Mad Hedge Technology Letter
January 29, 2019
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(WHATS BEHIND THE NVIDIA MELTDOWN),
(QRVO), (MU), (SWKS), (NVDA), (AMD), (INTC), (AAPL), (AMZN), (GOOGL), (MSFT), (FB)
Posts
Great company – lousy time to be this great company.
That is the least I can say for GPU chip company Nvidia (NVDA) who issued a cataclysmic earnings alert figuring it was better to spill the negative news now to start the healing process earlier.
This stock is a great long-term hold because they are the best of breed in an industry fueled by a secular tailwind in GPUs.
But this doesn’t mean they will be gifted any freebies in the short term and, sad to say, they have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the heart of the trade skirmish along with Apple (AAPL) and buddy Intel (INTC) amongst others.
The best thing a tech company can have going for them right now is to have no China exposure, that is why I am bullish on software companies such as PayPal, Twilio, and Microsoft.
I called the chip disaster back in summer of 2018 recommending to stay away like the plague.
The climate has worsened since then and like I recently said – don’t buy the dead cat bounce in chips because the bad news isn’t baked into the story yet or at least not fully baked.
It’s actually a blessing in disguise if banned in China if you are firms such as Facebook (FB), Google (GOOGL), and Amazon (AMZN).
I recently noted that a material end to this trade war could be decades away and the tech world is already being reconfigured around the monopoly board as we speak with this in mind.
Where do things stand?
The US administration took a scalp when Chinese communist backed DRAM chip maker Fujian Jinhua effectively shuttered its doors.
Victory in a minor battle will likely embolden the US administration into continuing its aggressive stance if it is working.
If you forgot who Fujian Jinhua was… they are the Chinese chip company who were indicted by the U.S. Justice Department for stealing intellectual property (IP) from Boise-based chip behemoth Micron (MU).
The way they allegedly stole the information was by poaching Taiwanese chip engineers who would divulge the secrets to the Chinese company buttressing China in pursuing their hellbent goal of being able to domestically supply enough quality chips in order to stop buying American chips in the future.
Officially, China hopes to ramp up its self-sufficiency ratio in the semiconductor industry to at least 70% by 2025 which dovetails nicely with the broader goal of Chinese tech hegemony.
Fujian Jinhua was classified as a strategically important firm to the Chinese state and knocking the wind out of their sails will have a reverberating effect around the Chinese tech sector and will deter Taiwanese chip engineers to act as a go-between.
According to a research note by Zhongtai Securities, Jinhua’s new plant was expected to have flooded the market with 60,000 chips per month and generate annual revenue of $1.2 billion directly competing with Micron with their own technology borrowed from Micron themselves.
Jinhua’s overall goal was to support a monthly manufacturing target of 240,000 chips spoiling Chinese tech companies with a healthy new stream of state-subsidized allotment of chips needed to keep costs down and build the gadgets and gizmos of the future.
For the most part, it was unforeseen that the US administration had the gall and calculative nous to combat the nurtured Chinese state tech sector.
However, I will say, it makes sense to pick off the Chinese tech space now before they stop needing American chips at all in 5-7 years and when all remnants of leverage disappear.
The short-term pain will be felt in the American chip tech sector which is evident with the horrid news Nvidia reported and the aftermath seen in the price action of the stock.
Nvidia expects top line revenue to shrink by $500 million or half a billion – it’s been a while since I saw such a massive cut in forecasts.
Half of revenue comes from the Middle Kingdom and expect huge downgrades from Apple on its earnings report too.
If this didn’t scare you, what will?
These short-term headwinds are worth it to the American tech sector as a whole.
To eventually ward off a future existential crisis when Chinese GPU companies start offering outside business actionable high quality chips curated with borrowed technology, funded by artificially low debt, and for half the price is worth its weight in gold.
The same story is playing out with Huawei around the globe but at the largest scale possible.
This is what happens when the foreign tech sector is up against companies who have access to unlimited state loans and is part of wider communist state policy to take over foundational technology globally.
I will also emphasize that the Chinese communist party has a seat on every board at any notable Chinese tech company influencing decisions at the top even more than the upper management.
If upper management stopped paying heed to the communist voice at the table, they would be out of business in a jiffy.
Therefore, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei standing at a podium promulgating a scenario where Huawei is operating freely from the government is what dreams are made of.
It’s not a prognosis rooted in reality.
The communist party are overlords breathing down the neck of Huawei after any material decisions that can affect the company and subsequently the government’s position in the interconnected world.
The China blue print essentially entails a pan-Amazon strategy emphasizing large volume – low cost strategy.
Amazon was successful because investors would throw money at the company until it scaled up and wiped the competition away in one fell swoop.
Amazon is on a destructive path bludgeoning every American second-tier mall reshaping the economic world.
The unintended consequences have been profound with the ultimate spoils falling at the feet of CEO and Founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos, his phalanx of employees as well as Amazon stockholders which are mostly comprised of wealthy investors.
Well, Chairman Xi Jinping and the Chinese communist party are attempting to Amazon the American tech sector and the broader American economy.
The American economy could potentially become the second-tier mall in this analogy and the game playing out is an existential crisis for the likes of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Nvidia, Micron, Intel and the who’s who of semiconductor chips.
If stocks reacted on a 30-year timeframe, Nvidia would be up 15% today instead of reaching a trading day nadir of 17%.
What is happening behind the scenes?
American tech companies are moving supply chains or planning to move supply chains out of China.
This is an epochal manifestation of the larger trade war and a decisive development in the eyes of the American administration.
In fact, many industry analysts understand a logjam of failed trade solutions as a bonus to the Chinese.
However, I would argue the complete opposite.
Yes, the Chinese are waiting out the current administration to deal with a new one that might be more lenient.
But that will take another two years and publicly listed companies grappling with the performance of quarterly earnings don’t have two years like the Chinese communist party.
And who knows, the next administration might even seize the baton from the current administration and clamp down even more.
Be careful what you wish for.
Taiwanese company and biggest iPhone assembler Foxconn Technology Group is discussing plans to move production away from China to India.
India is a democratic country, the biggest democracy in Asia, and is a staunch ally of the United States.
CEOs of Google (GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT), some of Silicon Valley heavyweights, are from India and American tech companies have been making generational tech investments in India recently.
Warren Buffet even invested $300 million in an Indian FinTech company Paytm.
When you read stories about India being the new China, well it’s happening faster than anyone thought and on a scale that nobody thought, and the underlying catalyst is the overarching trade war fueling this quick migration.
Apple is already constructing low grade iPhones in India in the state of Karnataka since 2017, and these were the first iPhones made in India.
They won’t be the last either.
Wistron, major Taiwanese original design manufacturer, has since started producing the iPhone 6S model there as well.
And it is no surprise that China and its artificially priced smartphones have undercut Samsung and Apple in India grabbing the market share lead.
This is happening all over the emerging world.
And don’t forget if U.S. President Donald Trump revisits banning American chip companies supply channels to Chinese telecom company ZTE. That would be 70,000 Chinese jobs out the window in a nanosecond.
The current administration has drier powder than you think and this would hasten the deceleration of the Chinese economy and also move forward the American recession into 2019 boding negative for tech shares.
Therefore, I would recommend balancing out a trading portfolio with overweights and underweights because it is obvious that tech stocks won’t be coupled to a gondola trajectory to the peak of the summit this year.
It’s a stockpickers market this year with visible losers and winners.
And if China does get their way in the tech war, American chip companies will eventually become worthless squeezed out by mainland competition brought down by their own technology full circle.
They are first on the chopping board because their overreliance on Chinese revenue streams for the bulk of sales.
Among these companies that could go bust are Broadcom (AVGO), Qualcomm (QCOM), Qorvo (QRVO), Skyworks Solutions (SWKS) and as you expected Micron and Nvidia who are one of the main protagonists in this story.
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
January 28, 2019
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(BUY DIPS IN SEMIS, NOT TOPS),
(XLNX), (LRCX), (AMD), (TXN), (NVDA), (INTC), (SOXX), (SMH), (MU), (QQQ)
Don’t buy the dead cat bounce – that was the takeaway from a recent trading day that saw chips come alive with vigor.
Semiconductor stocks had their best day since March 2009.
The price action was nothing short of spectacular with names such as chip equipment manufacturer Lam Research (LRCX) gaining 15.7% and Texas Instruments (TXN) turning heads, up 6.91%.
The sector was washed out as the Mad Hedge Technology Letter has determined this part of tech as a no-fly zone since last summer.
When stocks get bombed out at these levels - sometimes even 60% like in Lam Research’s case, investors start to triage them into a value play and are susceptible to strong reversal days or weeks in this case.
The semi-conductor space has been that bad and tech growth has had a putrid last six months of trading.
In the short-term, broad-based tech market sentiment has turned positive with the lynchpins being an extremely oversold market because of the December meltdown and the Fed putting the kibosh on the rate-tightening plan.
Fueled by this relatively positive backdrop, tech stocks have rallied hard off their December lows, but that doesn’t mean investors should take out a bridge loan to bet the ranch on chip stocks.
Another premium example of the chip turnaround was the fortune of Xilinx (XLNX) who rocketed 18.44% in one day then followed that brilliant performance with another 4.06% jump.
A two-day performance of 22.50% stems from the underlying strength of the communication segment in the third quarter, driven by the wireless market producing growth from production of 5G and pre-5G deployments as well as some LTE upgrades.
Give credit to the company’s performance in Advanced Products which grew 51% YOY and universal growth across its end markets.
With respect to the transformation to a platform company, the 28-nanometer and 16-nanometer Zynq SoC products expanded robustly with Zynq sales growing 80% YOY led by the 16-nanometer multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoC) products.
Core drivers were apparent in the application in communications, automotive, particularly Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) as well as industrial end markets.
Zynq MPSoC revenues grew over 300% YOY.
These positive signals were just too positive to ignore.
Long term, the trade war complications threaten to corrode a substantial chunk of chip revenues at mainstay players like Intel (INTC) and Nvidia (NVDA).
Not only has the execution risk ratcheted up, but the regulatory risk of operating in China is rising higher than the nosebleed section because of the Huawei extradition case and paying costly tariffs to import back to America is a punch in the gut.
This fragility was highlighted by Intel (INTC) who brought the semiconductor story back down to earth with a mild earnings beat but laid an egg with a horrid annual 2019 forecast.
Intel telegraphed that they are slashing projections for cloud revenue and server sales.
Micron (MU) acquiesced in a similar forecast calling for a cloud hardware slowdown and bloated inventory would need to be further digested creating a lack of demand in new orders.
Then the ultimate stab through the heart - the 2019 guide was $1 billion less than initially forecasted amounting to the same level of revenue in 2018 - $73 billion in revenue and zero growth to the top line.
Making matters worse, the downdraft in guidance factored in that the backend of the year has the likelihood of outperforming to meet that flat projection of the same revenue from last year offering the bear camp fodder to dump Intel shares.
How can firms convincingly promise the back half is going to buttress its year-end performance under the drudgery of a fractious geopolitical set-up?
This screams uncertainty.
Love them or crucify them, the specific makeup of the semiconductor chip cycle entails a vulnerable boom-bust cycle that is the hallmark of the chip industry.
We are trending towards the latter stage of the bust portion of the cycle with management issuing code words such as “inventory adjustment.”
Firms will need to quickly work off this excess blubber to stoke the growth cycle again and that is what this strength in chip stocks is partly about.
Investors are front-running the shaving off of the blubber and getting in at rock bottom prices.
Amalgamate the revelation that demand is relatively healthy due to the next leg up in the technology race requiring companies to hem in adequate orders of next-gen chips for 5G, data servers, IoT products, video game consoles, autonomous vehicle technology, just to name a few.
But this demand is expected to come online in the late half of 2019 if management’s wishes come true.
To minimize unpredictable volatility in this part of tech and if you want to squeeze out the extra juice in this area, then traders can play it by going long the iShares PHLX Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) or VanEck Vectors Semiconductor ETF (SMH).
In many cases, hedge funds have made their entire annual performance in the first month of January because of this v-shaped move in chip shares.
Then there is the other long-term issue of elevated execution risks to chip companies because of an overly reliant manufacturing process in China.
If this trade war turns into a several decades affair which it is appearing more likely by the day, American chip companies will require relocating to a non-adversarial country preferably a democratic stronghold that can act as the fulcrum of a global supply chain channel moving forward.
The relocation will not occur overnight but will have to take place in tranches, and the same chip companies will be on the hook for the relocation fees and resulting capex that is tied with this commitment.
That is all benign in the short term and chip stocks have a little more to run, but on a risk reward proposition, it doesn’t make sense right now to pick up pennies in front of the steamroller.
If the Nasdaq (QQQ) retests December lows because of global growth falls off a cliff, then this mini run in chips will freeze and thawing out won’t happen in a blink of an eye either.
But if you are a long-term investor, I would recommend my favorite chip stock AMD who is actively draining CPU market share from Intel and whose innovation pipeline rivals only Nvidia.
Global Market Comments
December 28, 2017
Fiat Lux
SPECIAL ISSUE ABOUT THE FAR FUTURE
Featured Trade:
(PEAKING INTO THE FUTURE WITH RAY KURZWEIL),
(GOOG), (INTC), (AAPL), (TXN)
Global Market Comments
August 23, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(WHY THE DOW IS GOING TO 120,000),
(X), (IBM), (GM), (MSFT), (INTC), (DELL),
($INDU), (NFLX), (AMZN), (AAPL), (GOOGL),
(THE MAD HEDGE CONCIERGE SERVICE HAS AN OPENING),
(TESTIMONIAL)
For years, I have been predicting that a new Golden Age was setting up for America, a repeat of the Roaring Twenties. The response I received was that I was a permabull, a nut job, or a conman simply trying to sell more newsletters.
Now some strategists are finally starting to agree with me. They too are recognizing that a ganging up of three generations of investment preferences will combine to drive markets higher during the 2020s, much higher.
How high are we talking? How about a Dow Average of 120,000 by 2030, up another 465% from here? That is a 20-fold gain from the March 2009 bottom.
It’s all about demographics, which are creating an epic structural shortage of stocks. I’m talking about the 80 million Baby Boomers, 65 million from Generation X, and now 85 million Millennials. Add the three generations together and you end up with a staggering 230 million investors chasing stocks, the most in history, perhaps by a factor of two.
Oh, and by the way, the number of shares out there to buy is actually shrinking, thanks to a record $1 trillion in corporate stock buybacks.
I’m not talking pie in the sky stuff here. Such ballistic moves have happened many times in history. And I am not talking about the 17th century tulip bubble. They have happened in my lifetime. From August 1982 until April 2000 the Dow Average rose, you guessed it, exactly 20 times, from 600 to 12,000, when the Dotcom bubble popped.
What have the Millennials been buying? I know many, like my kids, their friends, and the many new Millennials who have recently been subscribing to the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader. Yes, it seems you can learn new tricks from an old dog. But they are a different kind of investor.
Like all of us, they buy companies they know, work for, and are comfortable with. During my Dad’s generation that meant loading your portfolio with U.S. Steel (X), IBM (IBM), and General Motors (GM).
For my generation that meant buying Microsoft (MSFT), Intel (INTC), and Dell Computer (DELL).
For Millennials that means focusing on Netflix (NFLX), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), and Alphabet (GOOGL).
That’s why these four stocks account for some 40% of this year’s 7% gain. Oh yes, and they bought a few Bitcoin along the way too, to their eternal grief.
There is one catch to this hyper-bullish scenario. Somewhere on the way to the next market apex at Dow 120,000 in 2030 we need to squeeze in a recession. That is increasingly becoming a topic of market discussion.
The consensus now is that an impending inverted yield curve will force a recession sometime between August 2019 to August 2020. Throwing fat on the fire will be a one-time only tax break and deficit spending that burns out sometime in 2019. These will be a major factor in U.S. corporate earnings growth dramatically slowing down from 26% today to 5% next year.
Bear markets in stocks historically precede recessions by an average of seven months so that puts the next peak in top prices taking place between February 2019 to February 2020.
When I get a better read on precise dates and market levels, you’ll be the first to know.
To read my full research piece on the topic please click here to read “Get Ready for the Coming Golden Age.”
Dow 1982-2000 Up 20 Times in 18 Years
Dow 2009-Today Up 4.3 Times in 9 Years So Far
Global Market Comments
August 16, 2018
Fiat Lux
SPECIAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ISSUE
Featured Trade:
(NEW PLAYS IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE),
(NVDA), (AMD), (ADI), (AMAT), (AVGO), (CRUS),
(CY), (INTC), (LRCX), (MU), (TSM)
Global Market Comments
August 6, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD, or FINDING A NEW GIG),
(FB), (TWTR), (INTC), (NFLX), (AAPL), (AMZN),
(RIGHTSIZING YOUR TRADING)
Global Market Comments
April 3, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(TUESDAY, JUNE 12, NEW ORLEANS, LA, GLOBAL STRATEGY LUNCHEON),
(MARCH 28 BIWEEKLY STRATEGY WEBINAR Q&A),
(TLT), (TBT), (FXY), (GS), (FCX), (CSCO), (INTC), (NEM),
(RIGHTSIZING YOUR TRADING)