Category: Tech Stocks | Page 2

Why Robotaxis in 2020 Are Impossible and More Truths About Autonomous Vehicles

Published by Beth Kindig on May 3, 2019

This last week, we saw Tesla take advantage of the lack of information available on autonomous vehicle technology. Unfortunately, the facts around autonomous vehicles are elusive as PR copywriters fuel journalists, who are churning out content to meet deadlines. For starters, to get machines to respond like humans, within milliseconds, is one of the most difficult problems that technologists have aimed to solve. The truth about autonomous vehicles includes regulations, production cycles, and delays in implementation. I predicted when I wrote my analysis six months ago, that the gap between investor expectations (perception) and commercial deployments (reality) had created an…

Smoke and Mirrors: How Snap and Pinterest Hide User Attrition

Smoke and Mirrors: How Snap and Pinterest Hide User Attrition

Published by Beth Kindig on April 23, 2019

Social media companies today are using smoke and mirrors to hide an important key metric. I’m going to pick on Pinterest first because the social media company recently revealed these issues in its S-1 Filing, and meanwhile, Pinterest stock saw a 25% pop on the day of its public debut. To be fair, this 25% IPO pop pales in comparison to Snap’s 135% stock price increase from December lows. My best guess is that investors are hoping for the next Facebook, or perhaps they aren’t reading beyond the financials, which are on page 13 of the prospectus, compared to the…

Alphabet Stock: Keep a Close Eye on Third-Party Ads

Published by Beth Kindig on April 9, 2019

Towards the end of March, AdWeek broke the news that “Google Mulls Third-Party Ad-Targeting Restrictions.” Criteo’s stock dropped 30% and TradeDesk saw a 15% drop while Alphabet’s stock showed the least impact at 5%. I believe the market did not fully understand the implications of what advertising experts and insiders had leaked to AdWeek. It is my prediction Alphabet will have to let go of roughly $5 billion in quarterly revenue if the company aims to become a leader in artificial intelligence and sensitive data.

Nvidia Versus Xilinx: Heavy Hitter AI Stocks

Published by Beth Kindig on April 4, 2019

This week, I revisited Nvidia for the first time since the crypto bust. If you’re a regular reader of mine, then you’ll remember that I defended Nvidia as having a strong fundamental story due to their developer following and the GPU-powered cloud. We’ve seen the GPU-powered cloud story take shape with the recent acquisition of Mellanox. However, no analysis on Nvidia would be complete without a discussion on Xilinx, which is what I wrote about this week.

Apple Stock: A New Era of Mobile Saturation

Published by Beth Kindig on March 22, 2019

There are many positives to Apple’s story, with a wearables business up over 50%, cloud services up 40%, and Apple News readership at 85 million active monthly users. Apple Music is also now the number one streaming service in the United States over Spotify. Most importantly, Apple has a media announcement planned for March 25th, which will add to the growing services revenue. Investors should exercise caution, however, as the broader mobile market is slowing down and is nearing saturation.

Lyft: Risky Valuation and No Intellectual Property

Published by Beth Kindig on March 14, 2019

Silicon Valley produces a lot of winners; however, I believe investors should be careful with both of these IPOs due to bubble-like valuations, accelerating net losses, and a lack of geographic expansion opportunities. Yet, another concern is the liquidity event the large cap IPO provides, and the level of PR that can be bought leading up to the IPO, which will likely focus on the growing sales…

“Algorithms are not biased; data is biased” – MWC 2019

“Algorithms are not biased; data is biased” – MWC 2019

Published by Beth Kindig on March 7, 2019

AI may seem like an auxiliary technology to how we live our daily lives today, however, it will soon be the primary driver across the tech industry. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates the world economy will reach an additional 15.7 trillion in value by 2030 due to artificial intelligence. To put this into perspective, the top 5 technology companies today have a combined value of about $4 trillion, which includes Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. Over the next decade, AI will drive a market 5x the size of tech’s current global spend. Although this growth is exciting on many levels, the panelists at MWC 2019 voiced concerns about the handling of inherent biases that comes from data, as clearly discrimination by age, race, gender, education or other factors within audience segmentation is counterproductive to the advancement of society that AI promises.

MWC 2019: A Dose of Reality on 5G, Those Foldable Phones and Bitcoin Has a Serious Competitor

Published by Beth Kindig on March 7, 2019

The financing firm Greensill puts the total cost for 5G at $2.7 trillion through the end of 2020. The issue is that it’ll take a few years to see any returns, which will put networks in the red until applications catch up. This, of course, is the fine print to 5G that the lights, camera and action of the booths at MWC didn’t portray. In fact, there was a panel where Mike Fries, the CEO of Liberty Global, pointed out that carriers in Europe have not recouped costs on 4G yet. “You’ve had 10 straight years of declining mobile revenues in Europe with the biggest issue being price,’ he said.

Facebook Stock: Too Good to Be True

Published by Beth Kindig on February 21, 2019

Facebook has financial statements that Wall Street dreams are made of. Profit margins are at 40 percent, free cash flow outperforms due to low capex, and annual growth exceeds 20 percent year-over-year. In fact, FB posted 35 percent growth this past year with lots of runway to go. Meanwhile many of its FAANG peers struggle with high capex (Netflix) and diminishing growth (Apple).

To put it simply, Facebook’s cash flow and profit margins are not only some of the best in the S&P 500, but the best in the world. The ad dollar machine has incredible inertia and advertisers simply can’t turn away. If you are looking at the income statements, then you have every reason to go all-in on this company.