The stock market, after making several daily records, is under pressure today. Hi-growth software stocks have fallen and ServiceNow shares along with shares of IBM have seen significant drawdowns. I strongly felt that the sell-off in Service Now was not a reasonable interpretation of the quarter just reported and added to the position. And overall, I used the proceeds…
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…
We decided to take some profits on our Zscaler position which has risen by more than 80% so far this year and has reached a rather substantial valuation above average based on my estimates. The sale of 250 shares at $325.39 raised $81,340. We still have a position of 350 shares and that has a…
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…
On Wednesday evening, the President took revenge on the former Director of what is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Chris Krebs for not supporting the allegations regarding the integrity of the 2020 presidential elections. The order included allegations against Krebs for allegedly “blinding” the American public about the controversy over Hunter Biden’s laptop,…
Ticker Target Invest Philosophy In the wake of the excruciating fall of high growth IT shares I have been asked frequently about the Ticker Target investment philosophy and how it works in these difficult times. Obviously in looking at a drawdown of 34% in just over 6 weeks provides plenty of motivation for introspection and…
As mentioned in the weekly commentary, this week is a busy one for earnings. The two most salient releases for subscribers were those of Zscaler and SentinelOne. Other earnings reports of interest included Salesforce, a modest sized holding in the income/stability portfolio as well as Okta. Of course Pure Storage, the largest position in the…
Shift4 Earlier today we sold a bit more than half our position Shift4. We have had a sizable position-1100 shares-and we were able to sell 600 shares before the price declined below our limit. The average price of our sale was $105.77, and the low price was $103.99. Today, the CEO of the company, Jared Isaacman, accepted…
a) Zscaler: The business is growing but one metric is misleading investors As I write this Tuesday evening, Zscaler shares are down 15% to around $164. That puts the year to date loss of the shares to around 13%. I point that out simply because the question to consider is whether or not the company is…
Just as a point of interest, today is AI Appreciation Day. I have no immediate plans to celebrate, other than to note that marketers can find reason to celebrate something every day of the year, and today is for AI. One lady wrote on one of the AI sites that I read that she has opted…