Mad Hedge Technology Alerts!
As the trade ruckus rumbles on for the foreseeable future, there are some places to deploy cash and some places to avoid like the zika virus.
The one area of tech to avoid that is clearer than daylight is the small cap chips companies.
Like a fish out of water, you should not feel comfortable holding shares in this type of equity amid the backdrop of an unresolved trade skirmish.
Although the Mandarins ironically need our chips, the uncertainty permeating around small chip firms means it's not time to hold let alone initiate new positions.
Investors still don't know how this standoff with shake out.
Until, there is more clarity going forward, give way to the next guy who can take the heavy loss.
Keep the powder dry for better times.
The long-term demand picture is healthy with IoT, cloud, and software companies never being thirstier for chips.
Short term is a different story with many of these smaller chip companies subscribing to grotesque charts that will make your jaw drop.
Take Skyworks Solutions, Inc. (SWKS) whose shares have spent the majority of 2018 trending lower and are stuck in purgatory.
(SWKS) produces semiconductors deployed in radio frequency (RF) and mobile systems.
This stock has been tainted by the horrid reality that it generates 25% to 30% of revenue from China.
If you have been living in a cave for the past eight months, technology is the battleground for global supremacy pitting two of the leading technological heavyweights in the world against each other in a fiercely contested, drawn-out conflict.
Any American listed chip company doing at least 20% of revenue in China has the same chart trajectory and that is not up.
Adding insult to injury, (SWKS) generates 35% to 40% of its total revenue from Apple.
As we approach every earnings season, the story rewinds and plays again to loud applause.
A slew of analysts appears on air condemning Apple promulgating lower iPhone sales due to surveys taken across various key suppliers giving them a snapshot into production numbers.
Each time, the analysts are proved wrong. However, the avalanche of downgrades that ensues knocks the stuffing out of the small chip companies dipping viciously, at times more than 10% or more on the headline.
One of the larger Chinese contracts that was signed by (SWKS) was with ZTE. Yes, that ZTE, the one the U.S. administration temporarily put out of business for selling telecommunication equipment to North Korea and Iran.
That was the nail in the coffin.
According to the (SKWS) official website, it has an ongoing, expanding relationship with ZTE and its chips would be "powering data cards and USB modems" in ZTE-manufactured next-generation tablets.
Luckily, the American government reversed its initial decision restoring operations to ZTE.
That does not mean it is out of the woods yet as lingering risks still overhang over this company.
This revelation underscores the massive contract risk for companies that unlike behemoths such as Micron, are desperately reliant on just a handful of contracts to propagate short-term revenue.
Effectively, the U.S. administration views American chip companies as collateral damage to the bigger picture.
The only reason the ZTE ban was lifted was because it was a prerequisite to restart talks between both sides.
If the ban was upheld, 75,000 Chinese workers would have needed to polish the dust off their resumes to start a fresh job search.
The inability to sell components to service the Chinese consumer will strike where it hurts most: the bottom line.
Chip producers did $1.5 billion in sales with ZTE in 2017. That business is in a precarious situation when a tweet can just wipe out those contracts in one fell swoop.
Acacia Communications, Inc. (ACIA) churns out high-speed coherent interconnect products.
The stock was beaten down then beaten some more in 2018.
(ACIA) revealed 30% of its $385.2 million revenue derived from one contract with guess who...ZTE.
On word of ZTE ban, (ACIA) plummeted from $40 to $27.50 in one trading day.
The disappearance of a contract this vital to survival is tough for a small business to handle even if temporary.
Layoffs and a squeezed financial situation apply unrelenting pressure on management to find an elixir.
Cirrus Logic Inc. (CRUS) pumping out a mix of analog, mixed-signal, and audio DSP integrated circuits (ICs) was trading more than $62 just a year ago.
Fast forward to today and its shares are at a measly $39.
To say Cirrus Logic's eggs are in one basket is an understatement.
(CRUS) procures 80% of revenue from Apple.
It's all hunky-dory to develop a close relationship with Apple, but in light of this unpredictable economic climate, shares have been hit hard and there is no end in sight.
(CRUS) even won a contract to help produce Apple's noise canceling and water-resistant AirPods, but that does not do anything to change the narrative.
The vultures are circling around this name and it was time to abort a long time ago.
Xilinx, Inc. (XLNX) is another small chip company and the first to create the first fabless manufacturing model headquartered in San Jose, California.
This company, founded in 1984, procures around 35% of revenue from China
The trade headwinds have set this stock in the crosshairs, being the victim of frequent 5% drops and two 10% slides in 2018.
It is a miracle this stock is slightly in the green this year, and (XLNX) is one of the lucky ones.
Skim through the rest of small cap chips stocks and the charts look the same. Dreadful with massive rally busting sell-offs.
The extreme volatility in and of itself is a sensible reason to steer clear of these names.
The headline risks that splash across the morning news spreads are a daily reminder that chip stocks, big and small, aren't out of the woods yet.
The Johnny-come-latelies must expose themselves to higher quality, unique assets which possess little or no China exposure.
For the experts, trade the volatility at your peril. But if volatility is what you want with scarcity of value, leg into Roku (ROKU) or Square (SQ) on moderate sell-off days.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Quote of the Day
"Technological progress is like an ax in the hands of a pathological criminal," said German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein.
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
July 25, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(PICHAI YOURSELF, EARNINGS ARE REALLY THAT GOOD),
(GOOGL), (MSFT), (AMZN), (AAPL), (TWTR), (DIS), (TGT)
Google Translate, Alphabet's (GOOGL) free, multilingual machine, foreign language translation service, translates an unimaginable143 billion words per day.
These were one of the pearls divulged in the conference call from Google's CEO Sundar Pichai.
A bump in usage coincided with the 2018 World Cup in Russia, and in the age of low-cost airfare and overpopulation, it could be Alphabet's new cash cow.
Google Translate has the potential to morph into one of the premier foreign language applications used by anyone and everyone.
Forget about the Amazon effect, the Alphabet effect could be just as pungent, albeit away from the trenches of e-commerce.
Thank goodness the application is still ad-free.
No doubt it would be inconvenient to sit through a 15 second ad while interacting with a concierge at a bed and breakfast in the South of France.
Analysts did not sound out Pichai's plans for Google Translate, but he did mention there are some monetization opportunities on the horizon.
The latest earnings report is the most recent indication that the FANGs along with Microsoft are pulling away from the rest.
The equity price action in 2018 vindicates this fact with more than 80% of the gains spread around just a few high caliber tech names.
Is this fair? No. But life isn't fair.
The too slow too late regulation that was supposed to put a cap on the vaunted FANG group has had the opposite effect, squeezing the small guy out of the picture.
The runway is all clear for the FANGs, and the only way they will be stopped is if they stop themselves or an antitrust ruling.
This all adds up to why Alphabet has been a perennial recommendation for the Mad Hedge Technology Letter.
Duopolies are few and far between and monopolies even rarer.
They are great for earnings and as the global digital ad pie grows, it falls down to Google's bottom line.
On the news of stellar earnings, Facebook shares jumped higher in aftermarket trading and powered on to trade around 5% the following day.
Expect a great earnings report from Facebook with robust ad revenue growth.
Nothing less would be a failure of epic proportions.
The migration to mobile is real and investors need to understand analysts cannot keep up with the rising year-end targets in these shares.
Alphabet had a high bar over which to pole vault, and it still managed to beat it handily.
And the $5 billion fine for bundling its in-house apps on Android fell on deaf ears.
Alphabet has $102 billion in the coffers, and $5 billion will do nothing to materially affect the company.
The cash reserves are up from $34 billion in 2010.
The market trampled on any sniff of a risk-adverse sentiment and powered into the green with the Nasdaq reaching another all-time high.
Let's not get too carried away. Alphabet's bread and butter is still its digital ad business with Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat confirming this fact saying, "One of the biggest opportunities for investment continues to be in our ads business."
Alphabet still breaks off 86% of revenue from its distinguished ad business.
"Other" is a category commingling Google Cloud, Google Play, and hardware that only comprised 13 percent of total revenue.
"Other Bets" brings up the rear with 1% of total revenue comprising Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving unit, which is an industry leader putting Tesla and Uber in their place.
Waymo plans to shortly roll out a massive commercial operation. Along with Google Translate, it could carve out a nice position in Alphabet's portfolio going forward.
The most important metric was Alphabet's total ad revenue, which it locked in at $28.1 billion, a 23.9% YOY improvement.
Aggregate paid clicks, a model in which the advertiser pays Google for a user to click an ad, has been steadily rising to 58%, up from 52% from the same time last year.
The masterful efficiency circles back to Google's ad tech team, which is by far the best in the business and has outstanding management.
The Cloud is an area that Alphabet highlights as a place for improvement.
Alphabet's cash war chest allows the company to throw hoards of cash at a problem. When mixed with brilliant management it usually works out kindly.
CFO Porat mentioned that costs were particularly higher in the quarterly head count because of large investments in cloud talent.
Google is tired of playing third fiddle to Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT), and views enhancing the enterprise business as imperative.
This explains Alphabet's head count surge to more than 89,000 employees, sharply higher than the 75,600 employed a year earlier.
Every FANG and high-tier tech company is spending its brains out to compete with each other.
Expanding data centers is not cheap. Neither are the people to deploy it.
Alphabet has the cash to compete with the Amazons and Apples (AAPL) of the world.
They do not have to borrow.
The potential trip wire in Alphabet's earnings report was Google's traffic acquisition cost (TAC).
Alphabet's (TAC) is described as money paid to other companies to direct user traffic to its suite of Google products.
(TAC) went up to $6.4 billion, which is 23% of Google's ad revenue but down on a relative percentage basis of 24%.
This was enough to keep investors from sounding the alarm and was welcomed by analysts.
Alphabet pulled out all the stops this quarter and the momentum is palpable.
Top-line growth from its core ad business shows no sign of slowing.
Acceptable (TAC) was the cherry on the sundae for the quarter at a time when many industry insiders thought it would be around 25% or higher.
Hardware offered less punch than before, which is what all high-quality tech companies desire.
There were no obvious weaknesses and the 34 straight quarters of 23% YOY growth is hard to top.
Google pulls in 10% of all global digital ad dollars in one business.
Other highlights were Waymo eclipsing the 8-million-mile mark of self-driving on public roads as it is the next business to come to the fore.
Google cloud is at an inflection point attempting to win over corporate management.
It has already won contracts with heavy hitters such as Twitter (TWTR) and Disney (DIS).
Pichai mentioned Target (TGT) as a key new cloud client that just signed on with Google last quarter.
More importantly, Alphabet's brilliant quarter bolsters the macroeconomic picture heavily reliant on tech earnings to usher the market through the gauntlet.
Regulation has proved irrelevant. Whatever fine they are slapped with does not change that Google reaps the benefits from its market position as one of the duopolies in the global ad business.
Alphabet has been trading from the bottom left to the upper right via a consistent channel.
Do not chase the new all-time high of $1,270. Use any weakness around the $1,100 level to initiate new positions.
Owning a company this dominant has little downside. The regulatory burden was a myth and Pichai has handled this operation beautifully.
I am bullish on Alphabet and its partner in crime Facebook.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Quote of the Day
"Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all," said the 35th President of the United States John F. Kennedy.
