(AMZN) Archives

The Market Outlook for the Week Ahead, or QE is Back!

Let me warn you in advance that I am only going off drugs long enough to write this newsletter.

This year’s flu has finally laid me low and let me tell you it is a real killer. Perhaps it is my advanced age that has magnified its effects. Then I developed an allergic reaction to the flu medicine I was taking. For a couple of days there, I was looking like the Michelin Man.

However, I did have a lot of time to read research. And what I learned was sobering.

For a start, we are fully back to a quantitative easing market. In one fell swoop, the Fed went from an expectation of four interest rate hikes in 2019 to none. By ending quantitative tightening early, it has cut the amount of cash it is withdrawing from the financial system from $4.3 trillion to only $1.5 trillion.

The Fed is in effect reflating the bubble one more time. And what do you do in a QE-driven economy. YOU BUY EVERYTHING! This explains why stocks, bonds, commodities, and energy have all been marching upward in unison this year even though that is supposed to be theoretically impossible.

Yes, the decade long liquidity-driven bull market may have another leg up to go.

A higher high inevitably leads to a lower low. The trades you are executing now may be akin to picking up pennies in front of a steam roller. We are clearly planting the seeds of the next financial crisis. But for now, the pain trade is clearly to the upside.

Those of who who traded through the dotcom bubble are seeing déjà vu all over again. Huge money-losing tech companies are now floating IPOs on a daily basis. This too will end in tears, which is why I have recommended to followers to avoid all of them. This is a sucker’s game.

There is a cloud behind this silver lining. After a ballistic 21.43% move in the Dow Average in four months, markets are trading as if risk is a thing of the past. The euphoria is here and complacency rules. That means the number of new possible low risk/high return trades out there has fallen to zero.

There is another cloud to worry about. The more excess stimulus the Fed provides the economy now, the fewer resources it will have to get us out of the next recession, which might be only a year off. As a result, everyone is long but extremely nervous. They are still participating in the party but are standing next to the exit door. Pent up volatility is building like a volcano ready to explode.

The other great revelation is that markets have been trading extremely short term in nature, only one quarter ahead of what the real economy is doing. So, a stock market meltdown in Q4 2018 discounted a collapsing GDP growth in Q1 2019 of a 1% rate or less. That is down 80% from a year ago peak.

The ultra-strong market in Q1 is anticipating an economic rebound in Q2, After that, who knows?

That’s why I am moving both of my trading portfolios for Global Trading Dispatch and the Mad Hedge Technology Letter to 100% cash positions in the coming week.

Last week was the week when Walt Disney (DIS) morphed from being a has-been media stock hobbled by a failing holding in ESPN to a dynamic company that is suddenly taking over the world. The reward was an eye-popping 25% move in three weeks, which we caught.

Copper demand is rocketing, off of soaring global electric car production. Each vehicle needs 22 pounds of the red metal, and 4 million have been built so far. That number reached 5 million by June. Take a second bite of the apple with (FCX) as well.

General Electric got slaughtered again, with an earnings downgrade from Morgan Stanley. It will take years to sort out this mess. Avoid (GE).

The 30-year fixed rate mortgage plunged to 4.03% and may save the spring selling season for residential real estate.

Apple Topped $200. It looks like the market is finally buying the services story. Stand aside for the short term. It’s had a great run, up 42% from the December low. I’m waiting for 5G until I buy my next iPhone, probably next year.

The Mad Hedge Fund Trader hit a new all-time high briefly, up 15.46% year to date, and beating the pants off the Dow Average. Good thing I didn’t buy the bearish argument. There’s too much cash floating around the world. However, my downside hedges in Disney and Tesla cost me some money when I stopped out. I was late by a day.

We are taking profits on a six-month peak of 13 positions across the GTD and Tech Letter services and will wait for markets to tell us what to do next.

April is so far down -1.50%, as my downside hedges in Tesla (TSLA) and Disney (DIS) cost me some sofa change. My 2019 year to date return retreated to +13.92%, paring my trailing one-year return back up to +27.22%.

My nine and a half year return backed off to +314.06%. The average annualized return appreciated to +33.65%. I am now 100% in cash.

The Mad Hedge Technology Letter has gone ballistic, with an aggressive and unhedged 30% long which expires this week. It is maintaining positions in Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Amazon (AMZN), which are clearly going to new highs.

It’s going to be a dull week on the data front after last week’s fireworks.

On Monday, April 15 at 8:30 AM, we get the April Empire State Index. Citibank (C) and Goldman Sachs (GS) report.

On Tuesday, April 16, 9:15 AM EST, we learn March Industrial Production. Netflix (NFLX) and IBM (IBM) report.

On Wednesday, April 17 at 2:00 PM, we get the Fed Beige Book Indicators. Morgan Stanley reports (MS).

On Thursday, April 18 at 8:30 the Weekly Jobless Claims are produced. At 10:00 AM EST, we obtain the March Index of Leading Economic Indicators. American Express (AXP) reports.

On Friday, April 19 at 8:30 AM, the markets are closed for Good Friday.

As for me, I am staying planted in my bed reading up on research and watching HBO until I kick this flu. After that, I should be good for the rest of the year.

Good luck and good trading.

John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader

Flat on my Back

April 15, 2019/by Mad Hedge Fund Trader

April 11, 2019

Tech Letter

Mad Hedge Technology Letter
April 11, 2019
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(THE MEANS TO A FRIGHTENING END)
(AMZN), (FB), (GOOGL), (AAPL)

April 11, 2019/by Mad Hedge Fund Trader

The Means to a Frightening End

Tech Letter

Death of websites.

I love doing presentations to small businesses on my free time, partly to stay in touch with the pulse of the Davids who have the unenviable task of fighting uphill against the Goliaths.

It’s bad enough that the tech giants have scaled locally turning one’s local playground into a disadvantage.

The presentation is aptly titled "Content is King... But Only Through One’s Ownership" where the same parallels are explored and unpacked for my audience.

Proprietary Content – must be yours and you must own it on your own turf - your blog, your vlog, your app, and so on, it goes for everything.

Repurposing content on other platforms as a supplement to your own is one thing, but the moment you adopt an enemy platform as your main platform, that’s your coup de grâce.

SMEs (small businesses enterprise) believe it’s plausible to work with the higher ups, but don’t forget they have every incentive to cut you off from the fountain of youth.

One could say the best skill big tech has today is undermining their competition.

Facebook doesn’t allow posting content that criticizes Facebook, have you ever wondered why?

Website innovation has grinded to a halt because of the PageRank algorithm from Google, everybody is making websites the same, a top nav, descriptive text, a smattering of images and a handful of other elements arranged similarly.

Google’s algorithms and the self-regulating nature of their ecosystem have perverted the chance to have a unique online experience.

Most internet users have probably discovered that most websites don’t work well and the execution of them is lousy.

Many companies are not contributing enough resources to build out their site properly, or just don’t have the cash to fund it or a mix of the two.

About 95% of customer service calls originate from the company’s webpage because of payment problems, disfunction, misleading content, or simply because the website is down.

Ask any small business and they will tell you they deal with their domain being down for hours at a time because of some unknown server problem.

Not only is capitalism only working for a small group of Americans, but so are websites, such as massive companies like Amazon.com who have worked wonders with its e-commerce site.

Because the internet and namely websites are the key to building businesses, Silicon Valley is now using the concept of websites and their position as de-facto moderators to prevent others from developing proper websites, killing off the competition.

Alphabet is notorious for ranking their own products at the top of page one of any Google search.

Amazon has followed the same practice by sticking their in-house brands at the top of any Amazon search on Amazon.com.

And remember that none of this can be called “antitrust” because these borderline tactics offer consumers lower prices but that is only because consumers are brainwashed to believe Amazon offers the lowest price.

What if the same products are available for half of Amazon’s in-house brands, would Amazon volunteer to post their in-house brands on the second page, the graveyard of search results?

I would guess no.

Websites used to give businesses a chance, remember in the mid-90s when a website of any ilk was impressive as if someone was walking on water.

What can we expect next?

Amazon, Google, and Apple are taking their shows to artificial intelligence voice platforms.

SMEs could at least throw hail marys on standard internet searches with visual screens, but once content migrates over to voice platforms owned by Silicon Valley, then its game, set, and match.

For instance, a local business such as Joe’s Furniture Moving Business who, with the internet and visual screens, is searchable through search engines and can be even located on Google Maps with a concrete address.

Once we migrate the lions share of content to voice platforms over the next 15 years, Google Home, Apple HomePod, or Amazon Alexa could easily choose to remove Joe’s Furniture Moving Business information because they make more money offering you information of a moving service they own or have a stake in.

The advent of 5G will refine the voice technology and enhance the machine learning techniques needed to complete the migration of content.

Once the world crosses an inflection point where the technology and volume of content on smart speakers outweigh the hassle to use a keyboard or mobile screen, this effectively makes these smart speaker manufacture Gods of the World because they will own the voice-based internet.

They will be the gatekeepers of all global information, business, and development in the world and we will need to satisfy their algorithms to get our own content uploaded on their voice platforms.

And because of the nature of voice, users cannot see what else is out there, users will only hear what these companies tell us offering an outsized opportunity to manipulate the user experience generating more dollars for these powerful platforms.

By the end of 2019, 74 million Americans will be using smart speakers, giving these smart speaker firms adequate data to fine tune their products.

Eventually, all Americans will be forced to use it or will not be able to function, similar to the effects of a laptop, email, and smartphone combination now.

Once these voice platforms become ubiquitous, websites will be deemed irrelevant – consumers will simply have a choice of Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Apple HomePod and blindly trust what they tell you is in your best interests.

Pick your poison.

That’s right, users won’t control content in about 15 years, a scary thought, and now you understand why these companies will even give their voice A.I. platforms for free if they have to and probably will in the future.

April 11, 2019/by Mad Hedge Fund Trader

April 5, 2019

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
April 5, 2019
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:
(APRIL 3 BIWEEKLY STRATEGY WEBINAR Q&A),
(SPY), (VIX), (TSLA), (BA), (FXB), (AMZN), (IWM), (EWU)

April 5, 2019/by Mad Hedge Fund Trader

April 3 Biweekly Strategy Webinar Q&A

Diary, Newsletter

Below please find subscribers’ Q&A for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader April 3 Global Strategy Webinar with my guest and co-host Bill Davis of the Mad Day Trader. Keep those questions coming!

Q: I’ve gotten a lot of newsletters but not many trades. Why is that?

A: Perfect trades do not happen every day of the year. They happen a few times a year and they tend to bunch up. Most time in the market is spent waiting for an entry point and then piling on 5 or 10 trades rapidly. We’re letting our profits run and waiting for new trades to open up, so just be patient and we’ll get you more trades than you can chew on.

If you have to ask this question, you are probably overtrading. The goal is to make yourself rich, not your broker. The other newsletters that offer a trade alert every day don’t publish their performance as I do and lose money for their followers hand over fist.

Q: Are we on track for a market peak in May?

A: Yes; if we keep climbing up, eventually hitting new highs this month, then we are setting up perfectly for a pretty sharp pullback around May 10th. That would be a good time to get rid of all your longs and put on some short positions, certainly deep in the money put spreads—we’ll be knocking quite a few of those out in the end of April/beginning of May.

Q: Are you worried about the Russell 2000 (IWM) climb?

A: I’m not. If you look at the chart, every up move has been weak, and every down move has been strong. Looking at the chart, it’s still in a clear downtrend dragging all the other markets, and this is because small-cap stocks do poorly in recessions or market pullbacks.

Q: How severe and how long do you see the coming bear market being?

A: If history repeats itself, then it’s going to be rather shallow. The last move down was only three months long and that stunned a lot of people who were expecting a more extreme pullback. I don’t see conditions in place that indicate a radically deep pullback—25% at most and 6-12 months in duration, which won’t be enough to liquidate your portfolio and justify the costs of getting out now and trying to get back in later. They key thing is that there are no systemic threats to the market other than the exploding levels of government borrowing.

Q: If you had the Tesla (TSLA) April $310-$330 vertical bear put spread, would you keep it?

A: Probably, yes, because you have a $15 cushion against a good news surprise and a lot less at risk. I got out of my Tesla (TSLA) April $300-$320 vertical bear put spread because my safety cushion shrank to only $5 and the risk/reward turned sharply against me.

Q: Should we be buying the Volatility Index (VIX) here for protection?

A: Not yet; we still have enough momentum in the stock market to hit all-time highs. After that, you really want to start looking at the VIX hard, especially if we get down to the $12 level. So good thinking, just not quite yet—as we know in the market, timing is everything.

Q: Are you getting nervous about the short Disney (DIS) calls?

A: I’m always nervous, every day of the year about every position, and yes, I’m watching them. You are paying me to be nervous so you can go play golf. We may take a small hit on the calls if the stock keeps rising, but that will be offset by a bigger gain on the call spread we’re long against.

Q: When is the quarterly option expiration?

A: It was on March 15 and the next one is June 21. This is an off-month expiration coming up on April 18th, and that’s only 12 trading days away.

Q: If you get a hard Brexit (FXB) in the next few weeks, what will happen to the pound?

A: It’s risen about 10% in the last few weeks on hopes of a Brexit outright failure. If that doesn't happen, the pound will get absolutely slaughtered.

Q: If China (FXI) is stimulating their economy, will that eventually help the U.S.?

A: Stimulus anywhere in the world always gets back to the U.S. because we’re the world’s largest market. So, yes, it will be positive.

Q: Would you consider trading UK stocks under Brexit fail?

A: Yes, and there is a UK stock ETF, the iShares MSCI United Kingdom ETF(EWU) and you’re looking at a 20%-25% rise in the British stock market if they completely give up on Brexit or just have another election.

Q: What are your thoughts on the China trade war?

A: The Chinese are in no rush to settle; that’s why we keep missing deadline after deadline and all the positive rumors are coming from the U.S. side. It’s looking more like a photo op trade deal than an actual one.

Q: If we get a top in stocks in May, how far do you expect (SPY) to go?

A: Not far; maybe 5% or 10%, you just have to allow all the recent players who got in to get out again, and if the economy slows to, say, a 1% rate in Q1, that’s not a panicky type market. That’s a 10% correction market and what we’ll probably get. If the economy then improves in Q2 and Q3, then we may go back up again to new highs. We seem to have a three quarter a year stock market and therefore, a three quarter a year stock market. Q1 is always a write off for the economy.

Q: Do you still like Amazon (AMZN)?

A: Absolutely, yes—it’s going to new highs. And it’s also starting to make a move on the food market, cutting prices at Whole Foods, which it owns, for the 3rd time this year. So, it’s moving on several fronts now, including healthcare. There’s at least a double in the company long term from these levels, and a triple if they break the company up.

Q: If you bought the stock in Boeing (BA) instead of the option spread, would you stay long?

A: I would, yes. It’s a great company and there's an easy 10% move in that stock once they get the 737 MAX back off the ground again which they should do within the month.

Q: What do you think about food stocks with big name brands like Hershey (HSY)?

A: I’ve never really liked the food industry. It’s really a low margin industry. You’re looking at 2% a year earnings growth against the big food companies vs 20% a year growth in tech which is why I stick with tech. My advice is always to focus on the few sectors that are the best 5% of the market and leave the dross for the index funds.

Q: With the current bullish wave in the market (SPY), what sector/stocks do you think have the most momentum to break out another 10% to 15% gain in the next one to three months?

A: The next 10% to 15% in the market will only happen after we drop 5-10% first. I believe this is the last 5% move of the China trade deal rally and after that, markets will fall or go to sleep for six months.

Q: Do you expect 2019 to be more like 2018 or 2017? We know you are predicting the (SPX) will hit an all-time high of 3000 in 2019. Do you think it zooms up to a blow-off top in Q2/Q3 and then pulls back in Q4, like 2018? Or, do you expect a steadier ascent with minor pullbacks along the way (like 2017), closing at or near the year's highs on Dec 31? This guidance will really help.

A: I think we have made most of the gains for 2019. Only the tag ends are lifted. We have already hit the upside targets for most strategists, and mine is only 7% higher. After that, there is a whole lot of boring ahead of us for 2019 and the (VIX) should drop to $9. After complaining about horrendous market volatility in December, traders will beg for volatility.

Good Luck and Good Trading
John Thomas
CEO & Publisher
Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader

April 5, 2019/by Mad Hedge Fund Trader

April 3, 2019

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
April 3, 2019
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(WHO WILL BE THE NEXT FANG?)
(FB), (AMZN), (NFLX), (GOOGL), (AAPL),
(BABA), (TSLA), (WMT), (MSFT),
(IBM), (VZ), (T), (CMCSA), (TWX)

April 3, 2019/by Mad Hedge Fund Trader

Who Will Be the Next FANG?

Diary, Newsletter

FANGS, FANGS, FANGS! Can’t live with them but can’t live without them either.

I know you’re all dying to get into the next FANG on the ground floor, for to do so means capturing a potential 100-fold return, or more.

I know because I’ve done it four times. The split adjusted average cost of my Apple shares is only 25 cents compared to today’s $174, so you can understand my keen interest. My average on Tesla is $16.50.

Uncover a new FANG and the riches will accrue rapidly. Facebook (FB), Amazon AMZN), Netflix (NFLX), and Alphabet (GOOGL) didn’t exist 25 years ago. Apple (AAPL) is relatively long in the tooth at 40 years. And now all four are in a race to become the world’s first trillion-dollar company.

One thing is certain. The path to FANGdom is shortening. It took Apple four decades to get where it is today, Facebook did it in one. As Steve Jobs used to tell me when he was running both Apple and Pixar, “These overnight successes can take a long time.”

There is also no assurance that once a FANG always a FANG. In my lifetime, I have seen far too many Dow Average components once considered unassailable crash and burn, like Eastman Kodak (KODK), General Electric (GE), General Motors (GM), Sears (SHLD), Bethlehem Steel, and IBM (IBM).

I established in an earlier piece that there are eight essential attributes of a FANG, product differentiation, visionary capital, global reach, likeability, vertical integration, artificial intelligence, accelerant, and geography.

We are really in a “What have you done for me lately” world. That goes for me too. All that said, I shall run through a short list for you of the future FANG candidates we know about today.

Alibaba (BABA)

Alibaba is an amalgamation of the Chinese equivalents of Amazon, PayPal, and Google all sewn together. It accounts for a staggering 63% of all Chinese online commerce and is still growing like crazy. Some 54% of all packages shipped in China originate from Alibaba.

The juggernaut has over half billion active users, and another half billion placing orders through mobile phones. It is a master of AI and B2B commerce. There is nothing else like it in the world.

However, it does have some obvious shortcomings. Its brand is almost unknown in the US. It has a huge problem with fakes sold through their sites.

It also has an ownership structure for foreign investors that is byzantine, to say the least. It is a contractual right to a share of profits funneled through a PO box in the Cayman Island. The SEC is interested, to say the least.

We also don’t know to what extent founder Jack Ma has sold his soul to the Beijing government. It’s probably a lot. That could be a problem if souring trade relations between the US and the Middle Kingdom get worse, a certainty with the current administration.

Tesla (TSLA)

Before you bet on a new startup breaking into the Detroit Big Three, go watch the movie “Tucker” first. Spoiler Alert: It ends in tears.

Still, Tesla (TSLA) has just passed the 270,000 mark in the number of cars manufacturered. Tucker only got to 50.

Having led my readers into the stock after the IPO at $16.50, I am already pretty happy with this company. Owning three of their cars helps too (two totaled). But Tesla still has a long way to go.

It all boils down to the success of the $35,000, 200-mile range Tesla 3 for which it already has 500,000 orders. So far so good.

It’s all about scale. If it can produce these cars in sufficient numbers, it will take over the world and easily become the next FANG. If it can’t, it won’t. It’s that simple.

To say that a lot is already built into the share price would be an understatement. Tesla now trades at ten times revenues compared to 0.5 for Ford (F) and (General Motors (GM). That’s a relative overvaluation of 20:1.

Any of a dozen competing electric car models could scale up with a discount model before they do, such as the similarly priced GM Bolt. But with a ten-year lead in the technology, I doubt it.

It isn’t just cars that will anoint Tesla with FANG sainthood. The firm already has a major presence in rooftop solar cell installation through Solar City, utility sized solar plants, industrial scale battery plants, and is just entering commercial trucks. Consider these all seeds for FANGdom.

One thing is certain. Without Tesla, there wouldn’t be s single mass-market electric car on the road today.

For that, we can already say thanks.

Uber

In the blink of an eye, ride sharing service Uber has become essential for globe-trotting travelers such as myself.

Its 2 million drivers completely disrupted the traditional taxi model for local transportation which remains unchanged since the days of horses and buggies.

That has created the first $75 billion of enterprise value. It’s what’s next that could make the company so interesting.

It is taking the lead in autonomous driving. It could also replace FeDex, UPS, DHL, and the US post office by offering same day deliveries at a fraction of the overnight cost.

It is already doing this now with Uber Foods which offers immediate delivery of takeouts (click here if you want lunch by the time you finish reading this piece.)

UberCopters anyone? Yes, it’s already being offered in France and Brazil.

Uber has the potential to be so much more if it can just outlive its initial growing pains.

It is a classic case of the founder being a terrible manager, as Travis Kalanick has lurched from one controversy to the next. The board finally decided he should spend much time on his new custom built 350-foot boat.

Its “bro” culture is notorious, even in Silicon Valley.

It is also getting enormous pushback from regulators everywhere protecting entrenched local interests. It has lost its license in London, the only place in the world that offered a decent taxi service pre-Uber. Its drivers are getting beaten up in Paris.

However, if it takes advantage of only a few of the doors open to it, status as a FANG beckons.

Walmart (WMT)

A few years ago, I was heavily criticized for pointing out that half the employees at my local Walmart (WMT) were missing their front teeth. They have since received a $2 an hour's pay raise, but the teeth are still missing. They don’t earn enough money to get them fixed.

The company is the epitome of bricks and mortar in a digital world with 12,000 stores in 28 countries. It is the largest private employer in the US, with 1.4 million workers, mostly earning minimum wage.

The Walmart customer is the very definition of the term “late adopter.” Many are there only because unlike Amazon, Wal-Mart accepts cash and Food Stamps.

Still, if Walmart can, in any way, crack the online nut, it would be a turbocharger for growth. It moved in this direction with the acquisition of Jet.com for $3 billion, a cutting-edge e-commerce firm based in Hoboken, NJ.

However, this remains a work in progress. Online sales account for only 4% of Walmart’s total. But they could only be a few good hires at the top away from success.

Microsoft (MSFT)

Talk about going from being the 800-pound gorilla to an 80 pound one, and then back to 800 pounds.

I don’t know why Microsoft (MSFT) lost its way for 15 years, but it did. Blame Bill Gates’s retirement from active management and his replacement by his co-founder Steve Ballmer.

Since Ballmer’s departure in 2014, the performance of the share price has been meteoric, rising by some 125% over the past two years.

You can thank the new CEO Satya Nadella who brought new vitality to the job and has done a complete 180, taking Microsoft belatedly into the cloud.

Microsoft was never one to take lightly. Windows still powers 90% of the world’s PCs. No company can function without its Office suite of applications (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). SQL Server and Visual Studio are everywhere.

That’s all great if you want to be a public utility, which Microsoft shareholders don’t.

LinkedIn, the social media platform for professionals, could be monetized to a far greater degree. However, specialization does come at the cost of scalability.

It seems that the future is for Microsoft to go head to head against next door neighbor Amazon (AMZN) for the cloud services market while simultaneously duking it out with Alphabet (GOOGL).

My bet is that all three win.

Airbnb

This is another new app that has immeasurably changed my life for the better. Instead of cramming myself into a hotel suite with a wildly overpriced minibar for $600 a night, I get a whole house for $300 anywhere in the world, with a new local best friend along with it.

Overnight, Airbnb has become the world’s largest hotel chain without actually owning a single hotel. At its latest funding round in 2017, it was valued at $31 billion.

The really tricky part here is for the firm to balance out supply and demand in every city in the world at the same time. It is also not a model that lends itself to vertical integration. But who knows? Maybe priority deals with established hotels are to come.

This is another firm that is battling local regulation, that great barrier to technological innovation. None other than its home town of San Francisco now has strict licensing requirements for renters, a 30 day annual limitation, and a $1,000 a day fine for offenders.

The downtowns of many tourist meccas like Florence, Italy and Paris, France have been completely taken over by Airbnb customers, driving rents up and locals out.

IBM (IBM)

There was a time in my life when IBM was so omnipresent we thought like the Great Pyramids of Egypt it would be there forever. How times change. Even Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffet became so discouraged that he recently dumped the last of his entire five-decade long position.

A recent 20 consecutive quarters of declining profits certainly hasn’t helped Big Blue’s case. It is one of the only big technology companies whose share price has gone virtually nowhere for the past two years.

IBM’s problem is that it stuck with hardware for too long. An entrenched bureaucracy delayed its entry into services and the cloud, the highest growth areas of technology.

Still, with some $80 billion in annual revenues, IBM is not to be dismissed. Its brand value is still immense. It still maintains a market capitalization of $144 billion.

And it has a new toy, Watson, the supercomputer named after the company’s founder, which has great promise, but until now has remained largely an advertising ploy.

If IBM can reinvent itself and get back into the game, it has FANG potential. But for the time being, investors are unimpressed and sitting on their hands.

The Big Telecom Companies

My final entrant in the FANGstakes would be any combination of the four top telecommunication companies, Verizon (VZ), AT&T (T), Comcast (CMCSA), and Time Warner (TWX), which now control a near monopoly in the US.

There is a reason why the administration is blocking the AT&T/Time Warner merger, and it is not because these companies are consistently cited in polls as the most despised in America. They are trying to stop the creation of another hostile FANG.

Still, if any of the big four can somehow get together, the consequences would be enormous. Ownership of the pipes through which the modern economy courses bestows great power on these firms.

And Then….

There is one more FANG possibility that I haven’t mentioned. Somewhere, someplace, there is a pimple-faced kid in a dorm room thinking up a brand-new technology or business model that will take the world by storm and create the next FANG.

Call me crazy, but I have been watching this happen for my entire life.

I want to thank my friend, Scott Galloway, of New York University’s Stern School of Business, for some of the concepts in this piece. His book, “The Four” is a must read for the serious tech investor.

Creating the Next FANG?

April 3, 2019/by Arthur Henry

April 1, 2019

Diary, Newsletter, Summary

Global Market Comments
April 1, 2019
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, OR THE INMATES ARE RUNNING THE ASYLUM)
(SPY), (TLT), (FCX), (DIS), (TSLA), (IWM), (AAPL),
(GOOGL), (MSFT), (PYPL), (AMZN)

April 1, 2019/by Mad Hedge Fund Trader

March 26, 2019

Tech Letter

Mad Hedge Technology Letter
March 26, 2019
Fiat Lux

Featured Trade:

(PINTEREST COMES OUT)
(PINS), (FB), (AAPL), (GOOGL), (AMZN)

March 26, 2019/by Mad Hedge Fund Trader

Pinterest Comes Out

Tech Letter

The Facebook (FB) of digital images is on deck and has filed to go public.

I'll give you the skinny on it.

Pinterest (PINS) has slightly different lingo - they call digital images pins, a collection of pins, a pinboard, and the users that post pins are pinners.

Aside from this little creative wrinkle, Pinterest does little to help flow my creative juices.

That's not to say they are a bad company, in fact, it's quite refreshing that on the financial side of the equation, Pinterest is a solid financial enterprise.

They make money and aren't going to burn through their cash reserves anytime soon.

This should give some peace of mind to potential investors looking at snapping up shares of Pinterest.

Even though they are not a bad company, I cannot promote them as a firm revolutionizing technology in the way we know it, they certainly don’t, and never will, at least at the current pace of innovation.

Pinterest derives almost 100% of its revenue from digital ads à la Facebook, they do not sell anything and much like Facebook, the user is the product by way of mining private data and selling them over to third-party ad agencies who subsequently sell targeted ads on Pinterest’s platform.

As I read through Pinterest’s S-1 filing with the SEC, an overwhelming portion of the content is reserved for the litany of regulatory risks that serving digital ads, curating others' content, and the international risks that pose to Pinterest growth story.

As with most tech growth stories, this particular narrative must orbit around the strength of incessantly growing its domestic and international user base.

I surmise that part of the reason they desire to go public is because of the 265 million in global quarterly monthly users have reached the high watermark.

Therefore, this calculated risk of going public is entirely justified as the cash out for the venture capitalist and private owners that invested in this company as a burgeoning toddler.

Or the owners see catastrophic downside from the regulatory landscape which has been increasingly volatile in the past few quarters and wish to get out as soon as they can.

Let's make no mistake about this, Pinterest does not control its own destiny, and their success will be based upon external factors that they cannot control.

Some of these factors have already reared their ugly head, the most relevant example was when Google (GOOGL) changed its image search algorithm which disrupted Pinterest’s image function.

This was an example of third-party content originators clamping down on their willingness to allow Pinterest to populate content on their proprietary platform, and the lack of availability of content or the decreasing nature of it will sting the hope of increasing web traffic on Pinterest going forward.

Pinterest has clearly disclosed in its IPO filing that they are reliant on crawling third-party search engine services for third-party photos, this content is curated into their platform and credited to the original user.

I would classify this type of technology as unimpressively low grade and Pinterest will be susceptible to many more possible disruptions in the future.

In layman terms, if the stars do not align, Pinterest will be the first to feel it, and strategically speaking, this is a poor position to strategically operate from.

If Pinterest cannot serve the specific content that incites the tastes of pinners, this could destroy retention and engagement rates leading to a damaging downdraft of ad revenue.

Pinterest's feeble business model will certainly call for new investments in and around more innovative parts of technology.

What we have seen most successful technology companies flirt with are full-fledged recurring revenue models, and bluntly, Pinterest does not have one.

The likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Apple have pivoted hard towards this subscription model proving they can have their own cake and eat it too.

Funnily enough, Pinterest pays AWS, Amazon’s cloud arm, an extraordinary amount of money to store the pins or digital images on AWS Cloud platform to the tune of almost $800 million per year showing how beneficial it is to be on the other side of the equation.

Pinterest does benefit from a robust brand reputation and its footprint in America is quite large.

However, one group of potential customers have clearly been left out in the cold - Males.

The firm has been famous for being the go-to image platform for young mothers and generally speaking, American women born in the 1980s.

According to data analytics, it appears that content that males gravitate towards is not present on the platform and will need to be addressed going forward to grow users.

Another crucial problem that must be addressed is the lack of domestic growth in the user base.

In Q1 2018, Pinterest achieved 80 million monthly active users, however, fast forward to Q4 in 2018 and the number had barely inched up to 82 million monthly active users.

From Q1 to Q2, there was a dramatic deceleration in the number of monthly active users falling by 5 million to 75 million monthly active users.

The company blamed this on Facebook changing their password security causing users who rely on Facebook passwords and username entrance data to be temporarily stonewalled from entering Pinterest.

Millions decided to avoid the hassle and just stop using Pinterest because they were unable to enter the platform, causing major carnage to Pinterest’s ad-supported revenue model because of the hemorrhaging usership.

Unfortunately, bigger platforms such as Facebook and Google are not responsible to telegraph these structural changes in policy to Pinterest which means that this type of loss of usership could be a bi-annual or annual exercise in damage control.

Losing 10% of your user base based on someone else’s systemic changes is a bitter pill to swallow.

Investors must ask themselves why a premium search engine like Google search want to allow Pinterest to continue to curate its images for ad revenue effectively skimming off of Google’s top line?

As you have seen, Google has hijacked many of these types of business initiatives by taking on these opportunities themselves, dismantling the choke points, and going in for the kill.

The main avenue of user expansion is its international audience, and sadly, the average revenue per international user is a paltry $0.09. This number was up sequentially from the prior quarter which was $0.06.

If you compare the revenue per user with America, then it's easy to understand why the company wants to go public now.

Management presided over a sequential increase of American revenue per user from $2.33 to $3.16 in the prior quarter and the same growth will be hard to maintain and replicate spurring the higher-ups to cash out.

International growth is staring down a barrel of a gun with restricted access by governments who do not allow this type of service in their countries such as China, India, Kazakhstan, and Turkey.

The impact of these broad-based bans decodes into Europe being the only possible answer to user growth in revenue terms and total usership.

To state that Pinterest is confronted by widespread global risk is an understatement.

However, the low-hanging fruit would be squeezing more revenue out of the American user and I would guess that the ceiling would be around $7 per user in the near-term.

If management hopes to eclipse the $7 per American user, they will have to migrate into more data generative strategies such as video.