Mad Hedge Technology Letter
April 29, 2022
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(TELADOC IMPLODES)
(ARKK), (SARK), (TDOC), (ROKU), (SHOP), (ZM)
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
April 29, 2022
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(TELADOC IMPLODES)
(ARKK), (SARK), (TDOC), (ROKU), (SHOP), (ZM)
The Cathie Wood circus keeps making new lows as digital doctor platform Teladoc (TDOC) recorded the biggest drop in shares since its IPO.
At one point, shares were down 45% and this was the day after buying another tranche of over $200 million worth of shares before the earnings came out.
TDOC was a pandemic darling and since then, the stock has done nothing but dive lower.
There is even an inverse ETF to jump on the anti-Cathie Wood bandwagon called Tuttle Capital Short Innovation ETF (SARK).
SARK is almost up 100% year to date showing that as market conditions distort, traders must distort with them.
To stay long tech growth is like throwing money off an apartment balcony.
The lack of understanding Cathie Woods exhibits about the stock market is hard to fathom.
Her go-to excuse is that others “aren’t doing the research.”
We were smack dab in a low-rate environment for a decade when even marginal tech companies would get the benefit of the doubt.
As the goalposts have moved and narrowed, Wood is still sticking to her 5-year time horizon and still explaining to investors that other analysts “aren’t doing their homework.”
This really is a case of the emperor having no clothes if I have ever seen it.
To add insult to injury, she has gone on public television to speak about how she believes the global economy is experiencing deflationary pressures.
No matter what changes to the trading environment, she sticks to her narrow story of deflation and her 5-year time horizon while her investors lose money.
If that’s not enough, she blames the market for not understanding her ARKK fund which is down more than 50% this year.
She claims that many people are “devaluing innovation” and just do not understand innovation like she does.
With an unrelenting belief in her growth strategy, miraculously, another $1.5 billion of inflows have juiced up her fund in 2022.
There are many out there that still think she is a great money manager after her one call of Tesla going up was correct.
Investors have chosen to back her further even with mounting losses and that has now backfired as ETF ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) appears as if the market has not recognized how smart Cathie Wood is.
ARKK is Teladoc’s largest shareholder with a 12% stake worth.
It’s not just TDOC, but other investments like Roku (ROKU), Zoom Video Communications (ZM), and Shopify (SHOP) whose shares have experienced cataclysmic meltdowns of epic proportions.
Why did TDOC shares perform so poorly?
Higher advertising expenses in the mental health market, as well as an “elongated sales cycle” in chronic conditions as employers and providers of healthcare plans evaluate strategies.
TDOC’s services aren’t as good as first thought.
TDOC also took a $6.6 billion charge for impairment of goodwill, a non-cash charge the company excluded from its adjusted results.
The competition also has increased significantly and many of these first-move advantages are not holding up like they used to in tech.
The recent performance has been met with a bevy of analyst downgrades and tech growth as a sub-sector will have a hard time recovering until a lower interest rate sentiment comes back to sweep up the market.
Still, not a peep out of Cathie Wood on modifying her controversial strategies and that’s when we are staring down a barrel of multiple 50 basis point interest rate rises.
She was photographed partying in the Bahamas at some beach parties the day before the TDOC debacle, apparently, she isn’t bothered that much by her followers losing generation wealth.
If readers want to get back into tech growth after an easing of credit conditions, avoid buying ARKK and just buy a collection of strong tech growth yourself.
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.” – Said Co-Founder of Microsoft Bill Gates
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
April 27, 2022
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(GOOGLE LAYS AN EGG)
(GOOGL), (TIKTOK), (NFLX), (FB)
It’s not that easy to make money in big tech these days – that is what the big takeaway was with the Google (GOOGL) or Alphabet earnings report that came out after the close yesterday.
The glory years are long gone.
First, it was almost like Groundhog Day with the Netflix-like streaming catastrophe that has now victimized yet another tech company.
YouTube competes differently with other streamers and is reliant on the digital ad model which is why an ad shows every 10 seconds when we watch YouTube.
I know it’s annoying but that’s how they grow revenue, and the blame was squarely attributed to China’s TikTok which is a short-form video platform eating everyone else’s lunch.
YouTube led all platforms in the first quarter of 2022 when respondents were asked which platform they used most often for mobile video, but YouTube dropped to 35% of respondents vs. 45% in the first quarter of 2021 while TikTok was #2 with 22%.
Besides, YouTube is literally entertainment, and with the health situation normalized again and the weather heating up, don’t blame others for grabbing a beer or two with their friends whom they haven’t seen for ages.
That clearly doesn’t help the YouTube ad revenue when people are out and about.
Google will need to deal with this TikTok problem because it’s real and it’s not disappearing anytime soon.
Google has a TikTok copy called YouTube Shorts and it’s not going that well if we compare it to TikTok which has surged to well over 1 billion subscribers.
If management allows the platform to get stale, it could become another dying tech company like Facebook.
The sum of the parts wasn’t particularly impressive either and that is weird to say based on Google’s history of outperformance.
Investors almost never see them miss on the top and bottom line and the EPS miss was not even close.
Things are getting more expensive for all of us, and Google just laid bare what we knew it our guts.
Just look at their research and development spend, it went from $7.5 billion to $9.1 billion which is a $1.6 billion increase in nominal spend.
They are also getting less revenue from Google Play which lowered developer fees to 15% or less for 99% of apps, down from 30% previously.
The bright spots were search advertising and cloud businesses.
Google Cloud has been growing quickly, but still remains unprofitable. It grew sales 43% for the first quarter to reach $5.8 billion, which was about in line with expectations. However, operating losses were wider than expected at $931 million.
Investing aggressively in the cloud is Google’s silver bullet, and that’s clearly having an impact in terms of the free cash flow numbers as well as the higher expenses and the margin compression we’re seeing not only in that segment but in the broader business.
Big Tech is decelerating, and external forces are magnifying the weakness in growth.
I do believe much of the negativity has been priced into GOOGL’s stock and this isn’t the case of a broken business model like Netflix (NFLX) or Facebook (FB).
I believe GOOGL shares will have a positive second half of the year.
“There are two equalizers in life: the Internet and education.” – Said Former CEO of Cisco John Chambers
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
April 25, 2022
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(HIGH STAKES OF TECH EARNINGS)
(AAPL), (MSFT), (AMZN), (NFLX), (FB)
We get a deeper view into the current state of the tech market with the tech behemoths reporting this week.
I don’t expect a Netflix shocker, but the market doesn’t need one for tech stocks to trend lower.
Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Apple earnings are on deck at a time when $30 billion of outflows were sucked out of the equity market in the past 2 weeks.
As the falling knife dips lower, many traders are looking out for a decent counter-trend rally, I am too, but you better sell the rip as well. So we stay in a no man’s land of individual stock picking at a time when the garden variety of blasé indexing is now dead.
Another paradigm shift that needs to be addressed is the death of the FAANGs.
The writing has been on the wall for quite some time with Meta or Facebook signaling to the outside world that its business model is broken and news of today of Apple’s factory in Kunshan, China ordered for covid closure is a bad omen for Apple earnings.
At a broader level, Head of the IMF Kristalina Georgieva today suggested sovereign debt defaults are coming down the pipeline which means the IMF will most likely construct a rescue deal that ends in understanding why the national debt mattered.
The world continues this sovereign crisis in all emerging corners of the world from Sri Lanka and Turkey because when the US Fed raises rates, it raises rates on the whole world.
Georgieva also said that Ukraine needs $5 billion per month for the Ukraine economy to survive and that economy is already down more than 50% year to date.
The continuing of debt plugging around the world doesn’t necessarily breed confidence in tech stocks as this industry is heavily reliant on globalization working and cheap rates.
Many sovereigns are starting to freak out about the debt dilemma as we see Japan’s yen forge ahead to 130 to $1 USD.
It appears that we are getting a temporary reprieve in oil and fertilizer stocks because China is so locked down that demand destruction will improve the balance of supply and demand.
Clearly, many of these external factors are unsustainable, and yet they are deeply affecting the Nasdaq index.
The rise in interest rates will have many unintended consequences and the one that matters most for us is delivering higher financing costs to the tech sector.
Without the globalization tailwinds, investors must ditch the double and triple standards of before and solely focus on the fundamentals of a tech firm.
What a thought!
Now that tech firms are accountable for their own performance, we will finally see who can punch above their weight.
Specifically, issues in dire need of netting out are the cloud, enterprise, and the state of the American consumer.
FAANG + Microsoft have lost more than $2.1 trillion in combined market value between them since December, representing nearly half of the S&P 500’s $4.4trn loss over the same period.
This has left five of the six in bear market territory with falls of more than 20%, with Apple the sole exception.
I am expecting strong numbers from Microsoft and Apple as part of branching out in the tech story, where software, semiconductors, cyber security, and product-driven names such as Apple are on the winners’ side of the ongoing digital transformation.
Yet, I believe Microsoft and Apple will use this as a convenient time to guide weak which won’t help the stock prices.
It appears as many of the strong tech performances have been met with giant selloffs and management is acutely aware of that.
Before, liquidity was what mattered and now that has tremendously reversed and the quality of earnings matters more than ever at this point.
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge," said the late Professor Stephen Hawking.
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
April 22, 2022
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE FALLOUT FROM IBUYING)
(Z)
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