoSQL databases.Its revenue growth is currently being constrained by macro headwinds impacting a usage based pricing model.The company, despite an earnings report that was better than feared, has reduced its revenue growth estimates for the current year to the high teens percent.The company, while not…
Summary Alteryx Q4 earnings were a significant upside with better than expected results for revenues, ARR and non-GAAP operating profits.The company is benefitting from a significant set of initiatives including a new go-to-market motion and a cloud analytics platform.The company is benefitting from a significant set of initiatives including a new go-to-market motion and a…
There has been much written and discussed about the slowdown in the enterprise software space. Last week when Google and Amazon reported that their cloud revenue growth had faltered, it cast a pall on the entire space. Some subscribers have asked me if the issues with regards to the growth in the usage in the…
Microsoft’s latest quarter: Warts on display; Opportunities on the horizon I don’t usually write about specific quarterly results for different companies. I realize that many readers are anxious to see an evaluation of quarterly results in the shortest possible time. I used to do that as part of my job as a brokerage analyst; for the most…
A safe haven doesn’t mean that rain can’t fall October was a strong month for most stocks. Even software stocks bounced with the IGV (IGV), the software ETF rising about 7%, while the Wisdom Tree Cloud ETF (WCLD) rose about 3.5%. But while October was strong for the market as a whole, it has been…
For the last several months, pundits, analysts and investors have been beating the drums about an impending recession. The recession appears to have arrived, certainly in Europe, and probably in the US as well. At the very least, bond traders, who have bid down yields on Treasury bonds the last several months are relatively convinced…