“Success can cause people to unlearn the habits that made them successful in the first place.” – Said current CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella
“Success can cause people to unlearn the habits that made them successful in the first place.” – Said current CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
April 24, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(GREAT SETUP FOR MAY)
($COMPQ), (AAPL), (FRC)
As I glance up at my trading screen this morning and I see First Republic Bank (FRC) shares scoring hot, I know it means only one thing for tech stocks ($COMPQ) and that’s nothing positive.
Tech was trusted as the safety ground for investors during the global bank contagion that wreaked havoc on the supposed jewels of western banking like Credit Suisse in Switzerland.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
Instead, investors coalesced around tech shares and precious metals.
They benefited as they caught a serious bid up in price.
That’s all unwinding as FRC prepares for its earnings report which most likely will signal that the worst of the storm has passed.
That’s on the heels of “too big to fail” banks like JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo reporting better than expected.
April will most likely turn into quite a dud for tech shares which is why I have cooled it on issuing trade alerts.
To prevent panic from spreading, governments and central banks stepped in literally overnight and offered a lifeline to financial institutions delivering historic rescue packages and emergency deals.
Western taxpayers bailing out the institutions has been a common theme since 2001.
Eventually, UBS, Switzerland’s biggest bank, was required by the government to buy its long-time rival Credit Suisse for three billion Swiss francs ($3.25 billion).
Clearly, failure is not an option. The impact would be devastating not only for Switzerland but for the global financial system. It should not be forgotten that 15 years ago, UBS itself needed rescuing by the Swiss government and central bank.
This doesn’t necessarily stop what was happening before meaning high indebtedness, excessive risk-taking, unreasonable exposure to liquidity risk, mismatch between assets and liabilities, poor investment performance, mismanagement.
Customer trust eroded for one sector means that often another sector wins in the short-term with capital flight hitting tech shares.
Some days it's important to notice that Apple shares could act as a second bank account.
APPL also rolled out a new savings account delivering Apple customers 4.15% of interest on their money. That was a smart move by CEO Tim Cook.
Now an unhealthy mix of soaring inflation, rising interest rates, and weaker economic growth could leave banks facing new problems, ranging from steep losses in bond value to higher funding costs and lower loan demand.
After the acute banking stress of the past weeks, a credit crunch could be looming. To adjust to an increasingly unfavorable macroeconomic context, banks have already substantially tightened their credit standards for all loan categories. But that is an additional blow to recession-stricken economies.
If there is another banking crisis following the last one we just experienced, expect big tech to get another avalanche of investors looking for a safe haven.
Although I am not one hoping for another disaster, the savvy investor must do what is right to preserve capital.
These are choppy water we see ourselves in and I do believe the sideways action in tech shares in April has been a big victory for tech.
April was the month investors were planning to dump shares and run for the hills, and that didn’t manifest itself.
The little volatility means that there was very little action taking place.
I understand that as a wildly bullish setup for tech earnings because much of the “bad” tech earnings have been priced into the news.
Conditions favor a mild bullish push in tech shares in May after they report better than first thought earnings.
“A founder is not a job, it's a role, an attitude.” – Said CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey
My ad Hedge Technology Letter
April 21, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE CATCH-UP PLAN)
(GOOGL), (MSFT), (CHATGPT)
The tech industry is quickly morphing into a "generative artificial intelligence success story or bust" outcome for many involved.
This came pretty much out of nowhere.
December 2022 was the big announcement that ChatGPT went live and everybody in tech has basically been freaking out since then.
Big ideas like the internet and software also had the same type of effect on tech stocks back in the heyday.
What would have Microsoft (MSFT) been without the computer or Windows?
Even more urgent, once-perceived growth tech companies like Tesla are starting to cut prices of products because the consumer is tapped out these days.
That means tech corporations can’t sell the current product by adding incremental iterations and passing it off as something “groundbreaking.”
Consumers need something more.
Consumers will spend on the next big thing and generative artificial intelligence still has a long way to go, but stocks participating in generative AI are starting to get those premium multiples that were only reserved for tech royalty.
Everyone is hoping to get in on the action, and Alphabet is also racing to build a new search engine and add artificial intelligence features to its existing products in the face of rapid growth in the field by rivals such as Microsoft Bing.
Google is testing new features called "Magi," with more than 160 people working full-time on the project.
Google's new products will try to predict users' needs, with features such as helping users write software code and display ads in search results, and Google is also exploring mapping technology that allows users to use Google Earth with the help of AI and search music through conversations with chatbots.
Samsung Electronics is reportedly considering replacing Google with Bing, the main search engine on its phones, because of Bing's artificial intelligence capabilities. The Samsung contract is expected to generate $3 billion in annual revenue for Google, a revenue stream that is now in jeopardy. In addition, Google has a $20 billion contract with Apple for a similar default search engine, which is up for renewal this year.
Google’s search engine could be swept into the dustbin of history if they don’t get a move on it pronto.
The ecosystems like Apple and Samsung can easily opt for a better engine if Google falls behind and that is exactly what we are seeing from Samsung.
I would probably say that Google got a little too cocky and stopped developing itself.
They thought that nobody could topple them.
The panoramic views from the ivory tower can look nice from the terrace for a while until somebody builds a bigger ivory tower that obstructs the view.
It’s been quite fascinating to see Google’s sense of urgency lately because it was always assumed they were part of a stable duopoly with Facebook.
Google’s panic indicates that Microsoft’s Bing is a real threat to their revenue stream, and at the very minimum, bits and pieces of the new technology will be incorporated into a new version of a search engine that will behave as a supercharged version of Google, the likes we have never seen before.
If Google can catch up, then its stock price will go a lot higher from here.
"Life is not fair; get used to it," said the Founder of Microsoft Bill Gates.
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
April 19, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(NETFLIX WORTH A TRADE)
(NFLX), (YOUTUBE)
Netflix (NFLX) missed expected subscribership by 24% and that used to never happen with the old NFLX.
NFLX was that one company among a handful like Microsoft, Google, and Apple that always beat whatever gaudy estimate that was thrown at them.
Times are different.
Tech has essentially been told to eat some humble pie.
Gone are the days of yore when a big tech firm could hire tech workers and give them a fake job just to keep “talent” away from other big tech firms.
Those were the golden years of 0% interest rate policies from the Fed and now the Fed has stopped subsidizing NFLX subscriber numbers.
The truth is that the company and its content aren’t that great especially nothing better than what is on Google’s YouTube which is free with ads.
No surprise that NFLX has rolled out an ad-tier version of its service which is another underwhelming strategy for a firm that used to be the torchbearer of digital content.
Netflix, which broadened its crackdown to include countries like Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain, in addition to the test countries of Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru, revealed it's planning "a broad rollout" of the policy this quarter that will include the US.
The ad plan, dubbed "Basic with Ads," comes at a cost of $6.99 a month in the US and serves as a complement to Netflix's existing ad-free tiers — the Standard plan ($15.49 a month) and the Basic plan ($9.99 a month.)
The company, which revealed the ad tier now has about 95% of the same content as ad-free plans due to new licensing deals.
It’s funny to see NFLX hype up its own password crackdown strategy.
When they had the mentality of abundance, they didn’t really care if whole villages were using the same password.
Now they suddenly care because growth is harder and harder to come by because the product has heaps more competition than ever before and its content doesn’t stick out as it used to.
Even Walmart and Target absorb write-downs for all the theft it experiences annually and theft still happens at a high rate.
Netflix going after password sharing as if it is some type of growth strategy underscores that its business model is more like in the 8th inning of a 9-inning game.
Where are the great ideas?
Management needs to answer to that instead of talking about their core businesses like it’s the fringes.
The stock dropped from $700 to $170 in late 2021 until mid-2022 and alarm bells were ringing inside of NFLX’s offices.
The rebound back to $320 was just a reversion to the mean because of an oversold position.
The next question is if NFLX really has a lot of juice left and I feel we are at another inflection point when the business model is weakening.
However, with interest rate cuts forecasted for later in 2023, I do believe the path to $400 per share exists along as we avoid global financial contagion or an invasion of Taiwan.
The stock is still too beaten down and I can easily visualize traders pumping up the stock to $420 only for investors to realize that a password-sharing ban is not a growth strategy and the quality of content not better than free YouTube isn’t improving by 30% every year.
This would be a good buy-the-dip candidate in the very short term.
“The AI technology will keep you out of harm's way. That is why we believe in an AI car that drives for you.” – Said CEO of Nvidia Jensen Huang
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