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…
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…
Rediscovering a reasonably valued cyber-security leader The last 7 months has been an eternity for most investors in the high-growth IT space. At first the issue driving stocks lower was valuation in an environment in which the Fed committed to raising rates to curb inflation. And then, as inflation persisted, and comments from Fed governors…
Many of the larger tech companies have now reported their earnings. If there are two consistent threads they are that overall, earnings have been a bit better than some have feared and that while some of the consumer focused tech vendors have encountered a variety of headwinds, for the most part that hasn’t been the…
Last week was another disappointing week for the markets in general, and for IT names in particular. Although our high-growth portfolio did manage to appreciate by 1.8%, it is still down by more than 25% so far this year, and by 21% since 8/20/21. Those results are more or less consistent with the overall tech ETF, the IGV, which lost 2% last week and has lost about 20% since the start of the year, and 22% since last August. The World Cloud ETF broke even last week, but it has lost 26% since the start of the year and has lost 32% since August 20th of last year.
Earnings season got underway in earnest last week. It was not a great week for the software names. The IGV fell a couple of percent and the CLOU index was unchanged. The CLOU index benefited significantly from the announcement that one of its heavily weighted constituents, Proofpoint, is being acquired by the PE firm, Thomas…
As subscribers are aware, it is my practice to review the earnings for most of our portfolio companies-and a few other companies that are likely to be of interest to many subscribers. I will comment briefly on the quarter that Microsoft reported. In fact, it was fantastic. Just about every business metric that most investors…