Mad Hedge Technology Letter
March 9, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(WHY ZOOM HAS BEEN ZOOMING)
(ZM), (VMW), (JNJ), ($COMPQ)
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
March 9, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(WHY ZOOM HAS BEEN ZOOMING)
(ZM), (VMW), (JNJ), ($COMPQ)
One man's heaven is another man's hell.
Zoom Video Communications (ZM) is the hero of video conferencing software.
Few companies are navigating the coronavirus situation better than Zoom. Their better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings and forecast is a great omen for the coronavirus driving future demand for the company’s remote-work tools.
Even without the coronavirus, the company is doing spectacularly.
(ZM) delivers best in show teleconferencing services including video meetings, voice, webinars and chat across desktop and mobile devices, and has been the beneficiary of the dreaded coronavirus that has quarantined workers forcing them to rely on Zoom’s video app tools.
The virus has bolted by the 100,000 customer mark with at least 3,500 Corona deaths.
The panic has been overblown, and the same hysteria has seeped into the broader tech market triggering deep selloffs in almost every tech company.
The elevated awareness and adoption of the company’s video conferencing platform will allow the company to post an even better performance next quarter.
The migration into the company’s free app remains robust and it is unclear whether those users can be converted to paying ones. However, paid growth is still hitting on all cylinders.
Revenue crushed it at 78% to $188.3 million from $105.8 million a year ago.
In total, sales in 2019 were $622.7 million, up 88% year-over-year.
Zoom Communications is attracting more influential customers with 81,900 accounts with at least 10 employees, a 61% uptrend from the past year.
VMware Inc. (VMW) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) are two of Zoom’s largest accounts.
Zoom's first-quarter revenue guidance was strong as well predicting between $199 million and $201 million.
Another growth lever will be the mobile segment which has signed up more than 2,900 accounts with more than 10 employees in its first year after launch and will shortly be available in 18 countries.
Total operating margins surpassed expectation of 10%, by more than doubling, to 20.4%.
Ultimately, Zoom's robust Q4 results and guidance underline the company's smooth pathway to elevated revenue drivers as the world goes into pandemic mode because of Covid-19.
It was somewhat underwhelming that management cited a limited revenue benefit from the situation with a go-forward increase in costs as usage increases.
That could have been sorted out more delicately and keeping costs down is one of management’s responsibilities.
The positives still outweigh any minor negatives as the company has been able to capitalize by seizing mind share and expanding the funnel.
Zoom Communications has not been able to escape the recent volatility in shares as the 12% boost from a positive earnings report was met with a 13% haircut the following day as the broader Nasdaq was pummeled.
The Covid-19 virus is delivering agony to investors as the swings are simply hard to trade in and out of.
Making it even more difficult is fogging clarity breeding uncertainty stoking wild risk-off moves even when the central bank announced an emergency half-point rate cut.
The current issue is that short term, markets can behave as irrational as ever and trading algorithms are programmed to digest headlines by not only the volume but the potency and relevancy as well.
If every news wire sent out a story that free money was dropping from the sky, the market would be up 10% irrespective of whether it is true or not.
That is the world we live in where over 85% of the trading decisions and volume are executed by automated software and the exaggeration doesn’t discriminate in which direction it trends in.
So, we are stuck in this negative feedback loop where national headlines are almost entirely concentrated on the coronavirus and that is mainly the data that is fed into short-term trading algorithms.
Unfortunately, the tech market weakness is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy and new headlines of Northern Italy being quarantined and New York announcing a state of emergency is poised to be the next catalyst for a volatile upcoming trading week ahead.
Short-term traders need to understand that this isn’t just a “buy the dip” event and the deep in the money call spreads that had cushions of 8-10% were blown out in just a few days.
Long term investors should be using every dramatic selloff to add slightly to their positions incrementally lowering their cost basis.
It is hard to know when the coronavirus phenomenon will pass by but at the speed in which we are trending, U.S. school cancelations and further cities and states announcing highly negative events are in the pipeline for next week.
The bottoming event could eventually come in the form of US Corona cases topping 10,000 or cancelling the Olympics in Tokyo, but until then, the negative health headlines appear to be the new normal for the short-term and until we are fully washed out.
“A founder is not a job, it's a role, an attitude.” – Said Founder and CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
March 6, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(HERE’S A BIG TECH CORONA PLAY)
(NUAN), (VEEV)
I love the cloud, and the health cloud is the ultimate coronavirus equalizer.
I am also on record saying that the 2 cloud sub-sectors that will be lights out in 2020 are the health cloud and network security cloud.
I believe Veeva Systems (VEEV) is one example of a cloud play that many long-term investors need to add before it gets too expensive.
I have another health cloud play for you up my sleeve as well.
While many investors were lamenting the coronavirus meltdown in tech shares, the same cannot be said for Nuance Communications, Inc. (NUAN), who seek to transform patient care with AI‑powered solutions for physicians, radiologists, and hospitals.
This company has famed scientist Ray Kurzweil's fingerprints all over it.
In 1974, Raymond Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. to develop the first omni-font optical character-recognition system – a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font.
In 1980, Kurzweil sold this company to Xerox, later becoming known as Xerox Imaging Systems (XIS), and later ScanSoft which merged with Nuance in 2005.
Healthcare is a focus for the company who on their webpage describes their mission as a company that “empowers organizations to unlock value and meaning in the millions of interactions that happen every day.”
They also provide their A.I. services to other industries such as financial, transportation, telecommunications, and government.
Their crown jewel is the Nuance Dragon Medical One cloud-based platform and it just expanded its access to France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Integrated within the electronic health record (EHR), Dragon Medical One offers physicians the ability to capture a patient’s complete snapshot at the point of care in their own local language – reducing administrative workloads while improving documentation quality and care.
Nuance delivers intelligent systems that aid a more natural and insightful approach to clinical documentation, freeing clinicians to spend more time caring for patients.
Nuance healthcare solutions enhance and communicate more than 300 million patient stories each year, helping more than 500,000 clinicians in 10,000 global healthcare organizations to drive meaningful clinical and financial outcomes.
Nuance’s award-winning clinical speech recognition, medical transcription, CDI, coding, quality, and medical imaging solutions offer a unique end-product to medical professionals and patients.
Its intelligent voice technology helps physicians produce clinical documentation up to 45% and capture up to 20% more relevant data using personalized A.I. tools.
Clinicians simply open the application, select the section of documentation, and start speaking to update the EHR.
Doctors recognized a dramatic improvement in clinic letter turnaround times since integrating with the Dragon Medical One platform describing the process as efficient and improving overall patient experience.
Nuance has accelerated the adoption of the electronic paper records system maximizing resources by forcing medical records to go entirely digital.
The demand for AI-powered documentation solutions worldwide is agnostic to location - physicians face the same headaches of administrative workloads and have the same dire need for tools that help them focus on providing the best possible care to their patients.
This unique platform addresses care quality while maximizing patient satisfaction and minimizing workload and burnout pressures on providers worldwide.
As an integral healthcare cloud play for the short- and long-term future, the coronavirus should have benign impact on its business.
We could ever say that the outbreak could galvanize healthier long-term demand trends for Nuance.
The pandemic acts as almost a non-stop commercial to the next generation technology needs in healthcare in which Nuance plays into with its top-level health cloud tools.
Investors have agreed with my idea that this is the year of the health cloud and Nuance shares are up 20% since the introduction of the coronavirus.
If readers want to be part of the future, pick up a few shares of Nuance Communications.
“Twitter has been my life's work in many senses. It started with a fascination with cities and how they work, and what's going on in them right now.” – Said Founder and CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
March 4, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE BEST TECH STOCKS TO BUY AT THE BOTTOM)
(NFLX), (ZM), (PTON), (AMZN), (OKTA), (WORK), (ATVI), (EA), (TTWO)
Tech stocks that are begging to be picked up on the back of the coronavirus pandemic are Netflix (NFLX), Zoom Video Communications (ZM), workplace collaboration service Slack Technologies (WORK), and Peloton Interactive (PTON), the spin bike company.
Their short-term outperformance indicates that these stocks work well during mass pandemics shelving most outdoor activity and commerce.
The basket of 3 stocks has easily beat the S&P 500 since the coronavirus emerged as a threat in mid-January.
Home sitting doesn’t generate a net output of business activity unless that job is digital.
The majority of workers still commute in a physical car only to sit in an office, restaurant, or some other type of self-contained space.
That is the underlying problem that has no solution, and any rate cut by the Fed cannot ultimately solve consumers holed up in their house.
If the companies that could opt to go pure digital do take up the option, the number of remote workers would rise and digital products would be the ultimate beneficiary of this trend.
Companies that promote remote working such as Slack (WORK) and Google Hangouts are in pole position to reap the rewards.
These services include video conferencing software, logistical services, administrative services, network security services, ecommerce and any service that aids in generating digital content like Adobe and its umbrella of assets.
The trend was already transforming American culture, but the virus vigorously pulls forward a trend that was already in overdrive.
Enabling information workers to produce outside the traditional office environment is one of the lynchpins of the Silicon Valley model.
Companies will ultimately realize that spending big bucks on business travel to meet face to face for 30 minutes is probably not an optimal allocation of resources.
Business travel is getting cut with a cleaver such as Amazon.com (AMZN) who are forcing employees to avoid all nonessential travel for now, including within the U.S. Much of that travel could be replaced by video calls.
Other companies will get in on the action by directing their employees to work from home in the coming weeks.
Coronavirus mania has reached the U.S. shores with consumers stocking up on all the essentials at the local Costco.
If this gets worse, there is no solution unless a viable medical solution starts improving the health crisis.
There are still only 7 known fatalities from the coronavirus, all in the state of Washington, and limiting that number is critical to the health of the tech market.
Another company is Okta (OKTA), a leader in authentication security cloud software.
The company’s offering allows employees to use corporate applications on-site and remotely and protecting their access to their digital services is just as important as the work itself.
As consumer spurn movie theaters, concerts, and gyms, the entertainment space will give way to digital entertainment that includes Netflix (NFLX) and Roku (ROKU).
Roku is a great place to hide out in the world where Covid-19 meets daily consumers in the U.S. in a more meaningful way during 2020.
Netflix is a company that has defied gravity this year by bull-rushing its way through the competition and proving there is space for everyone.
The increase in incremental demand for digital content will only help Netflix claim a bigger part of the pie.
We can also lump the videogame industry into this cohort such as Activision Blizzard (ATVI), Electronic Arts (EA), and Take-Two Interactive Software (TTWO).
They have faced serious headwinds from gaming phenomenon Fortnite, but prolonged home sitting will even boost their shares.
The spine of digital services will receive a boost as well from the usual cast of characters such as Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Facebook (FB).
As investors wait for the climax of the coronavirus and the Central Bank has indicated that they are open to more accommodative policy, we could be ripe for more volatility.
Chinese coronavirus cases have started to taper off and if the rest of the world trends in a similar fashion, this virus scare could be in the history books in 2-3 months.
However, the trajectory of the virus is still a massive unknown in the U.S. and winning the health battle is the only panacea to this dilemma.
“Often you have to rely on intuition.” – Said Founder and Former CEO of Microsoft Bill Gates
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
March 2, 2020
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(TECH’S BIG CORONA HIT)
(COMPQ), (TESLA), (UBER), (EXPE), (CSCO), (CSPR)
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