“I strongly believe the business of a business is to improve the world.” – Said Founder and Co-CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
January 22, 2019
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(HOW TO PLAY TECHNOLOGY STOCKS IN 2019),
(NFLX), (AAPL), (TSLA), (STT), (BLK)
In the past week, the tech sector has received information allowing investors to sketch a concise roadmap of what to expect in the tech sector for the rest of 2019.
One – the bull story in technology isn’t dead and the December sell-off in tech growth stocks was overdone.
Two – the path to tech profits is filled with more booby traps than in year’s past.
Three – the migration to digital is becoming more pronounced by the millisecond.
If you go back about a month ago when tech stocks were at their trough, traders were pricing in about a 60% chance of a recession in 2019 or early 2020 and the data didn’t support it.
What people were confusing themselves with was slowing growth instead of a lack of growth.
Then we got the disastrous news from Apple (AAPL) indicating business in China was petering out forcing them to change tactics cutting iPhone prices.
The tech market went into full-on panic mode and the revelation of weak China data did not help either.
Netflix (NFLX) reported and the online streaming app offered some respite with outperforming growth numbers.
Netflix has been a favorite of the Mad Hedge Technology Letter since its inception but the caveat with Founder and CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings brainchild is that the extreme volatility makes it difficult to trade around on a short-term basis.
The stock is up 50% from its nadir and its growth story is solid and will perpetuate.
The next bastion of juiced-up growth for Netflix is the international audience and these numbers are examined closely with a fine-tooth comb by investors attempting to understand the direction of the company.
The company audaciously added 8.8 million in new international subscribers last quarter which handily beat the 7.6 million estimates by 1.2 million.
Netflix also announced a few days earlier that it would raise the price of a monthly subscription between 13%-18%, and investors treated the news with celebratory shots of tequila.
It has been consensus for years that Netflix was severely underpricing their premium content, and analysts have been screaming and kicking trying to get Hastings to push up their monthly prices.
The price hike coincides with a year where I believe Netflix can grow revenue over 30%.
The mix of these two developments illuminate a few things about Netflix.
Netflix has the content that consumers want and even if competition rears its ugly head, they aren’t even in the same ballpark in terms of breadth and potency of content.
They are the king of contents and I don’t see anyone knocking them off their elevated perch in 2019.
In many ways, the Netflix long-term thesis mirrors the tech industry’s long-term thesis emphasizing supercharged growth by any means possible.
Even though this strategy is risky, it is working for Netflix and the capital isn’t drying up to go after the best content producers money can buy.
This earnings report should put to rest the growth warning sirens for now, tech will grow this year, but earnings results will be more of a mixed bag with the occasional miss.
This is in stark comparison to early 2018 where every tech company and their mother were scorching earnings forecasts by a magnitude of two or three.
Last September, the tech market looked above its head and saw a few boulders about to crush the herd, but investors shrugged it off.
As we move forward, the tech sector and the overall market is inching closer to a recession.
The low-hanging fruit has been pocketed and incremental gains aren’t no-brainers anymore – this can be gleaned from Tesla (TSLA) curtailing their workforce by 7%.
This news was delivered by a letter from CEO of Tesla Elon Musk noting that these decisions have been made with the goal of “increasing the Model 3 production rate and making many manufacturing engineering improvements in the coming months.”
Basically, Musk has telegraphed that staff needs to perform better, identify efficiencies that will save costs which in turn will boost profit margins.
This doesn’t mean that the era of tech growth is over, but this signals that tech companies are becoming more fidgety about loss-making operations and have ultimately targeted profits which shout at investors' late-cycle economics.
Musk needs to turn Tesla into a perennial profit machine to prove naysayers wrong, and now is the time to turn the page and max out his rocket fuel.
If the recession hits, investors could turn against Tesla and capital could dry up.
This newfound modesty towards the e-car business model is, in no doubt, exacerbated by the ratcheting up of fierce competition from the traditional automobile makers.
Tesla is in the e-car lead for battery technology, revolutionary production processes, and have a treasure trove of data that German companies would do anything to get their hands on.
Musk knows Tesla has fought this hard to get to this point, and he'd rather have the ball in his hands with 10 seconds left and a tie game just like Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls did.
Shaving off the excess has meant removing the customer referral program that was too costly that included benefits like half a year of free charging.
Part of this also has to do with Tesla losing their tax credit at the end of the year as well as giving more impetus to trimming costs.
Becoming a mass-market car manufacturer means it is important to price the car at affordable price points and that will be extremely difficult.
The goal is to deliver a $35,000 e-car that performs comparably to the rest of the fleet but produced with 7% less hands.
Can Musk do it?
I wouldn’t bet against him.
Musk means business and is hellbent for revenge against his arch enemies – the Tesla short community who he has habitually dragged under the bus through the media.
Piggybacking on this tougher profit-making climate is Boston-based finance company State Street Corporation’s (STT) announcement reducing headcount by 1,500 amounting to 6% of the global workforce.
The firm cited the urgent need to automate processes that will give the company a bigger foothold into the digital sphere.
The same theme was echoed at BlackRock Inc. (BLK), the world’s largest asset manager, who will eliminate 3% of its global workforce, or 500 people, amid an existential threat from the temporary ineffectiveness of passive investing.
In a rising market, it is guaranteed that assets at these types of funds almost always go up.
However, with an injection of recent volatility, passive investors have seen their balances dwindle with the market spawning abrupt outflows.
The need to zig and zag with the market is now painfully obvious and using technology to plug in the gaps will be cheaper and more appropriate for late cycle price action.
This is a suitable segue way into the third point – the fluid follow-through of the digital migration and the debacle of Sears prove my point.
Hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert and his firm ESL have navigated this famous American retailer into the ground.
This is what happens when the entire retail industry goes online when you don’t.
To make matters worse, Lampert has probably never set foot into his own investment.
Each time I roam the aisles of Sears, it’s about as crowded as a mortuary at midnight – an elementary story of a mismanaged enterprise.
Sears is an example of digital ignorance and it’s not the only one.
Gymboree Group, the baby clothing company, is another one to put on the list – the firm filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The company will close more than 800 Gymboree and Crazy 8 stores, this is the second time they have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past two years.
Unsurprisingly, the firm cited a sudden decrease in mall traffic and a surge in online alternatives as the reason for the economic softness.
The economy does not operate in a vacuum and any analog company who voluntarily misses the pivot to digital is voluntarily digging their own grave.
These three trends will only become more exaggerated moving forward threatening companies like Apple who fail to innovate after more than a decade of selling the same product, other companies don’t have the balance sheets to handle the same weakness.
“The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of a mistake.” – Said Former President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Meg Whitman
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
January 17, 2019
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(WHY FINTECH IS EATING THE BANKS’ LUNCH),
(WFC), (JPM), (BAC), (C), (GS), (XLF), (PYPL), (SQ), (SPOT), (FINX), (INTU)
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.
“I think that technology is the best thing that ever happened to mankind.” – Said CEO of JP Morgan Jamie Dimon
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
January 16, 2019
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(3D PRINTING GETS A SECOND WIND),
(SSYS), (ETSY), (MSFT), (BA), (NFLX), (GE), (LMT)
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
January 15, 2019
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE BALKANIZATION OF THE INTERNET),
(AAPL), (FB), (CTRP), (PDD), (BABA), (JD), (TME)
The Mad Hedge Technology Letter has a front-line seat to the carnage wrought by the balkanization of technology that is swiftly descending across all corners of the tech universe.
In technology terms, this is frequently referred to as “splinternet.”
A quick explanation for the novices can be summed up by saying splinternet is the fragmenting of the Internet causing it to divide due to powerful forces such as technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and interests.
The rapid rise of global splinternet news stories will have an immediate ramification on your tech portfolio and it’s my job to untangle the knots.
What investors are seeing is the bifurcation of the global tech game into a binary world of Chinese and American tech.
Most recently, Central European country Poland, who was thought to be siding with the Chinese because of the growing presence by large-cap Chinese tech in Warsaw, announced government security had arrested a Huawei employee, Chinese national Wang Weijing, for allegedly spying on behalf of the Chinese state.
For all the naysayers that believe the administration’s hope of curtailing the theft of western technology was a bogus endeavor, this recent event buttresses the notion that Chinese state-funded tech companies are truly running nefariously throughout the world.
In fact, Poland has little to gain from this maneuver if you take the current status quo as your guidebook, and I would argue it is a net negative for Poland because Chinese tech is deeply embedded inside of the Poland tech structure bestowing profits and internet capabilities on multiple parties.
Making the case stronger against China, Poland has no flagship tech communications company that would serve as competition to the Chinese or could directly gain from this breach of trust.
The fringe of the Eurozone Central European nations and Eastern European countries bordering Russia running developing economies rely on Huawei and other low-cost Chinese tech suppliers like ZTE to offer value for money for a populace who cannot afford $1000 Apple (AAPL) iPhones and exorbitant western European telecommunications infrastructure equipment.
The Chinese beelining to this burgeoning area in Europe has given these less developed countries high-speed broadband internet for $10-$15 per month and 4G mobile service for $7 per month, a smidgeon of what westerners fork out for the same monthly service.
Poland rebuffing Huawei is an ominous sign for Chinese tech doing business in the Czech Republic and Hungary as European countries are moving towards denying Huawei in unison.
The last few years saw China create the same recipe of success for fueling economic expansion mimicking the American economy.
The tech sector led the way with outsized gains boosting productivity while analog companies transformed into digital companies to take advantage of the efficiencies high-tech provides.
At the same time, Beijing has initiated a muscular response to the accelerated growth of local tech companies.
The foul play of American tech in Europe has given impetus to Beijing to launch a power grab on local tech structures such as Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent.
This couldn’t be more evident at Tencent who has failed to secure any new gaming licenses for their best gaming titles.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), a battle royale multiplayer, has been deprived of massive revenue because of Tencent’s inability to win a proper gaming license from the Chinese authorities to sell in-game add-ons.
In total, lost revenue has already cost Chinese video game companies over $2 billion in revenue since May 2017.
Beijing wants to temper the growing clout of private tech companies who were the recipient of the Chinese consumer’s gorge on technology in the last 20 years.
These companies have never been more infiltrated by the communist party and this can be mainly attributed to the acknowledgment by Beijing that Chinese tech companies are too powerful for their own good now and are a legitimate threat to the powers above.
That is what the sudden retirement of Founder of Alibaba Jack Ma told us who infuriated Chairman Xi because Ma was the first Chinese of note to meet American President Donald Trump at Trump Towers pledging to create a million jobs in America.
Ma later rescinded that statement and was put out to pasture by Beijing.
What does this all mean?
As the broad-based balkanization spreads like wildfire, Chinese and American tech companies’ addressable markets will shrink hamstringing the drive to accelerate revenue.
The potential loss of Europe for the Chinese could give way to Nokia, Siemens, and other western telecommunication companies to move in hijacking a bright spot for Huawei.
If Apple isn’t punching above their weight in China, well that almost certainly means that local tech companies aren’t having a cake walk in the park as well.
The winter sell-off turned the screws on tech first and then the rest of equities obediently, Chinese tech could have a similar domino effect to the Chinese economy boding badly for Chinese ADRs listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
Last year, the Shanghai index was one of the worst performing stock markets in the world.
And if the trade wars are really ravaging a few key limbs from local Chinese tech firms, then companies exposed to the Chinese consumer such as Alibaba (BABA), JD.com (JD), Pinduoduo (PDD), Ctrip.com International (CTRP) and Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) could fall off a cliff.
This has already been in the works.
These companies are a good barometer of the health of the Chinese consumer and have had an abysmal last six months of price action.
The vicious cycle will repeat itself with worsening Chinese data drying up the demand for Chinese tech services and the Chinese consumer tightening their purse strings as they try to save money from a cratering economy.
It could become a self-fulfilling prophecy and that is what other indicators such as negative automobile sales and a rapidly failing real estate market are telling us.
The 65 million ghost apartments dotted around China don't help.
This could be the perfect opportunity to instigate wide-ranging reforms to open up the financial, insurance, a tech market to the west, something many analysts thought China would do after joining the World Trade Organization (WTO).
However, Beijing’s retrenchment preferring to pedal mercantilism and cold-blooded power grabs could offer Chairman Xi the prospect of further consolidating his authority by sticking his fingers deeper into the local tech structures giving the state even more control.
I would guess this is a false dawn.
American tech will confront balkanization headwinds of its own evidence in Vietnam as the government blamed Zuckerberg’s Facebook (FB) for failing to root out anti-government rhetoric which is illegal in the communist-based country.
If you haven’t figured it out yet – there is an underlying suitability issue with western tech services that tie up with authoritarian governments.
It many times leads the western tech companies to be a pawn in a political game that later turns into a bloody mess.
The weak rule of law has spawned a convenient practice of blaming western tech to distract from internal disputes strengthening the nationalist case of a purported western tech firm gone rogue.
This could lead Facebook to be removed in Vietnam, and the $238 million in ad revenue that will vanish.
Headaches are sprouting up across Europe with Facebook clashing with more stringent data privacy rules through General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
German’s largest national Sunday newspaper Bild am Sonntag claimed from sources that the Federal Cartel Office will summon Facebook to halt collecting some user data.
This could take a machete to ad revenue in a critical lucrative market for Facebook, and this experience is being echoed by other American tech companies who are running full speed into complicated regulatory quagmires outside of America.
Adding benzine to the flames, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein speaking at a cybercrime symposium at Georgetown University’s Law Center in Washington added to the tech misery explaining that to “secure devices requires additional testing and validation—which slows production times — and costs more money.”
This is not bullish to the overall tech picture at all.
Hamstringing tech is not ideal to promoting economic growth, but the decades of unchecked growth is finally reverting back to the mean with regulation rearing its unpretty head and the balkanization of tech forcing countries to pick between China or America.
The silver lining is that the American economy remains resilient taking the body blows of a government shutdown, interest rate drama, and trade war uncertainty in full stride.
The net-net is that American and Chinese tech firms could experience decelerating revenue growth far dire than any worst-case scenario forecasted by industry analysts.
Therefore, I forecast that American tech shares have limited upside for the next 6-10 weeks and Chinese tech is dead money in that same time span.
Any rally is ripe for another sell-off if there are no meaningful breakthroughs in the trade war and if China’s economic data continues to falter.
The global growth scare could actually come home to roost.
The supposed narrowing of trade differences has been nothing more than tactical, and procuring any fundamental victories is a hard ask in the short term.
In an ideal world, China would open the floodgates and allow the world to join them in an economic détente, however, based on Chairman Xi’s record of purging his mainland enemies and the military, slamming the gates shut and padlocking them seems more likely at this point.
Seizing the rights to an untimed Chairmanship term has its perks – this is one of them and he is using the entire assortment of options available to him.
Traders should look at deep in-the-money vertical bear put spreads on any sharp rally to specific out-of-fashion tech names saddled with regulatory and data balkanization headwinds, or tech firms with a large footprint in mainland China.
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