Technology, Capital Markets, Corporate Governance, Leadership, Entrepreneurship
Category: Investing
We recently wrote that “Scale Matters in Tech”. Technology companies that have captured the number 1 or number 2 position within a particular vertical enjoy Economies of Scale including: 1.) automatically getting a seat at the table for sales bakeoffs, 2.) job seekers naturally gravitate toward market leaders, 3.) prospective acquisition targets will find you, … Continue reading Three Activist Investor Targets
Hear that? Someone is listening. In fact, they all are: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, even Apple (who has positioned itself as a privacy champion). AI - more specifically the neural networks that power voice assistants - are far from fully autonomous. Deep learning models require human assistance at this juncture. Fair. It is when companies do … Continue reading AI’s Dark Side – They’re Listening
Based on June quarter earnings call results, management teams have less visibility into Sales pipelines, Revenue forecasts and Profitability in the aggregate than several months ago. This in turn causes would be acquirers to haircut purchase price valuations if not walk away from deals entirely. In the former case, valuation haircuts typically either stall deal … Continue reading Don’t Expect M&A Activity to Accelerate Anytime Soon
Year-to-Date results are in through July 31st 2019 and the CEORater Index outperformed both on an Unweighted and Weighted total return basis. The CEORater Technology Founder CEO Index posted an Unweighted Total Return of 33.1% year-to-date through July 31st 2019 vs. 29.1% for the benchmark (ticker: RYT). Everquote (tkr: EVER) was the top performer on an unweighted basis … Continue reading CEORater Technology Founder CEO Index Continues to Outperform
One of the services we provide at CEORater includes a CEO Personality Profile derived from Natural Language Processing applied to earnings call transcripts. Research out of Stanford University - Charles OReilly and David Larcker - demonstrates a correlation between CEO Personality and company outcomes. Separate efforts apply similar analytic methods toward evaluating institutional investors. Institutional … Continue reading When Evaluating Institutional Investors Ferraris Are A Red Flag.
We tip our hat to LSE for thinking outside the box, moving beyond a commodity business to acquire a somewhat unique data set (one of the big three with Bloomberg and Factset). Blackstone Group (BX.N) acquired a majority stake in Refinitiv from Thomson Reuters (TRI.TO) in October 2018, valuing the company at the time at … Continue reading LSE to Potentially Acquire Refinitiv (fmr. Thomson Reuters Data Business) for $27 Billion
We are doing a bit of work around derivatives exposure. Overnight we reviewed U.S. personal savings rates as a percentage of personal disposable income for the January 1959 - May 2019 period on a monthly basis. The personal savings rate has bounced between 6-8% since January 2013. This is in-line with the mid-to-late 1990's period. … Continue reading U.S. Personal Savings Rates 1959-2019
Facebook imagines a future in which consumers will pay for online and offline services with its cryptocurrency - Libra. Our view is that Libra will eventually enjoy broad adoption. The cryptocurrency floodgates are open, it’s primarily a question as to how Libra and others will be regulated. Regulation boils down to the size of the … Continue reading Facebook Calibra and Libra.
Companies mentioned: Accenture (ACN), Alibaba (BABA), AWS (AMZN), Azure (MSFT), Bottomline Technologies (EPAY), Broadridge (BR), DataRobot (Pvt.), GCP (GOOG), IHS Markit (INFO), Oracle (ORCL), Palantir (Pvt.), Qlik (Pvt.), Solera (Pvt.), SS&C (SSNC), Tibco (Pvt.), Verisk (VRSK). Accenture’s CEO of North America, Julie Sweet, will become CEO of Accenture effective September 1st 2019. Ms. Sweet is … Continue reading Accenture Is Preparing to Double-Down on M&A. We Share Our Ideas for Likely Target Areas.
Our experience is that it is best to take action during disruptive periods - or better yet - at the first signs of trouble. The "wait and see" approach often leads to irrelevance and ultimately death. Deutsche Bank plans to shed 18,000 jobs and exit the institutional trading business while simultaneously investing in technology. This … Continue reading “Wait and See” Does Not Constitute A Strategy
