Summary
- We're diving into SentielOne, a well-funded cybersecurity stock that is taking over the mid-market share.
- Vladimir Dimitrov joins us to break down the Intel Mobileye IPO, thoughts on Exxon Mobil and Oracle.
- We play bullish or bearish with breaking headlines for the week.
Editor's Note: This is the transcript version of the show we recorded on Wednesday. Please note that due to time and audio constraints, transcription may not be perfect. We encourage you to watch the show embedded above, listen to it below or on the go via Spotify or Sounder .
Bring your questions and join us live every Wednesday at 12 pm ET.
Stock Market Live is back in session. Welcome, everybody. Austin Hankwitz. He's with us as all ways. Daniel Snyder here. Thanks for tuning in. We’ve got Alexander, Anna, David. We've got Johns, multiple Johns now. We're going to have to make sure that the John's differentiate themselves.
Welcome, welcome, welcome back.
I love that.
Yeah. They're both all caps. True.
Stephanie is back with us. Michael, Mark, appreciate all you guys showing up hanging out with us for, if it's your East Coast lunch hour. I don't know if you're over in the UK and you're having a pint. Cheers. Welcome to the show. So glad that you're here joining us. Let's just go ahead and dive right in. We got a lot to pack into this episode within the hour. I want to make sure we get to all of that. We are joined by a special guest today. He's a Seeking Alpha Marketplace author, goes by the name of Vladimir.
He has recently launched a Marketplace service called The Roundabout Investor. And I want to get to him because today -- I don't know if you know this, Austin. Today seems like one of the big news items is that Intel ( INTC ) has just spun off their Mobileye unit in the IPO today. On the market, it is trading currently. You can go and check it out. We're going to ask him about his thoughts because he recently wrote an article on it. And so, we're going to hear from the man himself.
I’m excited. I have no idea what you're talking about. And I would argue that a lot of people might not know what you're talking about. So, I'm excited to be that guy asking the questions, digging deeper, trying to put these normal folk on my back, make things easier, make things comprehensible. But I think at Intel, I think of an old boring business, but if you're saying that there's a new stock on the block, I'm here for it, Daniel. Let's do it.
Yeah. Autonomous driving too. Something for the future. I love this car. So obviously, if you're new to this show, we always ask you, you know, feel free to jump into the chat. Talk to us, ask questions to us, ask it to our guests, we ask for engagement, and the first engagement we already got from John today who I don't know. John, apologize if we called you out, man, but he says engineers always write in all caps. It's not yelling, but he wrote that in all caps.
So, he's staying true to his word. John, appreciate you hanging out with us, man. Let's get it into it. Let's just start with a quick overlook of the market. Where are we right now? What's going on? Actually, as I popped this up, you're going to see boom. There's Mobileye trading right there. Look at that. Nice green spike on the day. Already up 33%. We'll see where it closes obviously. Let's go ahead and take a look at the [[SPY]] ETF with the S&P 500 benchmark.
So obviously, we're seeing four days of green in a row now. Right? Why is that happening? Well, let's go back and look at the [[VIX]] real quick. The VIX is tanking, the volatility index, which measures the adjusting what does it be? At the money calls and puts of the market. So, we're seeing, obviously, either it's unwinding of puts or buying of calls, we see the volatility coming down right here. Obviously, breaking through that 28 level, that it seems to like to hug.
We still do have that gap below the market here. And I want to add another one. I want to add the dollar index to our look this week. The US dollar, king dollar strong dollar, right, has completely broken through this minor trend line that we had to the upside. Some would say that's a rising wedge. Right? We saw that in a chart the other week. Rising wedge breaking to the downside. I think from here, I'd be looking at this support down here from the long-term trend line.
So that's around the 108 level. We'll see what happens if it goes right there, touches right as the Fed comes out to start speaking again. Right? You got to keep an eye on that. And then also I wanted to point out something to everybody is, this is -- I don't like to follow Forex much, but I keep an eye on this. So, this is the Japanese yen. This is the correlation between those two. And what we're seeing is, we're seeing intervention.
Like, look at that. Forex doesn't typically move like that. And that is from the Japanese Central Bank coming in and trying to stabilize their currency with the inflation they have going on over there, which is the correlation to the dollar index. So that explains why we're seeing the breakdown here as well. Let's look at the tech sector. Obviously, tech. We've got questions. But let me go back to the daily chart here and throw on our study of the moving averages. One second. There we go. Let's just look at some levels here. Obviously, we filled the gap from back here on October 7. Went ahead and moved through there. So where are we going from here? Well, time will tell.
But obviously, what I did recently is, I drew my Fibonacci levels from most recent high to the lowest low that we just experienced. That's why we're seeing some resistance right here. And now if we break through, we can see the Freddie moving average right here is at 288. The next level I would be looking at. And then quick look at the Russell. Of course, Russell also moving like crazy. See, most recent high, most recent low, if you want to look at it like that. It's been breaking through the moving averages. It doesn’t seem to have a problem.
There is this gap above the mark here as well as the 200-day moving average, some levels to watch. Remember, we could always see a rally up to the gap with a pullback in reversal or we could always see it go and fill the gap, probably find resistance here at the 200-day moving average though, and then you might see a reversal as well, just some levels to keep an eye on. So that's an overall look at the market. Let's go ahead and get into initial thoughts real quick. Let's keep it going because…
That's so interesting. Before jumping to that, I think it's so cool, Daniel, that you're talented enough to, like, recognize these gaps and these moving averages and say, hey, like, you know, just by looking at what this is, kind of thinking about, you know, historical patterns and different types of human psychology with traded, you can kind of see we got this moving average were headed towards, we got this gap to fill. I’m just fascinated by it, man. I love it. I love it.
It's honestly, man. When you really boil it down, I mean, I read books all the time about market psychology, market trading. I've actually started dabbling in the world of quantitative trading, trying to continue with the quanta doing because if you really break it down, pretty much over 75% of the volume at least, that's like a very conservative estimate for me. 75% of the volume traded every day is by quantitative machines.
Totally.
I want to know what these quantitative machines are doing so that when I go in and I'm starting to look for entries and exit points, I can then evaluate what you know, if it's especially a trade, but then also for longer term investments. Like, if I can wait, we've talked about Boeing ( BA ), we’ve talked about 3M ( MMM ). We’ve talked about all these companies. If I can see a level that I think a quantitative trading strategy might take it down to where I can get a great entry point and not have to worry about that moment where you're like, I just bought a stock and it's immediately going down already.
Like, what the heck? How is this happening? Like, if I can avoid that emotional affect myself, I want to. And so that's why I've always done that and dabbled into it. So happy to share with everybody. I would love. Oh, thank you, Stephanie. Appreciate it. She says Daniel is the man. I love it. Daniel used to -- I was called Daniel's son growing up, so maybe I'm more of, you know, waxing the car, painting the fence. But making this Miyagi. Just kind of curious, everybody that's here with us today, like, how many of you are into technical analysis? Just go ahead and leave us in the chat.
Kind of curious if you guys like that, if you're into it already, if you have other opinions about it, let us know.
I will say I'm always learning more about this, specifically from you and this show, Daniel, because, like, you know, at my core and sort of what we'll get into later is and I think the chat knows. Right? Big fundamental analysis. I love reading the 10-Ks, the 10-Qs, the earnings transcripts. I really enjoy, like, forecasting and building these financial models, thinking about what these companies might be doing in the future. But I have no idea the best time to buy as to what you're saying. Right? And so, for me, that's the hard part.
It's like I know what I want. I know what I want to do. I know where we're going. I just don't know how that might be timed in a way where the macro and what the market's doing. It's just very interesting. It's a cool balancing act. And I think to that point, I think we're really good to do well.
Yeah. No, I certainly agree. And I think everybody else here agrees as well. So, with that being said, let's go ahead and get into initial thoughts. It is time for bullish or bearish. I'm going to go ahead and get started first.
Okay. Let's do it.
All right. So, let's start off. This one is going to be straight gut instinct from you, because you already told us that you don't know what's going on about this. So obviously, I mentioned everybody, Intel's Mobileye, self-driving unit, just went public. Okay. Back in December of last year, some analysts speculated that its valuation was at $50 billion. But now this week, it was looking, I'm not sure what the valuation has come out to right now, but it's looking around $16 billion-ish, maybe plus or minus a little bit depending on how the stock does.
Not to mention that Intel bought this company originally in 2017 for $15.3 billion. So, it's not like it's gone very far right now with how the market has been doing. And in its S1 document, they listed a number of competitors including Advanced Micro Devices ( AMD ), NVIDIA ( NVDA ), Tesla ( TSLA ), Google ( GOOG , GOOGL ), and Apple ( AAPL ). So, what is your gut telling you? Are you bullish or bearish on this Intel Mobileye spin off?
So, before I hit you with my gut feeling, I really don't exactly understand what this is. Are we talking about a self-driving, like, car company? Or is it a technology that is then licensed by these self-driving EVs that can be turned you know what I'm saying, like, what exactly did -- how do they make money? Right?
What I understand, it is all about their ADAS, which is like the self-driving system, which runs off processors and probably programming language, and that's the like, which is why you're seeing them compared to semiconductors, AMD, NVIDIA, Apple. Google has self-driving Waymo that they're working on. But then Tesla is also doing chips in-house. So, I think it's more of the chip side. Obviously, it's the Intel company as well. So, I would, I would, I mean, obviously, we're going to ask Vladimir because he's going to be the expert on all this. But from my good instinct is that it's more processing.
Okay. So, if it's the processing and if it's the type of perspective where you can take this technology, I mean, at the end of the day, it's wild to just think about, you know, I call, like, motor trend and motor sports or whatever on my Instagram. I see all these EVs popping up. EV from you know, Hyundai, EV from Chev, EV from -- everyone's got an EV. And in ten years, I guarantee all of these EVs are going to be self-driving. I don't know how they're going to -- they're not going to build that technology in-house.
It just doesn't make sensing. They're going to license it. They're going to, you know, tap into what's existing. And if in Intel that's -- I think it's called Mobileye is able to take that technology and allow others to use it. Then I think that that to me is cool. I like that idea. I like the idea of selling shovels while there's a goldrush. Right? I think the self-driving thing could turn into a goldrush and if Mobileye and Intel is that company to sell their shovels, I’m here for it.
All right. It's a bullish. Yeah?
I'll take bullish. We're bullish. We're bullish with very little information, but we're bullish.
Yeah. That’s interest. That is initial thoughts. It's your gut instinct.
That's right.
Nice. So next up. This is actually something that you wrote about in your rate of return. The IRS is increasing the contribution limit for 401(k) accounts next to $22,500 from -- up from $19,500 this year. So, an increase of, what is that $2000, $3000 and is increasing IRA contribution limits up by $500 to $6500 for next year. Are you bullish or bearish on this move?
I'm super bullish. I think it's an incredible move. I think a lot of people including myself are in our 20s, 30s, and even 40s, and we’re saying, I want to put more weight to my Roth IRA. I want to put more money away in my 401(k). Maybe I'm not maxing out my 401(k), but now this gives me something to strive for.
Obviously, I'm not going to say it's easy to max out your Roth IRA like, $500, $600 a month now. It's a lot of money for a lot of people, but I think that's really exciting and I'm excited about it. So, I'm definitely bullish about this. I was actually going to ask you a very similar question. But my question is a bit different, so we'll come back to that. But I'm bullish on the IRS allowing us to invest more toward our retirement. More I can put my retirement, the happier I am, especially when it's tax deferred earnings.
Do you think it's weird timing though with the market being pulled back and all these recession fears that they go and increase the limit by this much?
No, I don't. And I think why it's not weird timing is because, you know, and my dad is older, so he was on social security. He just got an 8 point something percent increase to combat inflation. And then we also saw with the tax brackets being kind of extrapolated by that 7% range more recently. I think they're sort of kind of just doing the 3P. Right? It's like, let's do social, let's do tax, let's do retirement. Like, let's just make sure everyone's getting touched on. Everything's fine. I don't think it has to do with the market. I think it just has to do with how it's a big kind of wave of changes as it relates to our financials, personal finances, that is.
All right. Just had to check. All right. Third up on deck is tech earnings. Right? So this might be a twofer for you. Obviously, we had Microsoft ( MSFT ) and Alphabet last night after the bell. And man, we know how that's gone so far. So Meta ( META ) is after the close today, and Apple is after the close tomorrow, should we be bullish or bearish on these next two big tech names in earnings of this week?
I'm going to say bearish, because I think that a lot of the -- so I’ve been looking at some charts lately, right. And I've seen some charts that show since I want to say March, April time, a 7% increase in spending from, like, the consumer side on staples, right, and about 7% to 8% decrease in spending on discretionary. Right? I think that's directly impacting Apple. The new iPhone 14 Pro, I don't know any of my friends that bought them, but I do know -- I remember a lot of friends that brought the 13.
I remember a lot of friends that brought the 12, when times were great. No everyone were weaving in pandemic. I don't know a single friend that bought the 14. I think Apple's going to have some explaining to do. As it relates to Meta, I think they're also going to have some explaining to do. I saw recently that they're laying off their, what is it, their bus drivers because they're not doing with the shuttle drivers. I think it was like a employee perk or benefit for working at Meta, you get to be shuttled from some central location to the campus.
If you're, you know, working in the office, no one wants to do that anymore. I think that Meta is like, having this weird, like, we have to lay these people off. Should we reinvest in the Metaverse? We have all these servers now. Like, I don't - I think they also have a lot of explaining to do. I'm bearish on both. Hopefully, I'm wrong. Right? We all want green, but that's my hot take.
Got you. And Vida, I guess, that’s how your name sound, sorry, if I'm pronouncing it wrong. But Vida is bearish as well. So I kind of agree you on the Meta spot. So funny enough, when I worked at Disney World, we had the exact same parking scenario. Right? You had to go park in a parking lot. You had to jump on a bus.
You had to take the bus into work. It was a whole thing. Aggravating is all get out for the employee. So I wonder if this is actually better for employees, but I guess it just depends on, like, you know, if you're San Francisco Silicon Valley area, like, is there much parking for you? Or are you now going to be walking? I mean, I don't know. But Cool. Great takes.
Too bad a steak though. Given this, we always get $200 pro-headsets. I've seen a lot of cool things about them as it relates to work from home and having these, like, multiple monitors. Like, AR monitors. Have you seen that, Daniel?
Yeah. So, I actually have the quest too, and I've been able to set that up as well. The hard thing for me is like as a content creator, if I'm making videos. And I was playing with this years ago, back at Disney. We were talking to Meta all the time back when they were still Facebook and Oculus at the time. We were trying to figure out if there was a way to actually work in that environment for the stuff that I do. It never worked out. It's just too hard. You need the keyboards. You need the functions.
You need the shortcuts. And it was just like, I'm waiting until they got to get rid of these handles. They got to either turn it into gloves or just make it straight finger movements or whatever. Like, if they can figure that out, I think we could see a rapid progression within the work from home ability. But if you're just sitting at a computer writing Google docs and emails and you have a Bluetooth keyboard, that might work for you.
Got it. Got it. Okay. I love it. Let's jump into mine. So, Daniel, I'm sure you've seen as a lot of people on the Internet. Kanye West is saying some insane things right now. He's been on a bunch of different podcasts, saying some crazy stuff. And as a result, Adidas ( ADDYY ) has dropped him from their partnership. Right?
They're no longer selling Yeezy apparel, shoes, shirts, nothing. Yeezy has gone out of Adidas' arsenal. With that being said now, Adidas also said that they're going to have a $250 million hit to their earnings because how integral that product line was to the business. What are your initial thoughts on Adidas as a company now? That they are gone and kind of severing ties away from Kanye West?
My actual initial thoughts on this is, first off I don't want to talk about it anymore. Right? Like, the dude, he overstepped his boundaries. Secondly, Adidas as a company should have been quicker to the punch on that. Their executives -- I don't know if they went into, oh, crisis management mode. Yeah. Because it made so much money. It does not matter in my opinion. Like, it does not. Like, that dude needs to be sent to Mars. I don't at this point, like, respect for him as an individual is gone. Right?
As for Adidas, yes, in the long term, they did make the right move because there's certain subjects like this. Like, it doesn't matter the amount of money you're making if you are enabling something of that magnitude, that should not be even relevant anymore. Bullish on Adidas, they'll be fine in the long run. They'll be fine. They have plenty of other product lines. Every Yeezy in the world should be burned.
I agree. I think Adidas is going to be fine. I agree with all that entirely. And yeah, it's been very interesting to watch all this, like, just take place in like two weeks' time. It's pretty weird.
Yeah.
So next to this 401(k) contribution, you kind of beat me to it there. But I think what's interesting is that you didn't mention is Charles Schwab ( SCHW ) just published a study in October that 48% of Gen Z and Millennials want crypto in their retirement accounts. They want to see crypto in their retirement. They want to see crypto in their 401(k)s. What are your initial thoughts on this? A volatile asset like that be in people's retirements? Are we getting kind of crypto crazy? Like like, I mean, we're in a crypto bear market. Obviously, what's going on here?
I'm bearish on that move. I don't think cryptocurrencies belong in a retirement account, and here's why. I've been reading a book right now. Actually, I have it right here. I'll show it to you guys. It's called Re-Architecting Trust. And it's by Omid Malekan. He is the adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, who is like the -- he calls himself the explainer and chief of Crypto and Blockchain. When you boil down to what blockchain is? Yes, as a technology, it's great. It can benefit us in so many ways.
And he's breaking down the white paper of Bitcoin and Satoshi and all these other things. The cryptocurrency coins were never meant to be a store of value like people are trying to make them. They were a way to enable trust within the actual technology, which is needed for any currency around the world. And they needed to provide an incentive to the miners to back the entire network, to validate the transactions, to secure the network to the utmost level. Right? The cryptocurrencies themselves, the coins, the tokens that Ethereum introduced, were just these add-ons, but I don't think the value that we're giving them will be something that lasts. I could be wrong, but I am bearish.
I really appreciate the perspective, Daniel. That is very well thought through response. As someone who is bullish on one cryptocurrency, specifically. It's called Chainlink. I think we've talked about it a lot here. And it's not because of its store of value, but instead because it has the utility around the oracle problem in sharing, you know, real world data to the blockchain. I think to your point, blockchains are very incredible technology. Very interesting take. I love it, but I agree with you. How do you think crypto deserves to be in people's retirement? That's a terrible idea. Go get some dividend growth stocks, put those in your retirement instead.
Also, if you lose your value, there's no who just pointed this out? John pointed it out. It's not backed. Right? It's not backed like government bonds. It's not FDIC insured, like, if you lose the money, you lose the money.
Yeah. 100%. And not just that, but a lot of the companies, we think, Celsius. Right? Voyager. Right? All these big companies who have billions of dollars in AUM, now say, oh, sorry, your money's gone. Where did it go? I don't know. Right? It's insane. Good stuff. Last, this is very surprising to some, not surprising to myself, and probably not surprising to you either, Daniel. This last take is headline worthy in my opinion in the creator economy. MrBeast, the awesome content creator he is, is raising a $150 million in a venture round at a $1.5 billion valuation. What are your initial gut reactions to, one, how much money he's raising? Two, what do you think you can even be doing with that kind of money? And three, the billion dollar plus valuation.
So, it's a 10% stake. Hope you said $150 million, right, at $1.5 billion?
Yes.
Okay. So 10% stake, and he's raising it for a fund to be like SoftBank.
No. No. No. He like – okay, so MrBeast has all these, like, you know, probably hundreds of employees. He got his, like, 10 YouTube channels. Right? The company of MrBeast is raising a $150 million, so he can go do a bunch of more cool stuff to grow his business. That is – it’s hard to wrap your brain.
This guy has found a space. He talks about doing a space video. I've seen that before. Okay. So got it. So he's raising it as a personal company funding round. Got it. Man, I think that's interesting. I mean, I'm bullish on MrBeast as a creator. The guy has figured out algorithms, has created great content, has put a great team around him. The funding. Why?
So I think -- so from my perspective, he's got 200,000 right now that are businesses under this umbrella. Right?
Burger and chocolate, right?
The first one is -- yes. The burgers have already done a $100 million in sales over the last two years. And the chocolate is already going to - is on pace to do $40 million-something this year. Chocolate is much more profitable, and the chocolate business raised from 776, shrug capital and other, like, you know, notable VCs. So, I think this move is him coming for like a Nickelodeon, like a Cartoon Network. Like, I think this is him laying the foundation for the next ten years of building his own ecosystem of content and creators within that ecosystem, as well as being able to sell products directly, physical products, right, directly to his watchers, not just advertisements.
Or what if? Or I love what if. He's raising the money to take his current business ventures in America and take them international.
That makes a lot more sense.
That would be my other guess. He’s doubling down on what he knows is working. If he has the international presence on YouTube and is the creator that we all know. Right? Worldwide audience, why not? Right? You could be the next Korean BTS valuation. I'm bullish on that.
Yeah. I'm too.
And, yeah, I think he can pull it off. I think he has enough business people around him and enough creators and everything else. I think the guy has got a long, long path in front of him.
Great. Just turned 24, like, couple months ago.
He's twenty four?
Twenty-four years old man. What am I doing with my life? All right. There we go, everybody. And we got some comments over here. So, Vida says Adidas will be fine, but likely will partner with someone more interesting like Lizzo. I love that.
Are you interested in Lizzo?
And he says if your employer provides the match on your 401(k) do it. If they do not, invest in a Roth to avoid RMDs and you would not be taxed on gains and dividends on your equities. Well, look at this tax advice. I'm going to add bonus, is that the Roth passes to your beneficiary tax free. Denise also says, no crypto retirement accounts. Companies have a fiduciary responsibility to provide appropriate investment for their 401(k) plans for their employees. So, companies would be open to potential liability lawsuits. That's a good point.
That's interesting.
Alright. Let's keep the show moving on. Now look, we're going to go and play the guest stock because I love this. You looked out a stock that you want to communicate to our audience here about why you think that it might be a good buying opportunity. Honestly, I’ve never heard about this stock until you brought it to my attention. I think it's an interesting one as well. So, we're going to play a quick game, guess the stock. Obviously, I'll give you these couple of hints.
If you think you know what it is, jump into the chat, let us know you can do a ticker symbol, you can let us know the company name. And let's get into it. So, number first up. This is a cybersecurity stock, which you might have seen. It is based out of Mountain View, California. Hello with Silicon Valley. It IPO-ed on June 30, 2021. So just last year, added $1.3 billion valuation. It’s the official secure -- cybersecurity sponsor of Aston Martin's Cognizant, sorry, F1 team.
So if you're an F1 fan, maybe that gives you a little hint. Dan Loeb's Third Point Capital, which we mentioned earlier, a nice hedge fund that was in our Disney episode because we took a big stick. He owns 20 million shares of the stock with an average buy price of $42.78 according to his last 13F filing in July. But the fund did sell $1 million shares of the stock during that quarter. Interesting. The company's competitors\other competing services in the market include CrowdStrike, Bitdefender, Sophos, and Microsoft Defender.
And we've got a couple of guesses. We got Okta. We got CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike. No. Not CrowdStrike. No. Shack not Fire Iron. All right. So, you want to know what it is? This company was formerly known as Sentinel Labs Incorporated, but today we know it as SentinelOne ( S ). Alright, Austin. So, what's the rundown on this?
Let's talk about SentinelOne. Okay. So, to your point, you know, who is this company? What's going on? I think a lot of people might not be familiar. So, here's the deal. They know, just last week, we talked about on the Wall Street Journal. I think it was part of our bullish and bearish banter. That there was an article claiming that 2,200 chief information technology officers across multi-billion-dollar company's biggest focus for 2023. It was ramping up their cybersecurity efforts.
And it's criminal, in my opinion, to drop such a cool headline like that to our listeners and not have some sort of stock idea that could benefit from a -- from such a clear secular growth trend. Right? And that's what we're going to be doing today. So, I'm -- let's talk about SentinelOne, a cybersecurity provider for endpoint, cloud, and identity protection. Austin, what is end point protection? How -- what does it even mean? How is it understood? How does it fit into a company's ledger cybersecurity stock?
Good question. Think about it like this, Daniel. Let's say you're a company with hundreds or even thousands of employees. All of your employees are using laptops and smartphones to complete work, communicate with one another and access private data. The actual device itself like the laptop, the smartphone, the tablet, that is the endpoint device. That's the last point of contact with the company's network outside of a firewall. You guys follow me here, end point device outside the firewall. This is why our bosses always tell us, you know, don't do personal stuff on your work computer. Don't download those personal apps on your work phone. Don't do that stuff on our computers. So let's now pretend one of those endpoint devices that your employee is in possession with has been compromised, if this was a phishing email, if they downloaded a weird file, whatever, but it's compromised by a hacker. Since this device can access all the company's private data, so can now the hacker. And having an endpoint protection strategy in place is essential for every single company that uses technology if you just think about it right, to do work because every endpoint device can be a point of attack from hackers.
And with the number of endpoint devices increasing exponentially because of remote work, the risk of cybersecurity and cyberattacks increases as well. So the large part -- I'm sorry, the hard part about all of this is these attacks are taking place at the intersection between humans and devices, humans and machines. Right? So there's a bunch of room for error with humans. We're always making mistakes. We're clicking links. We're downloading stuff.
We get phished in emails. It happens. But traditionally speaking, when an endpoint device is compromised, it takes a very well-trained cybersecurity professional to not just recognize that the attack is taking place, but to also isolate the endpoint device from the broader network to make sure that more damage isn't done. And when I say damage, I want to remind everyone cybersecurity tax costs over $8 million in the US. So now you understand endpoint security, why it's important? How it impacts all of us if we're working remotely, working from home.
What is SentinelOne? How are they working in this space? So through artificial intelligence, SentinelOne is able to detect, investigate, and respond to a cyberattack. There's a bunch of reasons in my opinion, to be excited about SentinelOne. We'll talk about the reasons to be excited and reasons you might want to be on the sidelines. And then I'll let, obviously, we'll have one chime in and give their own feedback. So the first reason to be excited is their earnings. Right?
The company in my opinion is crushing it. Annual recurring revenue grew a 122% to $439 million with revenue captured during the most recent quarter being over a $103 million up 124%. They added a record number of customers during the quarter, 1100 customers sequentially quarter over quarter. That's insane. Total customer crowd count grew 60% year-over-year to over 8600 customers. Customers with annual recurring revenue of a $100,000 or more, right, so these big paying customers grew by a 117% to 755, and they're customer wide, so every customer. It’s not just the high paying ones.
Dollar based net retention rate hit an all-time high of a 137% land and expand. Right? Their gross profit margins came in at 65% up 6% year-over-year with those non-GAAP margins hovering around that 72% up 10% year-over-year. Operating margins increased 42% year-over-year. However, there's still an unprofitable company. And a wonderful thing which we'll talk about soon. Well, the, I guess, operating margin expansion being a wonderful thing that is. So finally, their balance sheet is strong as ever, $1.2 billion.
No debt, which I think is great considering where we are headed toward a looming recession if we're not able to run right now. I don't think this is a type of company that's probably going to thrive during macroeconomic uncertainty, but it’s so good to have no debt. And now looking toward the next quarter, $111 million in revenue, love it, similar operating margins, similar gross profit margins. Second reason to be excited back to what we're talking about with those operating margins is the operating leverage, right?
As a percent of total revenue, the research and development, sales and marketing and general administrative costs all came down year-over-year as a percent of revenue. Right? Operating leverage, they're seeing that it's great. 32% decrease in cost as a percent of revenue when compared to the quarter last year. They're not only growing exponentially as a company, but the economies of scale are beginning to kick in. The last reason I think someone would be excited is a lot of these really cool stuff at Bank of America ( BAC ) recently published about them, CrowdStrike and Microsoft specifically this quote about endpoint security.
So as you guys know, I think, you know, these big banks go around that, these little check-ins with the companies in the coverage universe. And after their check-in, Bank of America came out and said, end point security spending remains resilient despite macro pressures. And partners noted that August and September were two of the strongest month of sales since COVID began. Our check suggests that SentinelOne's sweet spot is still the mid-sized enterprises.
SentinelOne benefits from co-selling with vendors like Zscaler ( ZS ), and it also tends to have more partner friendly culture than its peers. So those are the reasons to get excited, reasons not to get excited, reasons you might stay on the sidelines for the cybersecurity company. The first one, is cybersecurity is very fragmented. Right? So I'd imagine if SentinelOne wants to continue to grow and become one of these massive decabillion dollar enterprises, they need to continue doing this merger and acquisition stuff.
They just bought a company recently. A lot of acquisitions, I think, are on the table here. Two, they're unprofitable. They're very unprofitable. They're not making any money. They have not laid out a path to profitability yet. Three, the valuation is very steep in my opinion. It's still trading around twelve times forward revenue, which is a high price to pay considering the current, you know, macroeconomic environment we're in with raising interest rates and the fact that they're still unprofitable.
And finally, their stock based compensation expense continues to rise, which is only prolonging that eventual flip toward profitability. So if you're a growth investor, you might be drooling right now. If you're not a growth investor, you might think this is crazy. Daniel, what are your thoughts on SentinelOne after I've laid it all out here for us?
That was a great, absolutely great layout that you just ran us through. The first thing I like to do, obviously as you -- if you watch the show, you know, is we're going to go look at the Seeking Alpha factor grades and the rating summary. So, Josh, let's go ahead and throw up that first slide, so everybody can see that the Seeking Alpha authors on this stock currently have a buy rating. The Wall Street analyst also have a buy rating, but our quant system here at Seeking Alpha has a hold.
Let's go into the next slide and look at the factor grades that compartmentalize into what creates the Quant system. So valuation is a B minus, growth is a C, profitability is a C minus, momentum is a C, and the revisions are a B minus. Obviously, the grades you can see three months ago, when they first started by the Quant, just so you guys know that Quant doesn't start looking at the grades and so we have a full year of data on the company from their earnings reports when it starts to compare all the metrics.
So that's why you don't have a six months ago column right there. But from three months ago, obviously, the valuation has improved. the growth has slowed down, profitability has slowed down, or sorry, grew a little bit. Momentum grew a little bit. And EPS revisions from the analysts also has had seen a positive improvement, which is a good sign for us. When we’re talking about, is this a good growth company is a good sign. So let's go to the next slide. I want to break it down. Here's the analyst breakdown of what is going on in Wall Street.
In the last ninety days, nineteen analysts, here's how they break out. Strong buy. There are eleven analysts with a strong buy. Three have a buy rating and five have a hold rating. There are no sell recommendations on the stock. Love seeing that. Let's go ahead and look at the Seeking Alpha authors breakdown on the next slide. You got in the last thirty days, not ninety days, thirty days, seven authors who have given ratings on the stock. There's only one cell, there's one hold, and the other five are buy or strong buy recommendations.
Now the thing that did keep my interests, go to the next slide, Josh, is here's the breakdown of the balance sheet. If you talk about, okay, well, if they're doing stock based compensation, they're delaying all this, they're burning cash, they're not profitable yet, those are all true. Exactly. They just have been created, they've been -- they did two acquisitions, I think, since they've gone public. But they still have $1.22 billion of total cash on the balance sheet. And their debts only is under $30 million.
So obviously, they have a little bit of a run-rate here. They just need to capitalize on it. You've seen the employee headcount increase, maybe that's due to the acquisitions, maybe it's not, maybe it's because of the growth factor that you're talking about and they have momentum on their side and they're actually taking that mid-market share like you're talking about. Josh, we can go ahead and take those off.
Taking a quick look at the chart just so everybody can have an idea of what I see initial thoughts wise on here. Let me go ahead and share my screen or a second one. By the way, ticker symbol is [[S]]. If you're listening to this on the podcast or watching after the fact. So obviously, we saw it went public. It got a nice big old boost. The initial question I had, and Austin, maybe you know the answer to this off the top of your head is, why was the stock having a significant pullback from its peak in November of last year before the markets pullback in January. Do you know why that might have been?
Well, didn't well, I think the [[SPY]] pulled back in January. Wasn't the Nasdaq peaking in November? Great question.
NASDAQ. No. NASDAQ. Well, it came back a little bit, but it went right back towards its highs.
Good question.
I was trying to do some research on it. I couldn't really figure anything out besides that at this moment in time, there was a hedge fund exiting their position. Now, I don't know if that would cause this steep of a drop. Yeah. It's probably not. No. So I was a little curious about that, maybe a stock-based compensation. I'm not really sure what happened there. I was trying to find some research on it. But obviously, we do know that Dan Loeb started entering -- I think it was around this area here, is when Dan Loeb's third point started taking a stake. And he still has 20 million shares. So something to keep in mind.
Obviously, moving averages are all on a downtrend. The stock has been demolished. It's off of the lows. Will it hold? Hopefully, in cyber security, as we've talked about, we think it's bullish for the long term. But they are competing, like I said, against companies like Microsoft and CrowdStrike ( CRWD ) and everything else. So they've really got to lean into their partner program, which I from what I understand, they built out really well and try to do, like, a kind of a backdoor business approach of being buddy buddy, getting all their clients, and then probably eventually in the future if they can make that work, they'll flip the switch. Or they'll try to at least.
Yeah. And I think, you know, from what I was reading to online from this Bank of America report is that CrowdStrike remains the EPP, right, endpoint protection provider for these large, large enterprises. Right? If you're a big company, you go with CrowdStrike. But we have a bunch of small and medium sized businesses. And that I think is what's say no one is going after. All this because I think what's interesting is when CrowdStrike shares their earnings. They say these are the companies paying us over a million a year. Whereas SentinelOne says, these are companies paying us over a hundred thousand a year. Right? So much smaller from that perspective.
Yeah. They definitely have an uphill battle. Right? And I love seeing Stephanie in the chat here breaking down EBITDA and the profit margin. And Denise is also pointing out that it might be a good company for the future to be acquired. Oh, she says, maybe Shopify will buy them? That'd be interesting. I don't -- I think it'd be -- I don't know, they have a lot of cash on the balance sheet. If they believe in their mission, they believe in their acquisitions they're making, if they're trying to become a dominant player, they might try to hold their own as long as possible. That's just my initial thoughts. But – and full disclosure, you are a shareholder of this company. Right?
Yes. Full disclosure. I hold stock in this company. I did not get in when Loeb got in, around those 40s. I've been sort of accumulating in, like, this mid-20s high and all around the twenties. So I have been accumulating shares for share. And I think also it's interesting to point out, there is one of those cell publishers or I'm sorry, one of the articles rather on Seeking Alpha from a publisher. And I read it, and it was interesting to me that it wasn't exactly a sell saying, like, here's, like, why the company is bad and since saying it's still trading at a lofty valuation, which I totally agree with.
So I don't know if you have any ideas Daniel or anyone in the chat has to say or maybe even, you know, send us an email. Hey, here are a couple of things that’s racing red flags to me about SentinelOne. Please share because we love the feedback. We like sharing these ideas with you all. And this is -- we're just always having a good time and opening the dialogue in discussion.
Yeah. For sure. Real quick, I want to answer the question from Chris on in the chat. How do I access the recordings of Stock Market Live? You can go to Seeking Alpha and we actually have our own author profile. It has every episode of Stock Market Live. You can find it there. You can leave comments. We interact in the comments all the time. We love talking to you guys. So check us out there. The one thing, you just mentioned red flags.
And I just remember that I did find one red flag about this company that I was a little worried about and I just want to share it real quick before we get to Vladimir. It's almost time to get in with the Intel Mobileye. We got to talk to them. So I was on Seeking Alpha looking through I'm just going to go back to this simple page, so I can show you guys how I found this. So, on the simple page of Seeking Alpha, you can go all the way down here to the bottom where we have the SEC filings.
And I love looking at the statement of changes and beneficial ownership because sometimes they can tell you a lot. They can tell you when people that are up in the c suite are exiting their stock holdings before they know a bad quarter is coming. And this one caught my eye when I was going through. This is the CFO of the company. So definitely knows what is happening with the financials, David. And he was recently had stock converted from common B shares to common A shares.
So I was like, okay. Well, it's a conversion. It's usually a part of a bigger plan. This is what is highlighted in his rule 10b5-1 trading plan. Now the interesting thing about that type of plan is that is how most of the time C Suite executives communicate to the market, that they have a plan to sell stock over time, so that the market doesn't freak out when they go and sell their stock. But the other thing they don't really tell you is, at any time that C suite member can say, wait, I don't want to execute my plan in this quarter.
If they know financials are going to be good. So keep that in the back of your mind. It could go either way. This guy could be taking it, putting it in a trust or using it for elsewhere. But he got his stock shares awarded and then immediately turn around and sell it. That's something I want to keep an eye on is I get as part of your plan, but also there's been plenty of times where an executive has stepped in and said, hey, don't execute on my plan this quarter.
So, I totally agree. And I think as you know, I worked for a publicly traded healthcare company, and I remember one of our c suite execs sold, like, $27 million worth of stock once. And I asked like, hey man like, what's going on? Why did you sell so much stock at our company? What's, you know, what's going back your head? And he's, like, oh, no reason. I just I got, like, three houses, and I wanted to just pay off my mortgages on them. So, I - that's what I had so I sold them. And I was like, okay. And the stock went up another, you know, 100% over the next couple of years. So, it's just -- it's interesting to me…
Yeah.
But from that I think it's totally valid. But also, like, I think, you know, people sell stock for any reason, but they only buy it for one reason. Right? So I always like to try and get more emphasis to who's buying the stock versus like who's selling it? I don't know.
No. It's a great point. And I'm glad you brought it up for everybody because that is the other side of the coin. Right? It is always great to go in and look at those beneficial ownership to see who is acquiring stock before the quarter earnings and everything else. And obviously, you're right. 100% right. Could be for any reason whatsoever I always just like to keep a little eye on it because sometimes…
Oh, yeah.
…my people and you're like, hold on. Red flag. All right. Put it in a put order. Put it in a call order. Like, whatever it might be. And that's where you really find that Alpha R trade. Now, we take away too much time. Thank you so much for bringing that Sentinel stock to us. I mean, I had no idea this company existed, so I appreciate all the effort you put into that. I'm sure everybody here does as well. But we got to get over to Vladimir who is joining us today.
He is a Seeking Alpha Marketplace Author, you can find them the roundabout investor. Vladimir, why don't you go ahead and jump onscreen here with us? Thank you so much. If you guys don't know, he’s joining us from the other side of the planet right now. So it's obviously nighttime. We appreciate him taking the extra time in his day to join us. Vladimir, why don't you go ahead and just take a quick second introduce yourself as well as the service and what you're all about.
Okay. Hi, Daniel, and thank you for having. Basically, I'm a full time Seeking Alpha Author for like 2 years now. I recently launched a service called The Roundabout Investor, where I focus on finding high quality businesses that are really long term oriented. It's sort of do not succumb to this short termism within the markets. Yeah. It's kind of a unique service and it's a bit hard to understand by most people because what do you mean by high quality businesses, there are no competitive advantages.
But to be honest, it's kind of like, it's really easy finding out all these businesses that do not really go into managing the business on a quarter-to-quarter basis. And yeah, my background is basically in finance. Prior to Seeking Alpha, I was a strategy consultant in the city of London for a number of years. And yeah, now I'm a full time Seeking Alpha Author.
Man, we really love having you part of the family here, man. Like, you -- I've been reading your recent articles and we're going to dive into it. Let's just go ahead. Why am I waiting? Well, let's go ahead and get into it. Obviously, the big-ticket item on the table today is you wrote -- you recently wrote about Intel Mobileye.
Yeah.
And obviously, they're going public. They just started trading a little while ago. We're seeing a big upside. I'm not sure where it is right now. It was at 30% and pulled down 26%. But like, it has seen a massive move, why don't you go ahead and just kind of give us your initial thoughts on? Is this positive for Intel as a company? Or is it kind of worrisome that they're doing this IPO in a down year where IPOs are pretty much tried up and the valuation has dramatically reduced similar to almost similar to what happened with Wework ( WE ). Right? What is -- what are your thoughts?
Yeah. I think most of the people really sort of getting too much out of it. Because at the end of the day, Intel is only selling a tiny proportion of the business. Most of the people don't really realize that it's not the whole business that they're selling. They're selling only around 5%. And that's not really, in my opinion, that's not really a sort of detail giving up on the -- on the whole thing.
So why are they doing the IPO now, though? I mean that's -- do they need the cash? Like, that's I think one of the speculations that's been going on is, you know, Intel is spending so much on capital expenditures. They want a bigger presence in Europe. They want to have their Ohio foundry bill. Are they just strapped for cash? I mean, this is the easiest method for them to race?
I mean, to be honest, they -- Intel will really need some cash in the -- over the coming years, as they’re being on the business and the foundry business. But this is not -- this doesn't have anything to do with sort of needing the capital. First of all, it's a really tiny amount. I think there is around 800 million to 900 million over it. When Intel actually spends $25 billion a year right now and they slowly need to run this up over the coming years. So, yeah, I don't think it's really -- I don't think they're really for the cash out of it.
They in my view, they really want to get their, sort of, their foot in the door, get sort of get the message out there. This is the company and get probably a few quarters or years of sort of SEC filings, get investors familiar with the business. And then I would expect for them to seek some deals with outside investors probably.
There you go. All right. And so just to I mean, Austin and I were a little confused earlier way.
Yeah. I’m not going to lie down. I know what Intel does. The idea that that Daniel kind of painted for me and gave the picture there. I kind of get it. But what IPO-ing? How are they making money? How much money are they making? What's going on here with this stock?
Well, basically, they're the leader in ADAS. ADAS basically is all these advanced driving assistance systems within the cars. So what they do? They purchase the semiconductors. They create this system on the chip. And then they sell it to sort of out of parts manufacturers or auto OEMs that eventually retrofit into the cars. But now with the autonomous vehicles, this field is sort of changing.
Now you need huge investments in software. You also need sort of CPUs and GPUs working in tandem for the whole autonomous driving experience. You also need all these feeds to sort of get data out of and create the software around it. So, the field is changing quite drastically.
So you're saying that they're selling these to be retrofitted. Right? Who's buying these? Who are buying these? They're -- who's buying their products, their software? And what kind of cars are kind of taking this? You said it was ADAD, a d a s?
Yes.
Yeah. Real quick.
That stands for Advanced Driver Assistance System, just for everybody to know.
Yeah. and that's completely different from what Tesla's doing. That's completely different from what Toyota's doing. Right?
Actually, it's similar. Okay. If you think about it.
Yeah. Good time, I have no idea about EVs or self-driving cars. This is just so it's a new world for me right now.
Yeah. It's just about doing sort of with the others. They're coming from a bit of different parts of the market into the whole AV space. And their customers are actually not very well known. They're sort of companies [Ziet and Palio]. These are, like, auto parts within the supply chain, auto parts manufacturer that basically get auto parts and get it to the supply chain to the OEMs. A big client of this is these uptick. They are public-traded, and they are sort of one of the leaders within the AD space. So they own the fleets and they're planning to launch the service?
We got a quick question here in the chat, Vladimir from Christian. He's kind of wondering how does Mobileye differ from Waymo? Do you have some insight that you could share with him?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're different in a way that Waymo owns the fleet. The impact of Google really helps them to when they're launching their robotaxi’s, they own the fleet and basically deal within house. Mobileye, does not plan to own the fleets. They're planning to get the technology, get the software, and then sell it to third parties. Having said that, though, it's worth mentioning that they actually need some fleet to get the data. So, because when you're building all these complex software for the AVs, you do need fleet on the streets to gather data, analyze it, and then create data.
The data. So Vladimir, I'm going to ask you, as of right now, knowing that the spin-off is happening, is this -- would you be invest, I mean, it's only you said what five or six percent of the entire company actually be an IPO. Is that investable right now?
I think so. It probably won't be as liquid as for pension funds and large hedge funds. But for retails, investor hours, team saw. Although, personally, I wouldn't really go for it right now. I mean it's, first of all, it's an IPO. It's a really dynamic market. Most of the peers operate as part of bigger entities. So for me personally, it's not really worth jumping on the train right now before the dust has settled from the whole IPO. And to that point I said…
So that’s exactly what I was going to ask. Right? So you're saying it's not exactly the time. But will you think it's like -- it could be like a retail thing, not exactly hedge funds because it's only 5%. As the dust settles, what are some perhaps like catalysts that would get a retail investor more excited to maybe make the make the jump there? Is it maybe a patent? Is it a technology? Is it like maybe new fleets to test this technology on? What would be a catalyst or two that would get people excited about this?
Likely, it would be a partnership deal, is what I expect. My opinion is that, they're trying to get up some partner involve whether that's a company like Apple, whether it's an auto manufacturer, it's not yet known, but they're definitely looking for outside investors and partnerships.
Yeah. I was wondering about the catalyst too. I want to move off from Mobileye real quick and let's go back to the parent company. Like Intel, do you -- with seeing how much intel is pulled back and hearing the story of what's going on with America and the semiconductors and everything else, do you think Intel as a company would be investable then?
Yeah. It definitely looks attractive at this level. It's a little similar story here for me. I mean, semiconductors are now in the eye of the storm if I should say. We did within this bear market, I mean, there is huge momentum trade that was going on within the semiconductor space. that is now fading with liquidity being withdrawn. There is also slowing growth within the sector. There are huge geopolitical risks within the field. So I would say definitely, there is one of my favorites, but not right now. I'm still sort of taking the wait and see approach on that.
Yeah. Josh, can you throw up that chart that I snagged from Vladimir's article actually between Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD? Because you made this chart, you had it in the article and I thought it was too great to not share with everybody. Meaning, the semiconductor sector has been just completely demolished this year with everything that's happening. And real quick, actually, while we're at it, I think we have a couple slides about Intel as well. Let's go ahead and run through those just so everybody's aware of what's going on with the ratings.
Let's go to the next slide. So Intel from the Seeking Alpha authors have a buy rating. The Wall Street analysts are a hold on Intel. The Quant system is a hold on Intel. Next slide, Josh. And looking at the factor grades, we see that valuation actually is an A plus and profitability is an A plus, which is pretty interesting to me. Growth is a complete F. Momentum and revisions are both D's kind of struggling at these levels, but it does pay a dividend. Right? So we pull up the dividend grades here.
Next slide, Josh, dividend is a B minus for safety, C for growth, A plus for yield and A for consistency. So it looks like the dividend seems to be safe here. So that as a, you know, as a value investor long term play, that the story you're telling me about Mobileye and Intel as a company I agree with you. I think these levels are starting to look a little attractive, personally.
I will personally be a bit careful with the dividend. because Intel building their foundry business right now, they have huge capital, it would have huge capital needs over the coming years. And given the huge opportunity in front of them this dividend might be at risk in the coming years, but that will be certainly be for the greater good in my view over the long term.
Aren't they getting a lot of company from or a lot of funds from the government to build this foundry, though?
Yeah. They also rely on the chipset product. But obviously, they will need internal capital as well.
Got you. Josh, you can go ahead. I'm jumping over here to Intel on Seeking Alpha, but I'm seeing a forward yield of 5.5%.
That's very risky in this sector. Because the semiconductor space that’s very risky.
Right? Share price was down and yield goes up.
Yeah. Totally. Totally. But while that's…
So he makes a good point of, like, dividend, you know, that would be the first thing to cut if they do need to spend a ton on capital. The CapEx. Good point. Any other questions Austin for you about Intel and Mobileye? I had one more thing I wanted to ask, but just want to check.
No. I think that’s all right. The catalysts partnership ideas. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So yeah. No. I just got -- I'm excited to keep my eye on this one. This is really interesting. I really appreciate you sharing this with us, Vladimir.
Denise has a good say, she's over here in the chat says insurance companies across the world want the type of data that Mobileye has to help with their loss models, pricing premium and policy inclusions exclusions. So, Intel slowed out for us at Mobileye will help fund the dividend rather than paying from operating profits. A lot of your thoughts on that because that is actually, I mean..
Big brain.
Definitely a fair point. What I must say is, I have another personal favorite within the field that's I'll keep in secret because it's within my service.
Oh, come on tell them.
But it's -- the question here really is, how do you want to operate this whole business? Do you want to operate it in house with all the other auto related businesses, insurance, and all that kind of stuff. Or do you want to have it separate? This is still not -- still not certain in my view. How should the field settle in over the coming years? Will it be better to be independent? Will it be better to be as part of a bigger entity. That's still the bigger norm.
So do you -- does it rhyme with the Test of My Love.
No.
That I can say.
Oh, okay. Alright. We'll get it from another time. Save it for the service, obviously. So as I mentioned, I was going through all your articles. And I got to ask you this. Moving on from Intel is you wrote an excellent piece about what's going on with Exxon Mobil ( XOM ). And I've said everybody before, I am a shareholder of Exxon Mobil. I have been for a long time. I've seen it go up to the nineties. I wrote it down to the forties, the thirties. I'm back over a hundreds.
But I couldn't help. I have the same question for you as one of the users on Seeking Alpha left on that article. And it's, the article sounded very bullish. You came across very, very bullish about why Exxon Mobil is standing out from its peers. Yet you gave it a hold rating for the stock. Just kind of curious why is that?
Yeah. Definitely long term. The bullish thesis still holds. The problem with this sector is that it's really cyclical and when investor sentiment can really drive the stock price up and down around the fair value. So, seeing this back I first talked about Exxon Mobil back in 2020, when the sentiment around the stock was to the bottom. Seeing this huge investor – swing in investor sentiment is what I don't really like within the company. And it's like fundamental CRD could change quarter by quarter basis and being so kind of up on these quarterly results, the investors is something I don't really like about it. But definitely yeah.
Definitely. I mean, probably investors, readers should not be reading that much into all these ratings if they plan to hold let's say, for next ten years. I'm just putting this rating with the minded people who might be buying or selling for, let's say, the next few months.
Got you. Okay. I'm glad I asked you because I was I'm just looking for clarification because Austin and I on this show, we ask each other all time. What about oil? Where's oil going? You're bullish of bears. Like, we're trying to figure this out. Obviously, it's been the sector that dominated this year, but we know that's not going to continue to happen every single Right? So that's where I had asked. I was like, what is the time frame here, which we always talk about is what's your time frame.
So I'm glad you bought it. Okay. And you also have the huge politicals because when the administration sees all these huge profits, you know, what usually happens. In the UK, they're trying to introduce this tax on profits. So yeah…
And what I just saw on Seeking Alpha’s website, but I didn't know and maybe this is me, just not giving up with oil as well as I should. Exxon Mobil is a $450 billion company now. Oh my gosh. Wow.
They're heavily focused in R&D of other things outside of oil now too, like the hydrocarbons and everything else. Like, they're trying to help lead the charge in that regard, but then also as I think in the news I saw this morning was that they found more oil patches around -- where was that? Got to look it up. One second.
Guyana. I mean, Guyana, I heard that that they just bought some new Guyana. There it is. Two new offshore Guyana discoveries. I mean, they’ve got discovery. They do it across the board. And actually, this was a company put on my radar by my grandfather. And he's been invested in it for a lot longer than I have. So yeah. Interesting company. Yeah, it’s kind of like was under the radar. Everybody wanted to get the props to Chevron. And I was like, there that’s – that’s my warrant kind of the same amount of hype.
Definitely. Definitely. And that should price really well with my sort of philosophy roundabout investments. Because they scored excellent. They continued to reinvest and given us – given us however negative all the prices collapsed, they continue to reinvest in these projects that basically take decades to build and managing this business for quarter by quarter, it's still not working well if you want to secure a lot of your long-term competitive advantage. So, yes.
So, I'm seeing Vladimir on your author page. You publish a lot of content. You are publishing analysis nearly, I'd say, every week, every other week.
I try to.
I mean, I'm sitting right. Very good stuff. That's incredible. One thing I noticed though is, a lot of well at least more recently, a lot of seldom buy ratings. Right? So I guess what I'm trying to say is, I'm only seeing a couple. And Oracle ( ORCL ) is on that list. And I'm not -- I don't mean to blindside you here on some Oracle questions. But isn't Oracle doing this, like, big turnaround? Isn't, like, cloud computing like a big thing for them now? Aren't they like, super focused on growth? It's, like, just this whole secular growth turnaround in Cloud.
Walk me a little bit through maybe Oracle or the next thing you mentioned, like, from a short-term perspective. Perhaps walk me through Oracle for the next maybe six to nine months. Maybe some of the biggest focuses, perhaps maybe some headwinds that they might be facing?
Six to nine months is probably they're basically getting more to the infrastructure space. So…
Got it. Got it.
…usually, they're really strong in the ERP space in the software powered with SAS. But many years they've been sort of a niche player in the deep cloud infrastructure space. And now as the growth slows down, I think we saw an article today about Google in their problems, like the whole growth is kind of slowing down, cooling off a bit after the boom of the post-pandemic recovery.
And Oracle is really trying to sort of get a -- is sort of a premium player in that space, right, if I could say. So, six to nine months, I would expect them to sort of continue doing their growth path, probably accelerate a bit, but to be uncertain. I mean, it's I'm a bit more on the long-term side for that.
Okay. So long term with the work goal, I'm over here looking at their stock chart. They kind of have this long consolidation phase between I want to say, call it 2014 and 2017, 2018. And then during the pandemic, you know, they saw a lot of momentum heading higher. And so, from a long-term perspective, I'm seeing they're paying a little bit of a dividend. What I guess is getting you excited most about Oracle maybe for the next couple of years?
Yeah. I mean, as I said, they're really trying to sort of transition and even their cloud ERP segment is growing at 20%, 30% over the past few years. But since they have lots of legacy business with sort of on premise. They have all these database on premise and transitioning from this slower growth business that's been dominating Oracle for years to the high growth space in the clouds. Takes time. But once you look on the needle surface, you see the huge exponential in these areas.
I love it. I love it.
That’s awesome. Guys – Vladimir, first off, thank you so much for taking this extra time today. We love having you on here. Obviously, Austin had a great point. I was just scrolling down further down your page. I mean, you're talking about you write on IBM ( IBM ), Mondelez ( MDLZ ), General Mills ( GIS ), NVIDIA, IBM, does it say IBM for Amazon ( AMZN )? Or I mean, all the companies, it seems like everybody wants to know about your writing about it. So I personally would recommend everybody go check you out on Seeking Alpha.
Your author page are blown up with articles like Austin pointed out. We loved having you on today. Love the thesis. Love the breakdown. Thanks for answering our questions. Besides Seeking Alpha, are you on Twitter as well? Where else can we find you?
Yes. Yeah. Twitter and LinkedIn as well. I'm on – marketing both pages. So, basically, going on my profile, I think there's a link to my profile.
Man, that's crazy. Vladimir. Thanks for taking the time today. Awesome.
Listen, man. You just earned yourself a follower on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Seeking Alpha. You're a rock star. I really appreciate all the constant analysis. 253 posts. This is incredible. I can't wait to read more.
In two years.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me again.
In two weeks. Two years. Two years. Oh, two years. Two years. Two years. Two years. Two years. Oh, no.
Awesome. You guys set your game up? No. That's no.
Thank you for having me, guys, and have a good one.
Hey, you too. Oh, awesome. What a guy? Josh, let's go ahead and throw up that last slide. We got to start rocking and rolling. Vida as well says, thanks Vladimir. Thank you to everybody hanging out with us today. Obviously, if you want to give us some stock ideas for future episodes, we continue to take those week over week. Email us at stockmarketlive@seekingalpha.com . You can find myself on LinkedIn. I'm there posting stuff all the time. Austin's Seeking Alpha, LinkedIn, Twitter and TikTok.
And TikTok.
I'm always on TikTok. Maybe you -- if you're -- I don't know if any of you are on TikTok. But if you're on TikTok, check me out. Big TikTok guy. Big TikTok guy.
He is a big TikTok guy, and he's crushing it over there. Vladimir Demistrov – Dimitrov, sorry, at The Roundabout Investor on Seeking Alpha. You can also just go check out his author profile, all those articles. He broke it down. And he's a CFA, by the way. So, he likes looking numbers. Let's be honest. All right. Awesome. Anything else from you, man?
Nothing from me, but I do want to throw a name in the hat for next week for our stock idea, Academy Sports. Academy Sports. We've seen a lot about them. Their stock is up 200% since they IPO-ed during the pandemic. It hasn't really seen too much of a pullback. We got a lot of catalysts as it relates to -- it's a very interesting stock. So, I'm going to throw that in the hat please. You know, we got John talking about Dick's. If you have any ideas, just email us.
They've got some good partnership deals. On it. You guys let us know. What do you think about Academy Sports? Should we cover it? Yes, or no? We've obviously got a ton of other stocks that we still got to get to. But obviously, we're building it up. We're going through them week after week. Bringing you the analysis. Thanks for hanging out with us on your lunch hour, your evening, wherever you are. We appreciate it. Thanks for listening. Hit that subscribe. Leave us a comment, rating. Whatever you do. And we'll see you guys next week, Wednesday, 12 PM eastern. Josh, get us out of here.
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