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Why FinTech is Eating the Banks’ Lunch

Going into January 2018, the big banks were highlighted as the pocket of the equity market that would most likely benefit from a rising rate environment which in turn boosts net interest margins (NIM).

Fast forward a year and take a look at the charts of Bank of America (BAC), Citibank (C), JP Morgan (JPM), Goldman Sachs (GS), and Morgan Stanley (GS), and each one of these mainstay banking institutions are down between 10%-20% from January 2018.

Take a look at the Financial Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLF) that backs up my point.

And that was after a recent 10% move up at the turn of the calendar year.

As much as it pains me to say it, bloated American banks have been completely caught off-guard by the mesmerizing phenomenon that is FinTech.

Banking is the latest cohort of analog business to get torpedoes by the brash tech start-up culture.

This is another fitting example of what will happen when you fail to evolve and overstep your business capabilities allowing technology to move into the gaps of weakness.

Let me give you one example.

I was most recently in Tokyo, Japan and was out of cash in a country that cash is king.

Japan has gone a long way to promoting a cashless society, but some things like a classic sushi dinner outside the old Tsukiji Fish Market can’t always be paid by credit card.

I found an ATM to pull out a few hundred dollars’ worth of Japanese yen.

It was already bad enough that the December 2018 sell-off meant a huge rush into the safe haven currency of the Japanese Yen.

The Yen moved from 114 per $1 down to 107 in one month.

That was the beginning of the bad news.

I whipped out my Wells Fargo debit card to withdraw enough cash and the fees accrued were nonsensical.

Not only was I charged a $5 fixed fee for using a non-Wells Fargo ATM, but Wells Fargo also charged me 3% of the total amount of the transaction amount.

Then I was hit on the other side with the Japanese ATM slamming another $5 fixed fee on top of that for a non-Japanese ATM withdrawal.

For just a small withdrawal of a few hundred dollars, I was hit with a $20 fee just to receive my money in paper form.

Paper money is on their way to being artifacts.

This type of price gouging of banking fees is the next bastion of tech disruption and that is what the market is telling us with traditional banks getting hammered while a strong economy and record profits can’t entice investors to pour money into these stocks.

FinTech will do what most revolutionary technology does, create an enhanced user experience for cheaper prices to the consumers and wipe the greedy traditional competition that was laughing all the way to the bank.

The best example that most people can relate to on a daily basis is the transportation industry that was turned on its head by ride-sharing mavericks Uber and Lyft.

But don’t ask yellow cab drivers how they think about these tech companies.

Highlighting the strong aversion to traditional banking business is Slack, the workplace chat app, who will follow in the footsteps of online music streaming platform Spotify (SPOT) by going public this year without doing a traditional IPO.

What does this mean for the traditional banks?

Less revenue.

Slack will list directly and will set its own market for the sale of shares instead of leaning on an investment bank to stabilize the share price.

Recent tech IPOs such as Apptio, Nutanix and Twilio all paid 7% of the proceeds of their offering to the underwriting banks resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Directly listings will cut that fee down to $10-20 million, a far cry from what was once status quo and a historical revenue generation machine for Wall Street.

This also layers nicely with my general theme of brokers of all types whether banking, transportation, or in the real estate market gradually be rooted out by technology.

In the world of pervasive technology and free information thanks to Google search, brokers have never before added less value than they do today.

Slowly but surely, this trend will systematically roam throughout the economic landscape culling new victims.

And then there are the actual FinTech companies who are vying to replace the traditional banks with leaner tech models saving money by avoiding costly brick and mortar branches that dot American suburbs.

PayPal (PYPL) has been around forever, but it is in the early stages of ramping up growth.

That doesn’t mean they have a weak balance sheet and their large embedded customer base approaching 250 million users has the network effect most smaller FinTech players lack.

PayPal is directly absorbing market share from the big banks as they have rolled out debit cards and other products that work well for millennials.

They are the owners of Venmo, the super-charged peer-to-peer payment app wildly popular amongst the youth.

Shares of PayPal’s have risen over 200% in the past 2 years and as you guessed, they don’t charge those ridiculous fees that banks do.

Wells Fargo and Bank of America charge a $12 monthly fee for balances that dip below $1,500 at the end of any business day.

Your account at PayPal can have a balance of 0 and there will never be any charge whatsoever.

Then there is the most innovative FinTech company Square who recently locked in a new lease at the Uptown Station in Downtown Oakland expanding their office space by 365,000 square feet for over 2,000 employees.

Square is led by one of the best tech CEOs in Silicon Valley Jack Dorsey.

Not only is the company madly innovative looking to pounce on any pocket of opportunity they observe, but they are extremely diversified in their offerings by selling point of sale (POS) systems and offering an online catering service called Caviar.

They also offer software for Square register for payroll services, large restaurants, analytics, location management, employee management, invoices, and Square capital that provides small loans to businesses and many more.

On average, each customer pays for 3.4 Square software services that are an incredible boon for their software-as-a-service (SaaS) portfolio.

An accelerating recurring revenue stream is the holy grail of software business models and companies who execute this model like Microsoft (MSFT) and Salesforce (CRM) are at the apex of their industry.

The problem with trading this stock is that it is mind-numbingly volatile. Shares sold off 40% in the December 2018 meltdown, but before that, the shares doubled twice in the past two years.

Therefore, I do not promote trading Square short-term unless you have a highly resistant stomach for elevated volatility.

This is a buy and hold stock for the long-term.

And that was only just two companies that are busy redrawing the demarcation lines.

There are others that are following in the same direction as PayPal and Square based in Europe.

French startup Shine is a company building an alternative to traditional bank accounts for freelancers working in France.

First, download the app.

The company will guide you through the simple process — you need to take a photo of your ID and fill out a form.

It almost feels like signing up to a social network and not an app that will store your money.

You can send and receive money from your Shine account just like in any banking app.

After registering, you receive a debit card.

You can temporarily lock the card or disable some features in the app, such as ATM withdrawals and online payments.

Since all these companies are software thoroughbreds, improvement to the platform is swift making the products more efficient and attractive.

There are other European mobile banks that are at the head of the innovation curve namely Revolut and N26.

Revolut, in just 6 months, raised its valuation from $350 million to $1.7 billion in a dazzling display of growth.

Revolut’s core product is a payment card that celebrates low fees when spending abroad—but even more, the company has swiftly added more and more additional financial services, from insurance to cryptocurrency trading and current accounts.

Remember my little anecdote of being price-gouged in Tokyo by Wells Fargo, here would be the solution.

Order a Revolut debit card, the card will come in the mail for a small fee.

Customers then can link a simple checking account to the Revolut debit card ala PayPal.

Why do this?

Because a customer armed with a Revolut debit card linked to a bank account can use the card globally and not be charged any fees.

It would be the same as going down to your local Albertson’s and buying a six-pack, there are no international or hidden fees.

There are no foreign transaction fees and the exchange rate is always the mid-market rate and not some manipulated rate that rips you off.

Ironically enough, the premise behind founding this online bank was exactly that, the originators were tired of meandering around Europe and getting hammered in every which way by inflexible banks who could care less about the user experience.

Revolut’s founder, Nikolay Storonsky, has doubled down on the firm’s growth prospects by claiming to reach the goal of 100 million customers by 2023 and a succession of new features.

To say this business has been wildly popular in Europe is an understatement and the American version just came out and is ready to go.

Since December 2018, Revolut won a specialized banking license from the European Central Bank, facilitated by the Bank of Lithuania which allows them to accept deposits and offer consumer credit products.

N26, a German like-minded online bank, echo the same principles as Revolut and eclipsed them as the most valuable FinTech startup with a $2.7 Billion Valuation.

N26 will come to America sometime in the spring and already boast 2.3 million users.

They execute in five languages across 24 countries with 700 staff, most recently launching in the U.K. last October with a high-profile marketing blitz across the capital.

Most of their revenue is subscription-based paying homage to the time-tested recurring revenue theme that I have harped on since the inception of the Mad Hedge Technology Letter.

And possibly the best part of their growth is that the average age of their customer is 31 which could be the beginning of a beautiful financial relationship that lasts a lifetime.

N26’s basic current account is free, while “Black” and “Metal” cards include higher ATM withdrawal limits overseas and benefits such as travel insurance and WeWork membership for a monthly fee.

Sad to say but Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and the others just can’t compete with the velocity of the new offerings let alone the software-backed talent.

We are at an inflection point in the banking system and there will be carnage to the hills, may I even say another Lehman moment for one of these stale business models.

Online banking is here to stay, and the momentum is only picking up steam.

If you want to take the easy way out, then buy the Global X FinTech ETF (FINX) with an assortment of companies exposed to FinTech such as PayPal, Square, and Intuit (INTU).

The death of cash is sooner than you think.

This year is the year of FinTech and I’m not afraid to say it.

December 18, 2018

Tech Letter

Mad Hedge Technology Letter
December 18, 2018
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(THE BIG TECHNOLOGY TRENDS OF 2019)
(MSFT), (AMZN), (BBY), (SONO), (ROKU), (ADBE), (AAPL), (BAC)

The Big Technology Trends of 2019

Tech Letter

As an astute purveyor of technology, it is my job to share with you the upcoming tech trends of 2019.

Some might be easily discernable and some might be a headscratcher, but all must be tabbed up and considered in the current tech outlook that is unpredictable and fluctuating, to say the least.

Part of the moody tech sentiment has been influenced by a changeable macro landscape - the tech sector’s winter freeze was woefully volatile and unfairly capsized good companies with the bad.

There is no means to get around it – the administration's delicate situation as it relates to Beijing and the American tech sector is front and center, and any movement of tech stocks must carefully absorb the ongoings from this complicated relationship.

The number of obstacles that confront this sensitive situation means that the 90-day window granted to solve the trade quagmires appear too brief of a timeframe to really knock out every single disagreement on the table.

The uncertainty over trade policy has really ruffled some of tech’s strongest feathers such as America’s pride and joy Apple (AAPL).

Apple is a great long-term story, but it does not preside over many short-term positive catalysts that can resuscitate the stock.

Analysts' downgrade after downgrade has been most harrowing for the chip components that make up Apple and other consumer electronic devices such as televisions and tablets.

This scenario is expected to extend into 2019 with Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAC) slashing their price target by nearly 30% on electronics retailer Best Buy (BBY) then sticking the fork in them by downgrading it to underperform.

The premise behind this downgrade was that Best Buy carved out 25% of revenue from television sales and even though Adobe (ADBE) analytics has calculated record online sales in the holiday season, the follow-through has largely been without television sales participating in the seasonal bonanza.

Piggybacking on this trope, I believe electronic device sales could be hard-pressed to eke out growth next year and are set up for a rude awakening.

Therefore, it is sensible to extrapolate this idea out and assume that smart hardware competing against the big boys such as smart speaker firm Sonos (SONO), who I urged readers to stay away at $16 in September, is set up for a painstaking 2019.

To reread the story, please click here.

The stock is now trading at $11 and a mix of weakening consumer device demand layered with the domination that is the Amazon Alexa has pushed up this company’s risk-reward levels to untold heights.

Rounding out the negatives is that content streaming platform Roku has also debuted its own version of a smart speaker.

Roku (ROKU) is one of my favorite long-time tech plays but has been dragged down by the broader trade war because a portion of its revenue is still captured by hardware such as the new speakers and Roku OTT boxes.

Differing from Apple, Roku earns most of their revenue from targeted ads on their proprietary platform, and this is its reason why most investors are in this stock that is set to capture a secular migratory wave of cord-cutters traversing to online streaming.

However, Roku TVs made by Chinese company TCL still draw in small portion of revenue and even though the China revenue is not as high on a relative basis as Apple’s 20%, the stock has floundered in the short-term.

If disruptors such as Roku can get hit savagely with a small portion of revenues from China, then I am convinced that any tech investor going into 2019 should stay away from hardware and hardware that is made in China.

The consensus is that the drawn-out trade war could become the X-factor in the 2020 election because the Chinese are willing to wait for the next guy on the carousel searching for a better deal.

If you thought Chinese supply chains had a tough time of it in 2018, then 2019 is poised to be even more treacherous.

What 2018 convincingly demonstrated was that the late economic price action is getting into later and later stages boding negative for tech stocks.

To construct a healthy tech portfolio going into 2019, the change in the tech partiality has made the pivot towards software much more important.

Investors need to mitigate Chinese supply chain risk and seek out domestic software plays.

That should be the playbook as tech investors are on pins and needles going into the new year.

The domestic economy is robust and tech investors should be attracted to top-quality cloud-based enterprise stocks that are profitable.

The FANG story collapsing in our face signaled to investors that it is time to cautiously consider whether to invest heavily into deep loss-maker tech growth stories.

A healthy rotation to premium quality tech with superior cash flow is one way to lock up stocks and slyly deflect the external factors shaking up the tech momentum.

PayPal (PYPL) is a stock that has large international exposure mainly in Europe, but none in China whose 3-year EPS growth rate is 26% and still driving sequential sales in the mid-20% range.

This is just one example of a stock that has the correct make-up in a harsh and brutal tech environment planted with invisible booby traps.

And the most tell-tale sign that the American economy is in for an all-out software frenzy is the number of head-spinning investments from big tech companies looking to expand their footprint into new talent spots around the country.

First, the farcical Amazon beauty pageant came to an end with the e-commerce giant announcing a three-part package deploying new operations in New York, Washington D.C., and Nashville as the next phase of digital growth ramps up.

Google (GOOGL) followed that up by plopping a software office in New York City devouring a huge chunk of the Chelsea neighborhood aimed at doubling the 7,000 employees already there.

Then it was Apple’s turn choreographing a significant investment in Austin, Texas that will cost them $1 billion along with juicing up operations in Seattle, San Diego, and Los Angeles.

They weren’t finished there and promised to double down its presence in Pittsburgh, New York and Boulder, Colorado over the next three years.

It’s clear that big tech has finally understood that it’s not invincible and milking the China supply chain for all its worth is now a taboo business practice that has bipartisan support firmly against it.

Like I said before, the trade war came 1-2 years too early for Apple, and these headline-grabbing talent investments in data centers and its staff underscore the sense of urgency to fully and comprehensively pivot towards a software and services company.

The transition has certainly been an excruciating process exposing the weak spots at a brilliant company at the worst possible time.

I blame CEO of Apple Tim Cook who is the operations expert in the building grappling with Apple overextending themselves in the Middle Kingdom that has come back to haunt him at night.

You would have thought that with the troves of big data on their hands, Apple’s consultants might have found a country allied with America to invest in such a massive supply chain.

This leads me to communicate with conviction that Microsoft (MSFT) is my favorite tech stock going into 2019 because it is the purest, scalable, high-quality software name with minimal hardware drag devoid of weak spots in its armor.

That was what the investment in GitHub for $7.5 billion was about, highlighting the value of owning the meeting place for coders, literally buying up a stash of over 28 million users and 57 million coding repositories in which 28 million are public.

Microsoft has also bought up six video game studios in 2018 attempting to capture a bigger piece of the pie for the video game market that has been throttled by Fortnite.

If the Microsoft baby gets thrown out with the bathwater, then the tech bear market is upon us in full force.

If you didn’t really believe content is king in 2018, then you will really feel the phenomenon further embedded into the economy and society in 2019.

Next year, almost all tech investments will result in more data centers and software engineers in the hope of pumping out the best content and data, whether it’s enterprise software, video games, or pure data storage.

In 2019, I am bullish on companies with a cloud-based bedrock able to grind out the best content in the world, backed by a strong balance sheet that dovetails nicely with a lack of China-based revenue exposure.

The uber-growth models could be taking a rest boding negatively for Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb who must convince a more skeptical tech audience with tighter purse strings as they inject yet another unique dimension into the tech world next year.

December 10, 2018

Tech Letter

Mad Hedge Technology Letter
December 10, 2018
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(IT’S ALL ABOUT THE CLOUD)
(OKTA), (ZS), (DOCU), (INTU)

It’s All About Software, Software, Software

Tech Letter

If you thought software week at the Mad Hedge Technology Letter was over, you were absolutely wrong.

I have done my best to offer a barrage of cloud-based software stocks with monstrous upside potential that would put any other industry companies six feet under.

Silicon Valley software companies have access to quinine in a mosquito-infested market – digitally savvy talent.

This talent is the best and brightest the world has to offer, and they want to work for a dominant company that gets it.

Much of this involves companies with bright futures, career opportunities galore, solving deep-rooted problems, all applying a treasure trove of data and a mountain of capital your rich uncle would giggle at.

In the short term, I have been succinctly rewarded by my software picks with communication software Twilio (TWLO) rocketing upward 35% intraday at the time of this writing from when I recommended it just a few days ago.

Another Mad Hedge Technology Letter recommendation Zendesk (ZEN), a software company solving customer support tickets across various channels, is up a tame 10% after the election.

All in all, I would desire readers to access due caution as the volatility can bite you badly with crappy entry points, but the upside cannot be denied.

The turbocharged price action means the pivot to software with its new best friend, the software as a service (SaaS) pricing model, encapsulates the outsized profits this industry will rake in going forward.

Without further ado, I’d like to slip in two more companies rounding out a robust quintet of software companies – I bring to you Workday (WDAY) and Service Now (NOW).

Workday is a software company based on a critical component of every successful company – human resources.

Unsurprisingly, human resources are tardy to this wave of software modernization.

Sensibly, companies have chosen short-term software fixes that drive profits with instant success rather than to update its human resource department’s processes.

Big mistake.

I would argue that getting the right people in the doors is paramount and can save substantial time because of the wasted time rooting out toxic employees who weren’t suitable fits.

Ultimately, I have concluded the worst-case scenario entails the enterprise resource planning market stagnating driving minimal growth to the cloud, however, this minimal growth would be substantial enough for Workday to outperform.

The landscape as of now only involves several vendors with a competitive (SaaS) solution auguring well for Workday allowing them to capture a further chunk of market share.

Workday’s growth metrics back up my thesis with its businesses posting a 3-year EPS growth rate of 291% and a 3-year sales growth rate of 36%, painting a picture of a company that will turn profitable in the next few years.

They can even showboat their glittering array of heavy-hitting customers who purchase their software that include Walmart (WMT), Target (TGT), and Bank of America (BAC).

The one headwind tarnishing these types of software companies is the stock-based compensation awarded to employees.

SBC rose 21% YOY and is slightly worrying in an otherwise stellar company. This method of compensation only works when the stock is rising and is a major issue for new Facebook (FB) hires who will prefer cash over its burnt-out share price.

If Workday doesn’t whet your appetite, then how about sampling a main dish of ServiceNow.

This company completes technology service management tasks offering a centralized service catalog for workers to request technology services or information about applications and processes that are being used in the system.

Admirably, this software helps IT workers fix IT system problems which in this day and age is useful considering the bottleneck of chaos many tech and non-tech companies face.

And more often than not, the chaos inundates the in-house IT departments causing the whole business to go offline.

Putting out digital fires is a perpetual business that will never flame out.

As websites and enterprise systems become more complicated, a bombardment of errors are prone to crop up and instant remedies are crucial to carrying out businesses in a time sensitive manner.

Even ask the best tech company in the universe Amazon (AMZN), whose move off Oracle’s (ORCL) database software was the ultimate reason for a serious outage in one of its biggest warehouses on this past Amazon Prime Day, according to Amazon’s internal documents.

The faux paux underscores the hurdles Amazon and other companies could face as they seek to move completely off the Oracle legacy database software whose development has stayed relatively stagnant for a generation.

The slipup was minutes and snowballed into excruciating hours on Amazon Prime Day resulting in over 15,000 delayed packages and roughly $90,000 in wasted labor costs.

Crikey!

These numbers didn’t even consider the wasted man-hours spent by developers troubleshooting and solving the errors or any potential lost sales.

When these mammoth tech giants are running at an incredible scale, a small blip can result in job losses, lost revenue, lost time, a slew of IT engineer sackings, and for some smaller companies, an existential crisis.

The large-scale acts as a powerful multiplier to the lost resources and cost, and as you can see with the Amazon debacle, a few hours can make or break a developer’s career.

Fortunately, IT budgets are higher up the food chain than human resource budgets while more than inching up every year. This is the main reason why I believe ServiceNow will outperform Workday.

The proof is in the pudding and when I scrutinize various metrics, the truth is filtered out.

ServiceNow’s quarterly growth rate is 35% which is higher than Workday’s who slipped back to 28% last quarter even though the 3-year growth rate is in the mid-30%.

Put mildly, accelerating sales growth is better than decelerating sales growth.

Both companies have a market cap in the low $30 billion and almost identical annual sales in the $2 billion range.

However, ServiceNow presides over significantly higher quarterly profit margins than Workday and will achieve profitability sooner than Workday.

In short, Workday loses more money than ServiceNow.

I believe in the underlying thesis of HR modernization underpinning Workday’s rapidly growing revenue and this secular trend is here to stay.

But I much rather put my hard-earned money on a company tied to IT modernization which is imminent and harder to put on the backburner because of its strategic position at the forefront of the tech curve.

HR CAN be put on the backburner and kept analog longer, and as the economy inches closer to a recession, this expense will be shifted further away from greener pastures supported by the fact that companies decelerate hiring new talent in poor economic environments.

To wrap it up, I do believe ServiceNow is the Burmese python consuming a cow, but that doesn’t mean I am bearish on Workday.

Workday will flourish, just not as much on a relative basis as ServiceNow.

Effectively, these stocks are well placed to move higher even after the violent moves upward this year. As the economic cycle moves further into the late innings, the importance of cloud-based software companies will become magnified further.

As for the software week at the Mad Hedge Technology letter, these solid five picks will offer deep insight into one of the most compelling parts of the internet sector.

As many observers have found out, not all tech firms are created equal and that is made even trickier with the existence of the vaunted FANGs who are the real Burmese python in the current tech landscape.

September 6, 2018

Tech Letter

Mad Hedge Technology Letter
September 6, 2018
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:
(THE SMART PLAYS IN FINTECH),
(SQ), (PYPL), (JPM), (COF), (WFC), (BAC),
(MGI), (GRUB), (BABA), (NFLX)

The Smart Plays in Fintech

Tech Letter

Fintech is all the rage now, and it’s time for investors to grab a piece of the action.

The tech sectors’ stellar performance in 2018 is a little taste of things to come as every industry forcibly pushes toward software and artificial intelligence to enhance products and services.

Bull markets don’t die of old age and some of these tech stalwarts are truly defying gravity.

The fintech sector is no exception.

Square (SQ) led by tech visionary Jack Dorsey has been a favorite of the Mad Hedge Technology Letter practically from the newsletter’s inception.

But another company has caught my eye that most of you already know about – PayPal (PYPL).

PayPal, a digital payments company, has extraordinary core drivers and a splendid growth trajectory.

Its arsenal of services includes digital wallets, money transfers, P2P payments, and credit cards.

It also has Venmo.

Venmo, a digital payment app, is the strongest growth lever in PayPal’s umbrella of assets right now, and was the first meaningful digital payment app in America.

It was established by Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail, who were roommates at the University of Pennsylvania, and the company was bought out by PayPal for $800 million in 2014, marking a new chapter in PayPal’s evolution.

Funny enough, Venmo’s original use was to buy mp3 formatted songs via email in 2009.

Venmo is wildly popular with tech savvy millennials. A brief survey conducted illustrates how fashionable Venmo is by recording higher user statistics than Apple Pay.

The app is commonly used for ordering pizza through Uber Eats or Grubhub (GRUB), or even shelling out for monthly rent.

If you want to stir up your imagination even more, Venmo has a prominent social feed where users can view other Venmo users’ purchases.

Financial models suggest Venmo could contribute $300 million to the PayPal top line in 2021. If Venmo executes perfectly, revenue could surpass the $1 billion mark in 2021, with much higher operating margins than PayPal’s core products.

Even though management declines to speak specifically about Venmo, the dialogue in the earnings call usually provides some color into what is going on underneath the hood.

Xoom, a digital remittance distributor app with offices in San Francisco and Guatemala City owned by PayPal, along with Venmo grew payment volume by 50% YOY, surging to $33 billion annually.

Of that $33 billion in volume, $19 billion was contributed by Venmo and Xoom chipped in with $14 billion.

More than 60,000 new merchants joined PayPal’s array of platforms, adding up to more than 19.5 million total merchants.

All in all, PayPal locked in $3.86 billion of sales last quarter, which was a 23% YOY jump in revenue, at a time where widespread acceptance of fintech platforms is brisk.

PayPal raised its end-of-year forecast and rewarded shareholders with authorization of a $10 billion buyback.

Upward margin expansion, expanding market share, multiple revenue stream, and untapped pricing power is the recipe to PayPal’s meteoric rise.

PayPal’s share price has climbed higher from a base of $73 at the beginning of the year to an all-time high of more than $90.

Offering more proof fintech is alive and kicking is Jack Dorsey’s Square’s dizzying rise of more than 200% YOY in its share price.

The company is exceeding all revenue growth expectations and is poised to ramp up subscription revenue.

As with the Venmo app, Square’s Cash app has unrealized potential and will be one of the outperforming profit drivers going forward.

Square hopes to be the one-stop-shop for all types of digital payment needs including consumer finance, equity purchases, possibly international transfers, and cryptocurrency.

All of this is happening amid a robust secular story that could have seen traditional banks swept into the dustbin of history.

Rewind a few years ago, perusing the data about the movement to digital payments must have frightened the living daylights out of the executives from major Wall Street mainstays.

Digital wallets assertive migration into mainstream money payment services could have detached traditional banks’ core businesses.

Slogging your way to a physical bank to put in a wire transfer was not appealing.

Archaic methods of business are painful to see, and traditional banks were still operating this way as of 2015.

Time is money and technology has crashed the traditional waiting time to almost zero.

The way these tech companies operate is simple.

They compete to hire a hoard of advanced computer developers or shortcut the process using the time-honored tradition of poaching the competition’s best talent.

Then snatch market share at all costs and grow like crazy.

Banks badly needed introducing some functions to their array of services such as linking with third-party payment APIs to facilitate online payments and enabling cross-platform digital payments.

Other functions such as establishing modern peer-to-peer payment systems or adopting QR code technology that are wildly popular in East Asia could enhance optionality as well.

These are several instruments they could have amalgamated into their arsenal of fintech technology that could have freshened up these dinosaur institutions.

Harmonizing banking tasks with mobile functionality was fast coming and would be the standard.

Anyone not on board would sink like the Titanic.

Ultimately, banking institutions needed to up their game and acquire one of these digital wallet processors or watch from the sidelines.

They chose the former when a consortium called Early Warning Services (EWS) jointly created by behemoth American banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Capital One (COF), Bank of America (BAC), and Wells Fargo (WFC) to “prevent fraud and reduce detection risk” made a game-changing decision.

(EWS) acquired digital payment app Zelle in 2016, and this was its aggressive response to Square Cash and PayPal’s Venmo.

Results have been nothing short of breathtaking.

Leveraging the embedded base of existing banking relationships, Zelle took off like a scalded chimp and never looked back.

In a blink of an eye, Zelle had already signed up more than 30 banks and over 100 financial institutions to its platform.

Banks couldn’t bear being left out of the fintech party.

With hearty conviction, Zelle is signing up users at a pace of 100,000 per day, and the volume of payments in 2017 eclipsed $75 billion.

Zelle projects to expand more than 73% in 2018, integrating 27.4 million new accounts in the U.S., head and shoulders above Venmo’s 22.9 million and Square Cash due to add 9.5 million more users.

Make no bones about it, Zelle was in prime position to convert existing relationships into digital converts. The banks that do not have an interest in Zelle have an uphill climb to stay relevant.

The United States is rather late to this secular growth story. That being said, already 57% of Americans have used a mobile wallet at least once in their lives.

Innovative ideas bring supporters galore and even more adoptees.

That is why the strong pivot into technological enhanced ideas bear unlimited fruit.

Using a mobile platform to just open an app then send funds within a split second with minimal costs is appealing for the Netflix (NFLX) crazed generation that can hardly get off the couch.

Ironically, it’s those in the emerging parts of the world leading this fintech revolution by skipping the traditional banking experience completely and downloading digital wallet apps on their mobile devices.

It’s entirely realistic that some fresh-faced youth have never been present at a physical banking branch before in India or China.

Download an app and your fiscal life commences. Period.

The volume of funds passing through the arteries of Chinese digital wallet apps surpassed $15 trillion in 2017.

And by 2021, 79.3% of the Chinese population are projected to use digital wallets as their main source of splurging Chinese yuan.

America lags a country mile behind China, but the Chinese progress has offered American tech companies a crystal-clear blueprint to springboard digital payment initiatives.

Chinese state banks are already starting to become marginalized, and the Wall Street banks are not immune to the same fate.

Devoid of a digital strategy will be a death knell to certain banking institutions.

Compare the pace of adoption and some must question why American adoption is tardy to a fault.

Highlighting the lackadaisical pace of American fintech integration was Alibaba’s (BABA) smash-and-grab attempt at MoneyGram International Inc. (MGI), as it sought to gain a foothold into the American fintech market.

The attempt was rebuffed by the federal government.

The nascent state of the digital payment world in America must alarm Silicon Valley experts. And the run-up in Square and PayPal includes calculated bets that these two standouts will leapfrog into the future with guns blazing along with Zelle.

The parabolic nature of Square’s mystifying gap up means that a moderate pullback is warranted to put capital to work in this name.

Investors should wait for a timely entry point into PayPal as well.

These two stocks have overextended themselves.

As the fintech pie extrapolates, there will be multiple victors, and these victors are already taking shape in the form of Zelle, PayPal, and Square.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Quote of the Day

“In the not-too-distant future, commerce is just going to be commerce. It won't be online commerce or offline commerce. It's just going to be commerce. And that will happen because of the phone,” – said CEO of PayPal Dan Schulman.

June 8, 2018

Diary, Newsletter

Global Market Comments
June 8, 2018
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:
(LAST CHANCE TO ATTEND THE TUESDAY, JUNE 12, 2018,
NEW ORLEANS, LA, GLOBAL STRATEGY LUNCHEON),
(JUNE 6 BIWEEKLY STRATEGY WEBINAR Q&A),
(TLT), (TTT), (TBT), (AMLP), (IBB),
(SPY), (SDS), (SH), (GS), (BAC)

June 6 Biweekly Strategy Webinar Q&A

Diary, Newsletter

Below please find subscribers' Q&A for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader June 6 Global Strategy Webinar with my guest and co-host Bill Davis of the Mad Day Trader.

As usual, every asset class long and short was covered. You are certainly an inquisitive lot, and keep those questions coming!

Q: What does the coming Kim Jong-un summit with North Korea mean for the market?

A: It means absolutely nothing for the market. The entire North Korean threat has been wildly exaggerated as a distraction from the chaos in Washington. So, you may get a one- or two-day rally if it's successful. If it's not expect a one- or two-day sell-off, but no more. Whatever North Korea agrees to, we will not see any follow through; they won't buy the Libyan model of denuclearizing North Korea for fear of their leader meeting the same end as Libya's Khadafy (i.e. being hunted and shot in a storm drain.) North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons.

Q: What do you do at market tops?

A: Well, hopefully if you're reading this letter you're long up the wazoo, so you sell everything you have. Then, wait for a double top in the market (which is clear as day) and falling volume. You start looking at things like the ProShares Ultra Short S&P 500 ETF (SDS). That's the -2X version (there's the (SH), which is the -1X short S&P 500) and you just start buying outright puts on a lot of different things, particularly the overbought sectors of the market, which are generally pretty obvious. It's also good to look for a stock that has made a new high and has negative money flow.

Q: Why are the banks doing so poorly?

A: I believe they fully discounted all of this year's interest rate hikes last year when the stocks nearly doubled. We just talked about a technical setup; Goldman Sachs (GS), Bank of America (BAC), and other stocks had those bear setups. At this point, I believe they're coming down to a place of support and probably getting a decent dead cat bounce. They've had their sell-off, they had their run, and it was triggered by one of the best technical short setup patterns you'll see.

Q: Would you buy financials here?

A: Absolutely not. It's unclear why they're doing so badly, but I would not buy it with anyone's money. Their earnings growth is nowhere what you see with technology stocks.

Q: Is crude oil poised for the next leg up?

A: No, it's not. The oil game may be over if they rush to overproduce once again. It's clearly been artificially boosted to get the Saudi Aramco IPO done. After the end of the quota system, you can get oil back down to the $50s easily. I don't want to touch it here; if anything, I'm more inclined to buy it if we get down to the $50s, which would essentially be the February low.

Q: Is the U.S. dollar overbought here?

A: Yes. The dollar has had a great run all year, which is evident from the rising interest rates. It's done a 10% move up in a fairly short time, which is a lot for the foreign exchange market. It's way overbought; you could easily get a round of profit taking in the dollar, either going into or right after the next Fed interest rate hike in two weeks. I'm staying away from the currencies. There are too many better fish to fry in the equities.

Q: Can you expect Tech to keep going up after this next run?

A: Yes, I expect us to break out to a new high and give back some ground in a retest of the old high. The old high will then hold and then I expect a sort of slow grind up. Tech could well go up for the rest of 2018.

Q: If the S&P 500 is in a trading range, would you sell any rally?

A: Yes, but I'm going to wait for the rally to come to me; I'm not going to reach for any marginal trades. When the (SPY) gets to $280, I'll be looking very closely at the $285-$290 vertical bear put spread one or two months out. So, that peak should hold for the summer and you can make a good 25%-30% on that kind of spread.

Q: Would you buy Biotech here?

A: Yes, the chart setup here is looking very positive, and it's natural for people to rotate out of Tech to Biotech because the earnings growth is so dramatic. That's why I sent out a Trade Alert to buy the NASDAQ Biotechnology ETF (IBB) yesterday. They have been unfairly held back by fears of drug pricing regulation, which has nothing to do with biotech, but it affects their share prices anyway. But so far, it has been all talk from Trump and no action. I think he's busy with North Korea and the trade wars anyway.

Q: My custodian won't let me sell short the United States Treasury Bond Fund (TLT) so I bought the ProShares Ultra Pro Short 20+ Treasury Fund (TTT). Is that alright?

A: You definitely want to be short the Treasury bonds market for the next several years going forward, so you have the right idea. If the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond yield jumps from 2.95% today to 4% in a year as I expect, that takes the (TLT) down from $119 to $97. If you can't make money shorting bonds in that environment you should consider another line of work.

The problem with these 3X leveraged funds is that the cost of carry is very high. In the case of the (TTT) it is three times the 3.0% 10-year bond coupon you are shorting plus a 1% management fee for a total of 10% a year. For that reason, the 3X funds are really only good for day trading. You run into a similar problem with the 2X (TBT). This is why I use non-leveraged put spreads or outright puts for this asset class.

Q: Why are we seeing strength in the Alerian master limited partnership (AMLP) when oil prices are falling, and interest rates are rising? Shouldn't it be going the other way?

A: How about more buyers than sellers? There are so many retirees out there desperate for yield they will take on inordinate amounts of risk to get it. With an 8.0% dividend yield you always have an underlying bid for this ETF. That's why we have been recommending this since April. An 8% dividend can cover up a lot of sins, even when interest rates are rising and oil prices are falling. Also, the U.S. is infrastructure constrained now that production is approaching 11 million barrels a day. That is great for the kind of energy projects (AMLP) finances.

Q: What's the next support price for NVIDIA (NVDA)?

A: With the stock going straight up there is little need for support. Our 2018 target is $300. If you recall, we have been recommending this cutting-edge GPU manufacturer since $68, and people have made fortunes. Those who bought long dated deep out-of-the-money leaps $100 out made 1,000% on this Trade Alert 18 months ago. That said, the 200-day moving average at $213 looks rock solid.

Good luck and good trading to all.

John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader

A Chat With Berkshire Hathaway?s Warren Buffett

Diary, Newsletter

Sometime in the early 1970?s, a friend of mine said I should take a look at a stock named Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA) run by a young stud named Warren Buffett.

I thought, ?Why the hell should I invest in a company that makes sheets??

After all, the American textile industry was in the middle of a long trek toward extinction that began in the 1920?s, and was only briefly interrupted by the hyper prosperity of WWII. The industry?s travails were simply an outcome of ever rising US standards of living, which pushed wages, and therefore costs, up.

It turns out that Warren Buffett made a lot more than sheets. However, he is not a young stud anymore, just an old one, like me.

Since then, Warren?s annual letter to investors has been an absolute ?must read? for me when it is published every spring.

It has been edited for the past half century by my friend, Carol Loomis, who just retired after a 60-year career with Fortune magazine. (I never wrote for them because their freelance rates were lousy).

Witty, insightful, and downright funny, I view it as a cross between a Harvard Business School seminar and a Berkeley anti establishment demonstration. You will find me lifting from it my ?Quotes of the Day? for the daily newsletter over the next several issues. There are some real zingers.

And what a year it has been!

Berkshire?s gain in net worth was $18.3 billion, which increased the share value by 8.3%, and today, the market capitalization stands at an impressive $343.4 billion. (Sorry Warren, but I clocked 30% last year, eat your heart out).

The shares are not for small timers, as one now costs $214,801, and no, they don?t sell half shares. This compares to a 1965 per share market value of $23.80, and is why the media are always going gaga over Warren Buffett.

If you?re lazy and don?t want to do the math, that works out to a compound annualized return of an eye popping 21.6%. This is why guessing what Warren is going to do next has become a major cottage industry (Progressive Insurance anyone?).

Warren brought in these numbers despite the fact that its largest non-insurance subsidiary, the old Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad (BNSF) suffered an awful year.

Extensive upgrades under construction and terrible winter weather disrupted service, causing the railroad to lose market share to rival Union Pacific (UNP).

I was kind of pissed when Warren bought BNSF in 2009 for a blockbuster $44 billion, as it was long my favorite trading vehicles for the sector. Since then, its book value has doubled. Typical Warren.

Buffett plans to fix the railroad?s current problems with $6 billion in new capital investment this year, one of the largest single capital investments in American history. Warren isn?t doing anything small these days.

Buffett also got a hickey from his investment in UK supermarket chain Tesco, which ran up a $444 million loss for Berkshire in 2014. Warren admits he was too slow in getting out of the shares, a rare move for the Oracle of Omaha, who rarely sells anything (which avoids capital gains taxes).

Warren increased his investment in all of his ?Big Four? holdings, American Express (AXP), Coca-Cola (KO), IBM (IBM), and Wells Fargo (WFC).

In addition, Berkshire owns options on Bank of America (BAC) stock, which have a current exercise value of $12.5 billion (purchased the day after the Mad Hedge Fund Trader issued a Trade Alert on said stock for an instant 300% gain on the options).

The secret to understanding Buffett picks over the years is that cash flow is king.

This means that he has never participated in the many technology booms over the decades, or fads of any other description, for that matter.

He says this is because he will never buy a business he doesn?t intrinsically understand, and they didn?t offer computer programming as an elective in high school during the Great Depression.

No doubt this has lowered his potential returns, but with the benefit of much lower volatility.

That makes his position in (IBM) a bit of a mystery, the worst performing Dow stock of the past two years. I would much rather own Apple (AAPL) myself, which also boasts great cash flow, and even a dividend these days (with a 1.50% yield).

Warren will be the first to admit that even he makes mistakes, sometimes, disastrous ones. He cites his worst one ever as a perfect example, his purchase of Dexter Shoes for $433 million in 1993. This was right before China entered the shoe business as a major competitor.

Not only did the company quickly go under, he exponentially compounded the error through buying the firm with an exchange of Berkshire Hathaway stock, which is now worth a staggering $5.7 billion.

Ouch, and ouch again!

Warren has also been mostly missing in action on the international front, believing that the mother load of investment opportunities runs through the US, and that its best days lie ahead. I believe the same.

Still, he has dipped his toe in foreign waters from time to time, and I was sometimes quick to jump on his coattails. A favorite of mine was his purchase of 10% of Chinese electric car factory BYD (BYDDF) in 2009, where I have captured a few doubles over the years.

Buffett expounds at great length the attractions of the insurance industry, which today remains the core of his business. For payment of a premium up front, the buyers of insurance policies receive a mere promise to perform in the future, sometimes as much as a half century off.

In the meantime, Warren can invest the money any way he wants. The model has been a real printing press for Buffett since he took over his first insurer in 1951, GEICO.

Much of the letter promotes the upcoming shareholders annual meeting, known as the ?Woodstock of Capitalism?.

There, the conglomerate?s many products will be for sale, including, Justin Boots (I have a pair), the gecko from GEICO (which insures my Tesla S-1), and See?s Candies (a Christmas addiction, love the peanut brittle!).

There, visitors can try their hand at Ping-Pong against Ariel Hsing, a 2012 American Olympic Team member, after Bill Gates and Buffett wear her down first.

They can try their hand against a national bridge champion (don?t play for money). And then there is the newspaper-throwing contest (Buffett?s first gainful employment).

Some 40,000 descend on remote Omaha for the firm?s annual event. All flights to the city are booked well in advance, with fares up to triple normal rates.

Hotels sell out too, and many now charge three-day minimums (after Warren, what is there to do in Omaha for two more days other than to visit PayPal?s technical support?). Buffett recommends Airbnb as a low budget option (for the single shareholders?).

I was amazed to learn that Berkshire files a wrist breaking 24,100-page Federal tax return (and I thought mine was bad!). Add to this a mind numbing 3,400 separate state tax returns.

Overall, Berkshire holdings account for more than 3% of the total US gross domestic product, but a far lesser share of the government?s total tax revenues, thanks to careful planning.

Buffett ends his letter by advertising for new acquisitions and listing his criteria. They include:

(1) ?Large purchases (at least $75 million of pre-tax earnings unless the business will fit into one of our existing units),

(2) ?Demonstrated consistent earning power (future projections are of no interest to us, nor are ?turnaround? situations),

(3) ?Businesses earning good returns on equity while employing little or no debt,

(4) Managemen
t in place (we can?t supply it),

(5) Simple businesses (if there?s lots of technology, we won?t understand it),

(6) An offering price (we don?t want to waste our time or that of the seller by talking, even preliminarily, about a transaction when price is unknown).

Let me know if you have any offers.

To read the entire history of Warren Buffett?s prescient letters, please click here: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.htm.