StockideasHQ

Stock Market Moderator  
4â—‰5â—‰2788â—‰
https://stockideashq.com
Member since: 2019-03-03
Followers: 2
Following: 2
Posts: 634
Replies: 260

Hi, I'm Shih-Min. I am a software engineer that deals with highly-scalable, distributed and fault-tolerant systems.
SaaS
Nasdaq
Instacart
The price action on the first day of the IPO is terrible
By: 
👤 The Tech InvestorCommunity Lead :)) 
💬 634
   Sep 20, 2023

It’s down 20 ish percent from the peak of the day. The last time there was an IPO that peaks on day1 and pulls back 20% from intraday high was $didi. Didi went down about 63% in a few weeks and about 90% in a year. And then it gets delisted soon after. However, the case for Didi was mostly attributed to geopolitical risks, so there's a chance the price action will be entirely different after day1 for Instacart.

Didi stock price since IPO, daily chart: https://i.imgur.com/qlyAyOT.png

However, there’s a thing about Instacart. If they were able to do IPO in 2021 they would have done that already. So it is possible that they never had a viable business model from the start, which could be why they were unable to proceed with an IPO. And the price action today was certainly disappointing.

In my opinion, the food and grocery delivery space is mostly done, with established players like Uber, DoorDash, Amazon dominating this space. One thing about this sector is that while your drivers are essential for your business, they are essentially an expense rather than an asset for your company. But not investing in your people is bad for your business in the long run, but maybe there's simply not an alignment in this sector. Also, unless you have a fleet of robotaxis, squeezing profits out of your revenue will be hard. As we move to an era of inflation and recession, I find it hard to believe that people will be willing to spend significant amounts on grocery delivery when they can simply go to a store and get something for themselves.

I’m doubtful of what they can achieve in the long run. I have to say how this company can grow from here on is beyond my understanding.

$cart $dash $amzn $uber


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Crazy speculation is coming back to the market
...
By: 
👤 The Tech InvestorCommunity Lead :)) 
💬 634
   Sep 12, 2023

$cgc +82%, $acb +72% tells you crazy speculation is coming back in some sectors, but this might also happen to any sectors in the market.

No one knows for sure but there's a chance that the worst of the bear market is over.

https://i.imgur.com/P31IJUq.png


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MongoDB ER
This company is on track to achieve economics of scale
By: 
👤 The Tech InvestorCommunity Lead :)) 
💬 634
   Sep 04, 2023

In Q2, the company exceeded their top-end revenue guidance of $392 million by generating $424 million, reflecting a 40% growth.

Also, for non-GAAP income from operations, the initial guidance was set between $36 and $39 million. However, the actual figure came in at $76.7 million.

Customers / 100k ARR customers / Atlas customers count are also moving up steadily, their revenue and net income guidance are also moving up greatly, which is quite impressive.

https://i.imgur.com/MVoDOJ3.png

The future of this company looks quite certain. It's executing well in my opinion and getting closer to economy of scale quarter after quarter. This is a buy in the long run

$mdb


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Companies that provide little value adds are not going to make it in the long run.
There are a lot of companies in the market is doing that at the moment
By: 
👤 The Tech InvestorCommunity Lead :)) 
💬 634
   Aug 29, 2023

It's hard to see the value proposition for companies like Wix.com or Squarespace when it's already so easy to create a website these days, and people don't even use websites anymore. Do you remember when was the last time you remembered a domain name? There are exceptions in this space (e.g., Onlyfans) that succeed without a mobile app, but those are few and far between in the consumer apps realm, and for companies to succeed these days it basically means you need to be mobile first, at least from my observation.

Shopify, on the other hand, had the value proposition of helping sellers sell their products. It is very clear what they wanted to do early on when no one else was doing it. The truth is no one cares about your website as long as you can buy the items you really need easily enough with just a few clicks. I suspect that might not be true anymore, but at least it was true when Shopify worked on this online platform business model years ago where online shops were scarce.

And if your value proposition does not matter it will be hard for you to grow (in revenue). And when the risk of you never achieving economy of scale are high then your multiples will not be justifiable at any level that’s higher than zero. But that’s rational because there’s no guarantee that you can survive in a medium to long timeframe.

I had this urge to create this post because I kept seeing sponsored videos on Youtube from a few of the companies I mentioned above, and that screams to me that they're desperate and is running out of things to do. Also, it becomes really annoying that sometimes when I watch the videos that has those services I would just switch to other channels.

No. Sorry to say it will probably not work out for you.

$sqsp $shop $wix $bigc


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Snowflake ER
This is yet another quarter that their company is not going anywhere.
By: 
👤 The Tech InvestorCommunity Lead :)) 
💬 634
   Aug 25, 2023

Snowflake might have to go down again this quarter because this is the 2nd quarter that their RPO does not really grow. $1M ARR customers are also growing at a slower pace.

https://i.imgur.com/zuSiGjj.png

Cashflows are also quite terrible. How did it go up 3% on Friday I wonder.

https://i.imgur.com/4cGEQMq.png

They're #ai but I think they were more impacted by the banking crisis than the other tech companies. $snow


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Bill.com ER and Transcript reading
Let me read the transcript for you.
By: 
👤 The Tech InvestorCommunity Lead :)) 
💬 634
   Aug 19, 2023

Great ER. Is there really a recession happening at the moment? What I see is a growth story that cannot be stopped easily.

The price action is quite bullish, it has bounced almost 20% from its after-hour dip. Hopefully, that means the market has come back to its senses and the valuation can correctly reflect the fact that companies who grow should be positively rewarded, just like in a normal stock market. Otherwise, a stock market that functions like a casino would benefit no one except maybe hedge funds and algorithms, which defeats the true purpose of the stock market.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/WV8fs.png $bill

Here is a quick walkthrough of their transcript:

We delivered more than $1 billion in revenue and 65% year-over-year revenue growth while achieving our first year of non-GAAP profitability. 

Good. Nothing unusual here. Apparently companies grows in 2023.

At the end of fiscal 2023, more than 460,000 businesses used BILL as their central hub of financial operations. We expanded our network to 5.8 million members that have originated or received an electronic payment through our platform by making it easy for buyers and suppliers to connect and transact payments, we enabled $266 billion in total B2B payment volume across our platform reflecting approximately 1% of US GDP and a significant milestone.

That's a lot of money they're processing. Imagine if they take a cut of the TPV they're processing. Wait, I think that's already the case isn't it?

There are 30 million small businesses in the US and 70 million globally. The majorities still use manual paper-based processes to manage their financial back office. There is a vast opportunity to help these small businesses automate their financial operations to gain better insight to the company manage their business and cash flow and easily transact trillions of dollars of B2B payments.

So, they have 0.46m customers. So they have 0.65% (0.46/70) of the global businesses using their service already. Maybe the opportunity is truly really big here still.

This creates a valuable data asset that we apply our AI engine too which enables us to develop better user experiences such as auto-matching customers, and suppliers, auto-populating invoices, no matter how they are received, managing risk and providing payment and funding choices for customers and network members.

So, they mentioned AI. Maybe that's still a good thing but hopefully they don't use AI to just sell us false information. Lots of companies do that.

Turning to the accounting channel. We acquired many new partners and now serve approximately 7,000 accounting firms, up from 6,000 a year ago. We continue to enhance the tools we provide accountants to manage their clients.

Payment solutions are not something you change every day, but once you make the switch, you may find yourself stuck with it. Also, accounting firms are run by the smartest people on the planet basically. It's quite an accomplish to be able to grow this section of clients by 15% during a banking crisis and expenditure tightening period.

...etc

Source:

  • https://s24.q4cdn.com/404137088/files/doc_financials/2023/q4/Q4-23-Investor-Deck.pdf
  • https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-com-holdings-inc-nyse-192724834.html

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Cloudflare ER & Transcript
Let me read the transcript for you.
By: 
👤 The Tech InvestorCommunity Lead :)) 
💬 634
   Aug 15, 2023

They have a fantastic quarter and their guidance is great. The price action is not great after their ER call but maybe it's just general market selloff. Hopefully they can continue to execute and deliver good results in the next few quarters.

Let's take a look at what they say in their earnings call this quarter.

Thank you, Phil. We had a strong quarter in spite of continued macroeconomic uncertainty. In Q2, we achieved
revenue of $308.5 million, up 32% year over year. We added 196 new large customers, those that pay us more
than $100,000 per year; and now have 2,352 large customers, up 34% year-over-year.

So, despite macroeconomic uncertainty they're still able to growth their $100k ARR customers by 34% to 2,352. Imagine what this number would be like if we did not have a inflation recession back in 2022-2023.

And for the first time in several quarters, sentiment among IT buyers does not appear to be getting worse. Our dollar-based net retention ticked down to 115%, down 2% quarter over quarter. Dollar-based net retention is a lagging indicator. So, it will be slower to reflect the go-to-market improvements we are seeing.

So, macro seems to be improving. Retention is a lagging indicator and there are companies like $mndy that's actually showing retention tick ups this quarter. Those are also good news for companies in the same sector.

And our team is armed with great products to sell. Last quarter alone, Forrester recognized Area 1, our email
security product, as a leader. IDC recognized us as the leader for two reports in Zero Trust and Network Edge
Security-as-a-Service. And we were the only new vendor recognized by Gartner for Secure Service Edge. Our
developer platform.

Area 1 is a email security service that protects you against phishing and all those kind of things. This, along with Zero Trust and other things can be things that company look after when they have scale. This actually aligns with my experience working for software companies where you have something working already and then you start to worry about security and other things.

Cloudflare Workers, continues its explosive growth. We reached 10 million active Workers
applications in Q2, up 250% since December and 490% year-over-year.

The number of Workers applications grow up almost 500% yoy. 500% growth in application can easily be 200% growth in production usage. This is actually one of the most important take away in the ER because if we're heading to a future where companies move their compute to CDN edges you would see even more traction and economies of scale for this service. And that would mean something.

R2 continues to grow and now stores over 13 petabytes of customer data, up 85% quarter-over-quarter. We have
44,000 distinct paying customers with R2 subscriptions. And brand name customers are beginning to adopt it as
their primary object storage solution. That seems like a good segue into some other customer wins in the quarter

R2 is AWS S3 alternative. R2 storage cost is roughly 70% of that of S3. Also, the real deal here is R2 about egress fees, this means if you want to read your file it might cost way less with R2. The data on R2 has already grown 85% qoq. We should continue to see progress on this front because it takes effort for companies to switch or migrate from an existing storage service like S3 to R2. You cannot go there in 2-3 quarters that's not possible.

Beyond AI, Cloudflare's Zero Trust solutions where another big winner in Q2. A Fortune 500 technology services
company expanded their relationship with Cloudflare, signing a three-year $7.2 million contract for 25,000 Zero
Trust seats. That brought their annual spend with us to over $5 million. They first became a customer in Q3 last
year using our application security product.

A Fortune 500 company signed a 7.2m/3 = 2.4m yr deal with them. That brought their annual spend with us to over $5 million. This means Zero Trust has the potential to be as big as all other existing parts of the compute platform revenue combined.

One of the largest online recruiting platforms expanded their relationship with Cloudflare, signing a 25-month,
$2.4 million contract, and bringing their annual spend over $5 million. With more than 90% of their employees
remote, they were looking for a comprehensive zero trust solution and evaluated us against every leading vendor
in the market. They decided to go all in on Cloudflare with 15,000 seats for Access, Gateway, CASB, Data Loss
Prevention, Browser Isolation and Area 1 email security. I'm especially proud of how quickly we were able to
onboard them, less than a month to fully replace their first generation zero trust vendor.

So, it can take as low as 1 month to fully replace their alternative zero trust vendor. It's hard to imagine how other can fend off the competition from them when you have something that can be toggled off within 1 month.

An Australian technology company expanded their relationship with Cloudflare, signing a one-year, $2.2 million
contract, bringing their total spend with us to over $5 million. This customer started out on our pay-as-you-go plan
in 2016. This quarter they signed a Zero Trust deal to protect their expanding workforce. They're also broadening
their use of Cloudflare's developer platform with both R2 and Durable Object.

So they talked about R2, Zero Trust and Durable Objects more. R2 and Zero Trust is a few of their latest offerings. I thought Zero Trust is a hard sell but it seems they're able to gain progress selling this thing. Also, I can see R2 & Durable Object usage growing over time. But it's interesting that this Australian company started in 2016 but is able to bump up their expenditure in 2022 by 78% (2.8 -> 5m) and find use cases in the latest offering. So, maybe Cloudflare have done something right here.

Turning to our customer metrics. In the second quarter, we had 174,129 paying customers representing an
increase of 15% year-over-year. We ended the quarter with 2,352 large customers, representing an increase of
34% year-over-year, and an addition of 196 large customers in the quarter. In fact, we added a record number of
customers spending more than $500,000 on an annualized basis with Cloudflare, and the second quarter was
also one of our highest quarterly additions of customers spending more than $1 million annually, including our
largest Zero Trust contract to-date.

So, they get a lot more 500k and 1m ARR customers this quarter. I didn't find this number anywhere in the ER but this is good news regardless.

Turning to net income and the balance sheet. Our net income ...

RPO grows. Guidance is ok.

I'll be so surprised if Cloudflare does not become one of the largest compute platforms in the future.

$net

Source: https://www.cloudflare.net/files/doc_financials/2023/q2/CORRECTED-TRANSCRIPT-Cloudflare-Inc-NET-US-Q2-2023-Earnings-Call-3-August-2023-5-00-PM-ET.pdf


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Contagion fears spread as China property sector cash crunch intensifies
I suspect they're going to get their Lost Decades this time.
By: 
👤 The Tech InvestorCommunity Lead :)) 
💬 634
   Aug 15, 2023

https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/country-garden-shares-slump-record-low-after-onshore-bond-trading-halted-2023-08-14/

China's largest private real estate developer Country Garden (2007.HK) is seeking to delay payment on a private onshore bond for the first time, the latest sign of a stifling cash crunch in the property sector, piling pressure on Beijing to step in.

https://i.imgur.com/LU2kbeu.png

China is currently in a real estate crisis, and I don't see a way out for them this time. If I were to guess I would guess they have gone into a deflationary period and is about to get their Lost Decades. Thanks to Xi and his Covid-zero policy the Chinese people did nothing for 3 years, and now their youth unemployment rate is in the 20-30s and there's just no jobs for you. Also, Xi did a great job crushing private sector companies, and that includes real estate companies, for more control, and what you end up getting is sectors over sectors of inefficient companies either about to dry up in cash or going into bankruptcy, and that means job market is going to deteriorate further.

The real estate sales figured were hinting something bad earlier this year when the sales number drop 19% yoy in May and 28% yoy in June. And that's before the Country Garden news. Now, with all those Country Garden news we can expect the sales number to continue to trend lower in July and onwards. And that means the real estate sector companies including home improvement companies, agents, renovation companies... etc is going to suffer. Furthermore, in previous times, local governments would generate funds by selling land to real estate companies to raise money. However, since no one is buying properties at this time, local governments will not be able to do that, and that means a lot of cities would go bankruptcy one after another.

Imagine you have everyone in the country piling generations of wealth into the real estate that is dropping in value but you have no way to pay your mortgage back. And in reality is everyone in Chinese is doing it one way or another. The thing is the Chinese stock market is one of the worse performing stock market in the last decade, in order for your value to not shrink you need to find ways to achieve preservation of capital, and real estate became the primary tool for Chinese people to achieve that goal. And now, over 40% of people has over 2 properties, but that means leverage.

And we know what it means when you have leverage in a bear marker: it won't end well. You're borrowing against your future income to bet the price of the properties would go up. But you do not have future income anymore, and the price of the property continues to go down. But since properties are illiquid by default there's no other way to escape from this losing investment so for most people their best bet is to continue to pay their mortgage for a way out. This means the next 1-2 decades people would not be able to spend on anything extra and they are probably going to get their Lost Decades almost for sure.

Also, USDCNY just made multi-decade high. It's pretty obvious where the trend is going this time.

https://i.imgur.com/xFIaNKu.png

p.s: Communism does not work, but I thought we already know. $MCHI


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Tesla Cuts China Price of Top-End Model Ys in Latest Salvo
By: 
👤 The Tech InvestorCommunity Lead :)) 
💬 634
   Aug 14, 2023

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-cuts-price-top-end-002032371.html

Tesla Inc. has cut the price of its two higher-end Model Y vehicles in China by 14,000 yuan ($1,900) in the latest salvo in a bruising price war.

I think we can see the price cut for Tesla happening more in the future in China. The reality is that the Chinese people are not in good shape now and they do not have money to spend anymore. So the only reasonable thing Tesla can do now is to cut and cut and cut to at least get their business going and see how it goes.

But in the meantime companies like $nio or $xpev will suffer even more. There's no way you can compete with Tesla on price drops like that.

$tsla


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Roblox ER
ER is not great and the numbers do look bad across the board.
By: 
👤 The Tech InvestorCommunity Lead :)) 
💬 634
   Aug 12, 2023

Their user base and hours engaged are still growing. But their cash flows are not going anywhere, and their COGS and SBC and Developer Exchange Fees continues to go up faster than their revenue and cash growth so this is becoming a loss-making metaverse story that the market dislikes in the current macro environment.

https://i.imgur.com/3dU0wu2.png

Their stock-based compensation is growing at such a rapid pace that the chart literally looks like a stock market breakout to me. It also seemed being an employee rather than a shareholder is a better idea at the moment. It is evident that their shareholders will continue to suffer in the current and upcoming quarters.

Layoffs might be a good thing for their shareholders.

https://i.imgur.com/DHU6w8D.png

$rblx

Source:

  • https://ir.roblox.com/financials/quarterly-results/default.aspx
  • https://s27.q4cdn.com/984876518/files/doc_financials/2023/q2/SH-Letter-Q2-23-08-09-23.pdf
  • https://s27.q4cdn.com/984876518/files/doc_financials/2023/q2/RBLX-Q2-2023-08-09.pdf

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Datadog ER
Their ER is not great. But could it be because the expectation is way too high?
By: 
👤 The Tech InvestorCommunity Lead :)) 
💬 634
   Aug 09, 2023

This company grows their OCF like 40x in 4 years. When's the last time you see a company growing OCF 40x in 4 years and has a stock price slashed 70% from the peak? Is it a good time to buy the dip yet? :) $ddog

https://i.imgur.com/nQDgUKi.png

https://i.imgur.com/bS21m77.png


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Portfolio Review 2022
My account is down 65% from all-time-high. It was so bad.
By: 
👤 The Tech InvestorCommunity Lead :)) 
💬 634
   Jul 30, 2023

I do not actually have a 2021 review, so this might be a follow-up post to my previous 2020 SaaS review post linked below. The majority of my stock holdings in 2022 were in this list, and my holdings haven't changed much anyway. So this post should provide some reasoning about what I do and why I think they make sense.

Also, I do not own all of the stocks mentioned in the list or on this page. In fact, I usually hold less than 5 stocks at once. I usually only invest in things that I know well or have used in the past either for work or for other purposes. This is why monitoring too many stocks is impossible for me because there simply aren't that many stocks that I am familiar with. So I do not bother, and that also means I do not need to lose money in trades that I would regret. And I think you should also do the same thing, too.

2022 was a bad year for tech or growth (or me). We had a great tech bull-run in 2020 and early 2021, and it came to a sudden stop and reversed later in the year. While there were signs that the market could peak in 2021, there's very little guidance how much of a pullback you will get and when it would happen. And by late Feb 2022 my portfolio was already down 30% from all-time-high and it wouldn't make a lot of sense to sell after that. What if the maximum retracement happens to be 30%? And it turned out that's the beginning of my misery.

And then the Russia-Ukrainian war broke out, and the Fed started aggressively raising rates. There were talks of inflation in late 2021, but no one expected it to reach 6-10% in major economies by mid 2022 that leads to a 25x hike by mid-2023. And then Jarome Powell has been literally talking non-stop everyday since then. My portfolio has been shrinking a little bit every day since March 2022 toward the end of the year. It's a painful period in tech investing that I will remember forever.

On the companies' side, we have tech companies talking about elongated sales cycles or lowering guidance. It seemed likely that we are going to have a recession, and companies become cautious in their spending and tried to optimize their spending, and this caused cloud to suffer quite a bit. Tech companies have also implemented many cost-cutting measures, and that caused mass layoffs for tech. Everything looked so miserable that time. Additionally, when it comes to layoffs in North America, it seems that most companies chose to provide 3-6 months' severance for the employees they let go. As a result, the earnings numbers have been severely impacted, and that drove all the ratios (p/e) to high or negative numbers.

While some companies get greatly impacted by macroeconomic shocks, there isn't really much of a change in fundamentals for most of the companies I invest in. I haven't made many changes to my holdings for the year 2022 (and actually not much change in 2019) because I was already too late to do anything. In retrospect, I wish I had been able to at least hedge a bit; then I might not have experienced this level of misery.

However, while the overall market is in a recession / inflation selloff, the companies in which I am investing are still showing good growth in their core business metrics like revenue, MAU, DAO, RPO, retention, hours, headcounts and such. So, if they can survive the macro downturn maybe there is a chance they will emerge stronger then before the rate hikes and recession.

Tesla is a great example of that. Despite Elon Musk doing all kinds of stupid(?) things on Twitter and so on in 2022, it also appears that the sales numbers are just going up every quarter for Tesla, and he's able to build one gigafactory after another. And you can see there's more and more Tesla running on the streets, so it's expected that they're gonna have a good future and might dominate in many areas like EV, AI or robotaxi. Also, at the bottom of the selloff Tesla was traded at around forward p/e or 20! It was insanity. Imagine you can invest the future of EV, AI or robotaxi at this level of valuation. In retrospect we should thank Elon for the mess he has done to Twitter. That said I have very tiny positions in this one and I wished I had more of this during the bull run.

Meta has also shown a strong comeback since late 2022. On the outside, you see Mark wasted 2B in his metaverse project and failed. However, what you don't see the mainstream media would tell you, is that, as wealthy and successful as Mark is, he is willing to do whatever it takes to make his company successful. Meta has actually quickly bounced back 350% off the bottom in a year as of today, also maybe because, at the end of the day, they're still the no.1 marketing platform for marketers. Google and Snap doesn't even come close. Keep in mind there's a chance Meta stock price can continue to go up in the coming years because maybe there are still some takeaways from a 2B failure that enable you to build something greater with their Meta Quest or Threads offerings. You never know.

Snap. So Snapchat is what kids do to get a date and be social these days. I had to use it a few times per month with my kids. Prior to their crash, they mentioned they want to double their revenue in the next (or every, I forgot) three years. And yes, that claim itself could have justified maybe $20 or $40 or $80 per share. 2x every 3 years is a lot! And then the bear market, plus the Apple Privacy tracking, drove the price way down to around $10 per share. But that aside, almost all of their core metrics are growing, and people love them. I don't see myself using other silly apps with my kids anyways. I traded it a few times but most of them but the net result is like 0 again for this one.

https://i.imgur.com/aiq6sg0.png

Now, Netflix stocks. I actually placed a few bets on Netflix stock on the way down and on the way up. And the total profit from those bets was about 0. On the business side, Netflix rolled out the ad-supported tiers and wants to charge you extra for sharing accounts. The media criticize them for doing that, and some analysts even claim they're the losers in streaming on TV. What a joke! If Netflix is a service that 4-5 people are willing to share accounts with in the first place, there's a chance that when you charge extra, you would end up getting 2x or more revenue. Having an ad-supported tier is also seems right thing to do. If you compare it with traditional TVs that give you tons of ad time, you'll know what Netflix do is way less annoying. No one can justify going back to traditional TVs and tolerate such annoyance when you have to pay for subscriptions. However, it would be much nicer if I hadn't bet Netflix stock on the way down but at least I am not losing money on this one in a bear market.

I have also traded Airbnb stocks a few times, and then I lose money lol. People go on TV and talk about pent-up demands in 2021 and 2022, yet this never materialized and Airbnb stock just kept going down. What a shame. Recently their stock price seems to be going back up again. I wonder could it be that they are still a cheaper alternative to hotels and experiences, and competition is non-existent in the bed and breakfast space. No one uses VRBO now btw. Although they may not be known for innovation, their cashflows are great. Investing in them seem like a good idea.

I've also invested in Square and Roblox because they're extremely popular applications that people use in gaming / education / finance. Their DAUs are constantly going up, and they have been successful in either scaling up their revenue streams or enhancing their economy. They should continue to be good companies to look into in the future if we decide to move towards a blockchain future or a metaverse, if one ever exists.

Roblox is especially interesting to me because I was thinking what I would do if I were to create a coding platform like Roblox. And then I realized how difficult it would be. In order for people to create games, you need to have players on the platform first. Also, if the platform doesn't have good games, there won't be any players joining. Therefore, it becomes a significant chicken and egg problem that not many companies can overcome. However, I ended up not holding this stock at the end of 2022 since I do not have high confidence in the metavese taking shape. I intend to buy it back if necessary and I can see this stock going much higher if a few catalysts happen.

A few other companies worth mentioning are Datadog, Cloudflare, Snowflake, Hashicorp, HubSpot, Atlassian, Monday.com and many others. You can see the user count, revenue, and RPO of these companies continue to grow in 2022. dog and net has been a tool that I have always used. It is a tool that I have no interest in switching from, nor do I believe it is easy to switch away from. And I suspect that is also true for tech companies in general and it might be semi-standard devops tools for software companies nowadays.

And since those companies have achieved economies of scale there are many more things they can potentially do now. Many start to have cybersecurity offerings and use cases, and their valuation started to seem reasonable at this level. Cloudflare for example continues to roll out features that could bring compute over from other cloud providers, and even my website has things built on top of their service. Those are very important things that, if played well, could bring in significant revenue in the future.

Hopefully, the market will be less harsh on those SaaS names in 2023 and their stock price can climb back up a bit. This is where most of my losses come from in 2022, unfortunately.

2022 has been harsh for investing for me. I learned a lot during that year, and it was the first time I experienced a large bear market while all the companies were still growing without limits. So far in 2023, I am doing okay, and I hope that the tech companies can continue to cover losses and climb higher later in the year.

$tsla $meta $nflx $mndy $abnb $snow $rblx $sq $hubs $shop $hcp $ddog $net $snap $upst

p.s: 2020 SaaS review: https://www.stockideashq.com/posts/IzMNNdck/2020-saas-review/.


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Cloudflare Pages is not that bad
So Workers does have some utilities that you cannot get easily from other service providers.
By: 
👤 The Tech InvestorCommunity Lead :)) 
💬 634
   Jul 24, 2023

I am traveling in Taiwan rn. I was so surprised when I was looking at the website and then I noticed the latency is so bad here. The circumference of the earth is about 40,000 km and, in theory, it would take light an extra 0.15s to travel between my server and the client roundtrip. However, it turned out that instead of getting 0.15s of latency increase, I can see up to seconds being spent on fetching the requests, this it would take more than 5s to render the whole page in some places. And this is such a bad user experience that renders the website unusable.

And then I remember I used to put my website on Cloudflare Pages and hook it up with Worker KVs, which gives you a globally replicated low-latency key-value storage by default. Once I move my website back to Cloudflare it loads fast again in this part of the world, but I am assuming that would be sure for most places in the world. Switching to Netlify turned out to be a bad technical decision. To be fair, it might not be Netlify's fault but rather a combination of Cloudflare and Netlify network calls that caused some disruptions.

$net


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Earnings Next Week
Companies like Tesla and Netflix are hinting that we are going to have a bumpy trading sessions ahead.
By: 
👤 The Tech InvestorCommunity Lead :)) 
💬 634
   Jul 23, 2023

My gut feeling prediction for next week's ER:

  • $MSFT is up
  • $SNAP is up
  • $SPOT is up
  • $GOOG is down
  • $META is down

Reason for the prediction: AI is going to be a thing in the future and Microsoft has put together the AI puzzle pieces relatively well compare to their competitors, so the future of Microsoft should continue to be ok. As a dev I had no choice but to use Github and Linkedin and whatever everyday at work. Also, keep in mind they have just got Activision Blizzard, sort of.

Snap has their own AI, too. Snap is how people social and go get a date in the modern age.

As for Meta, so far there is no evidence to suggest that Threads will work out eventually. And we also know AI is disrupting Google, and we would be using a search engine quite differently in the future. There's a chance you would never need to go visit Google again for normal daily activities, and instead, you do it thru either a watch or a glasses.

Spotify is how people listens to their music. It's just a product that people generally loves.

Next week is going to be big.

https://i.imgur.com/ZUT37Km.jpg


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Micron
It is hard to imagine that a 50-year-old company can pull off any new tricks.
By: 
👤 The Tech InvestorCommunity Lead :)) 
💬 634
   Jul 01, 2023

Micron is an amazing company whose revenue is declining and is lower than their COGS, yet their stock price is up 4% in after-hour trading before it slips. In my opinion now is a good time to trim investments that are not going anywhere in the long run. It's producing low-end semi components and you can find similar companies in other countries doing pretty much similar things.

Hard to imagine how many companies in the semi sector can justify this high stock price in the long run. $mu


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