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Weekly Issue: September Looks Like a Repeat of August

Weekly Issue: September Looks Like a Repeat of August

Key points inside this issue

  • We are establishing a buy-stop level at 9.50 for shares of Veeco Instruments (VECO), which will lock in a profit of at least 13% on this short position.
  • The Hershey Company: Tapping into Cleaner Living with M&A


We ended a volatile August… 

Stocks rebounded from some of their recent losses last week as trade tensions between the U.S. and China appear to have cooled off a bit. For the month of August in total, during which there seemed to be one market crisis after another, most of the major stock market indices finished down slightly. The outlier was the small-cap heavy Russell 2000, which shed around 5% during the month.

Looking back over the last few weeks, the market was grappling with a number of uncertainties, the most prominent of which was the announced tariff escalation in the U.S- China trade war. There were other uncertainties brewing, including the growing number of signs that outside of consumer spending, the economy continues to soften. We saw that consumer strength in Friday’s July Personal Income & Spending data, but also in the second June-quarter GDP revision that ticked down to 2.0% from 2.1%, even though estimates for consumer spending during the quarter rose to 4.7% from 4.3%. I would note that 4.7% marked the strongest level of consumer spending since the December 2014 quarter. We are, however, seeing a continued shift in where consumers are spending — moving from restaurants and department stores to quick-service restaurants and discount retailers as well as online. This raises the question as to whether the economy is prepared to meet head-on our Middle Class Squeeze investing theme?

Another issue investors grappled with as we closed out August was the yield curve inversion. While historically this does raise a red flag, it’s not a foregone conclusion that a recession is around the corner. Rather it can be several quarters away, and there are several stimulative measures that could be invoked to keep the economy growing. In other words, we should continue to mind the data and any potential monetary policy tweaking to be had.

Closing out August, more than 99% of the S&P 500 have reported earnings for the June-quarter season. EPS for that group rose just under 1%, which was far better than the contraction that was lining up just a few weeks ago. Based on corporate guidance and other factors, however, EPS expectations for both the September and December quarters have been revised lower. Some of this no doubt has to do with the next round of tariffs that took effect on Sept. 1 on Chinese imports, but we can’t dismiss the slowing speed of the global economy either.

That overall backdrop of uncertainty helps explain why the three best-performing sectors during August were Utilities, Real Estate and Consumer Staples. But as we saw in the second half of last week, a softer tone on the trade war led investors back into the market as China said it wished to resolve the trade dispute with a “calm” attitude.

Without question, investors and Corporate America are eager for forward progress on the trade war to materialize. While there have been several head fakes in recent months, we should remain optimistic. That said, we here at Tematica continue to believe the devil will be in the details when it comes to a potential trade agreement, and much like deciphering economic data, it will mean digging into that agreement to fully understand its ramifications. Those findings and their implications as well as what we hear on the monetary policy front will set the stage for what comes next. 


… and it looks like more ahead for September

This week kicks off the last month of the third quarter of 2019. For many, it will be back to work following the seasonally slow, but volatile last few weeks of summer. The question to be pondered is how volatile will September be? Historically speaking it is the worst calendar month for stocks and based on yesterday’s performance it is adhering to its reputation.

As a reminder, on Sept. 1 President Trump authorized a tariff increase to 15% from 10% on $300 billion in Chinese imports, many of which are consumer goods such as clothing, footwear and electronics.  As we saw, that line in the sand came and went over the holiday weekend and now Trump is once again rattling his trade saber, suggesting China should make a deal soon as it will only get worse if he wins the 2020 presidential election.

In addition to that, yesterday morning we received the one-two punch that was the August reading on the manufacturing economy — from both IHS Markit and the Institute of Supply Management. The revelation that manufacturing continued to slow weighed on stocks yesterday. The direction of Tuesday’s official data, however, was not a surprise to us given other data we monitor such as weekly rail car loadings, truck tonnage and the Cass Freight Index.  But as I have seen many a time, just because we are aware of something in the data doesn’t mean everyone is. 

What I suspect has rattled the market as we kick off September is the August ISM Manufacturing Survey, which showed the U.S. manufacturing sector declined to 49.1 in August. That is the lowest reading in about three years, and as a reminder, any reading below 50 signals a contraction. Data from IHS Markit also released yesterday showed the U.S. manufacturing PMI slowed to 50.3 in August, its lowest level since September 2009. Slightly better than the ISM headline print, but still down. Digging into both reports, we see new orders stalled, which suggests businesses are not only growing wary of the trade uncertainty, but that we should not expect a pickup in the month of September.

In my view, the more official data is catching up to the “other data” cited earlier and that more than likely means downward gross domestic product expectations ahead. It will also lead the market to focus increasingly on what the Fed will do and say later this month. I also think the official data is now capturing the weariness of the continued trade war. The combination of the slowing economy as well as the continued if not arguably heightened trade uncertainty will more than likely lead to restrain spending and investment in Corporate America, which will only add to the headwinds hitting the economy. 

Taking those August manufacturing reports, along with the data yet to come this week – the ISM Non-Manufacturing readings for August, and job creation data for August furnished by ADP and the Bureau of Labor Statistics — we’ll be able to zero in on the GDP taking shape in the current quarter. I would note that exiting last week, the NY Fed’s Nowcast reading for the September quarter was 1.76%, below the 2.0% second revision for June-quarter GDP. There is little question that given yesterday’s data the next adjustment to those forecasts will be lower. 

Adding to that view, we’ll also get the next iteration of the Fed’s Beige Book, which will provide anecdotal economic commentary gathered from the Fed’s member banks. And following the latest data, we can expect investors and economists alike will indeed be pouring over the next Beige Book.

No doubt, all of this global macro data and the trade war will be on the minds of central bankers ahead of their September meetings. Those dates are Sept. 12 for the European Central Bank (ECB) followed by the Fed’s next monetary policy meeting and press conference on Sept. 16-17. Given the declines in the eurozone, the ECB is widely expected to announce a stimulus package exiting that meeting, and currently the CBOE FedWatch Tool pegs a 96% chance of a rate cut by the Fed. With those consensus views in mind, should the economic data paint a stronger picture than expected it could call into question those likelihoods. If central banker expectations fail to live up to Wall Street expectations, that would more than likely give the stock market yet another case of indigestion. 

All of this data will also factor into earnings expectations. Earlier I mentioned some of the more recent revisions to the downside for the back half of 2019 but as we know this is an evolving story. That means effectively “wash, rinse, repeat” when it comes to assessing EPS growth for the S&P 500 as well as individual companies. And lest we forget, companies will not only have to contend with the effect of the current trade war and slowing economy on their businesses, but also the dollar, which as we can see in the chart below has near fresh highs for 2019. 

The biggest risk I see over the next few weeks is one of economic, monetary policy and earnings reality not matching up with expectations. Gazing forward over the next few weeks, the growing likelihood is one that points more toward additional risk in the market. We will continue to trade carefully in the near-term and heed what we gather from the latest thematic signals.


The Thematic Leaders and Select List

Over the last several weeks, the market turbulence led several positions, including those in Netflix (NFLX), Dycom (DY) and International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) — on both the Tematica Leader board and the Select List to be stopped out. On the other hand, even though the overall markets took a bit of a nosedive during August, several of our thematic holdings, such as USA Technologies (USAT), AT&T (T), Costco Wholesale (COST), McCormick & Co. (MKC) and Applied Materials (AMAT) to name a few outperformed on both an absolute and relative basis.

Even the short position in Veeco Instruments (VECO) has returned nearly 18% since we added that to the Select List last March. That has been a particularly nice move, but also one that is playing out as expected. Currently, we have do not have a buy-stop order to protect us on our VECO position, and we are going to rectify that today. We are establishing a buy-stop level at 9.50 for shares of Veeco Instruments (VECO), which will lock in a profit of at least 13% on this short position. 

  • We are establishing a buy-stop level at 9.50 for shares of Veeco Instruments (VECO), which will lock in a profit of at least 13% on this short position.


The Hershey Company: Tapping into Cleaner Living with M&A

When we think of The Hershey Company (HSY) there is little question that its candy, gum and mints business that garnered it just over 30% of the US candy market lands its squarely in our Guilty Pleasure investing theme. Even the company itself refers to itself as the “undisputed leader in US confection” and we look at its thematic scorecard rankings, its business warrants a “5”, which means nearly all of its sales and profits are derived from our Guilty Pleasure theme. 

Not exactly a shock to even a casual observer. 

But as we’ve discussed more than a few times, consumers are shifting their preferences for food, beverages and snacks to “healthier for you” alternatives. These could be offerings made from organic or all-natural ingredients, or even ingredients that are considered to promote better health, such as protein over sugar. Recognizing this changing preference among its core constituents, Hershey hasn’t been asleep at the switch, but rather it has been making a number of nip and tuck acquisitions to improve its snacking portfolio, which aligns well with our Cleaner Living investing theme. 

These acquisitions have played out over a number of years, starting with the acquisition of the Krave jerky business (2015);  SkinnyPop parent Amplify Snacks (2017), Pirate Brands, including the Pirate’s Booty, Smart Puffs and Original Tings brands (2018). Then, just last month, Hershey acquired ONE Brands, LLC, the maker of a line of low-sugar, high-protein nutrition bars. August 2019 turned out to be a busy month for the executives of Hershey, as also in that month, the company announced minority investments in emerging snacking businesses FULFIL Holdings Limited and Blue Stripes LLC. FULFIL is a one of the leading makers of vitamin–fortified, high protein nutrition bars in the UK and Ireland, while Blue Stripes offers cacao-based snacks and treats instead of chocolate ones. 

Clearly the Hershey Company is improving its position relative to our Cleaner Living investing theme. The outstanding question is to what degree are these aggregated businesses contributing to the company’s overall sales and profits? While it is safe to say Hershey has some exposure to the Cleaner Living theme, the answers to those questions will determine Hershey’s overall theme ranking. That level of detail could emerge during the company’s September quarter earnings call, but it may not until it files its 2019 10-K. 

As we wait for that October conference call, I’ll continue to do some additional work on HSY shares, including what the potential EPS impact is from not only falling sugar prices but also the pickup in cocoa prices over the last six months. In a surprise that should come to no one, given the size and influence of the company’s chocolate and confectionary business to its sales and profits, cocoa and sugar are two key inputs that can hold sway over the Hershey cost structure. 

In my mind, the long-term question with Hershey is whether it can replicate the nip and tuck transformative success Walmart (WMT) had when it used a similar strategy to reposition itself to better capture the tailwinds of our Digital Lifestyle investing theme? No doubt transformation takes time, but now is the time to see if a better business balance between our Guilty Pleasure and Cleaner Living themes emerges at Hershey.

WEEKLY ISSUE: Nike offers several points of confirmation; Boosting two price targets

WEEKLY ISSUE: Nike offers several points of confirmation; Boosting two price targets

Yesterday, we received the first of what is likely to be quite a bit on potential tax reform. If the efforts we’ve seen pertaining to repeal and replacing Obamacare are any indication, tax reform will take some time and call for reaching across the aisle. We’re cautiously optimistic such reform can take place in a lasting fashion as it would help give a boost to disposable incomes, which would be a boon to the consumer spending led U.S. economy. We’ll have more on this as it develops as well as implications of other happenings inside the Beltway, from more barbs with North Korea to President Trump’s regulatory reform overview to be shared next week.

 

Making some adjustments to the Tematica Investing Select LIst as we close the quarter

As the new tax policies are put forth and put under the microscope, we will soon close the books on September and 3Q 2017. With a few days left in the current quarter, the S&P 500 is up 3.3%, and we’ve had a number of positions ranging from AXT Inc. (AXTI), USA Technologies (USAT), International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) and Facebook (FB) handily beat that index. Some of our more recently added positions, including this week’s Corning (GLW) and last week’s LSI Industries (LSI) have dipped along with the market these last few days, but our outlook for both remains undiminished.

We have seen some former stalwarts, like Amazon (AMZN) and Alphabet (GOOGL) underperform over the last few months, but we’re heading into the seasonally strongest time of the year for these two companies – we’ll continue to keep both on the Tematica Investing Select List. The same goes for Starbucks (SBUX) as it rolls out its pumpkin flavored beverages and its peppermint mocha alongside other seasonal favorites.

Our price targets remain as follows:

  • Alphabet (GOOGL) — $1,050
  • Amazon (AMZN) — $1,150
  • AXT Inc (AXTI) — $11
  • Corning (GLW) — $37
  • Facebook (FB) — $200
  • LSI Industries (LYTS) — $10

 

We are boosting our price targets this morning on International Flavors & Fragrances and USA Technologies as follows:

  • Raising our IFF price target to $150 from $145;
  • Increasing our USAT target to $6.50 from $6.00

 

These increases offer additional upside, but not enough to warrant subscribers committing new capital at this time. Rather subscribers should continue to own these positions to capture incremental upside and in the case of IFF its dividend stream.

 

Now let’s step back and take a wider view

Our position has been and remains that we are likely to see the recent bout of volatility continue as we close the books on the third quarter of 2017 and roll right into earnings season. That reporting activity will come to a head just as we get the bulk of economic data for the month of September, the proverbial icing on the 3Q 2017 GDP cake. Based on the hurricanes, odds are this data will be a bit wobbly, to say the least, and odds are we will see more GDP revisions for the three months ending in just a few days. While some may look through the economic data, the quarterly results from Darden Restaurants (DRI) earlier this week and the subsequent drop in its shares tell us the market has yet to fully price in the impact of the hurricanes.

Here’s the thing – this could lead to the stock market retrenching from current levels, and in our view letting some of the froth out of the market is a good thing. Candidly, with the market trading near 19x expected earnings – head and shoulders above the 5- and 10-year averages – it begs the question as to how much additional upside is to be had?  This is especially true for investors that are only now returning to the market.

Our strategy for the near-term will be to focus on those companies that have strong thematic tailwinds and whose shares have a more than favorable risk-to-reward tradeoff. This could be in new positions like the ones we’ve added over the last 10 days or it could be in existing ones that come under pressure this earnings season. We always like the former, but the latter is also welcome if it allows us to improve our cost basis for the long-term.

Now, let’s dig into what Nike said last night in its quarterly earnings results – the skinny is, it was reinforcing on several levels for our themes as well as our recent comments on the dollar. Here we go…

 

What’s Nike telling us this morning?

Last night athletic footwear and apparel company Nike reported better than expected quarterly results, but the shares are trading off this morning. Sifting through the results, we see the 3% decline in North American sales as offering credence to our Cash-Strapped Consumer theme, while the 9% growth year over year in China, as well as the 5% year on year improvement in Asia-Pac/Latin America for the company, reflects our Rise & Fall of the Middle-Class thematic. That mix brought Nike’s international business to more than 55% of its overall revenue, and yes during the earnings call last night the company conceded that it has indeed benefitted from the weakening dollar during the last several months.

When it offered its outlook, however, Nike quickly called out that its expected margin contraction with “FX continuing to be the single largest driver.” Yesterday we shared our view the rebounding dollar could present a renewed headwind as the investing herd adjusts it view to incorporate the Fed’s interest rate hike forecast and we see that comment by Nike as confirmation. In addition to the near-term post-hurricane economic slump, this is potentially another reason we could see earnings expectations get reset in the back half of 2017 in the coming weeks.

We’ll look for more confirmation today during Applied Material’s (AMAT) 2017 Analyst Day and tomorrow when McCormick & Co. (MKC) and reports its quarterly earnings. As a reminder, we expect Applied to deliver a favorable demand picture for both its semiconductor as well as display capital equipment businesses, with the former benefitting from ramping demand in China. With regard to McCormick, consensus expectations have the company delivering EPS of $1.05 on revenue of $1.18 billion for the August-ending quarter. As we’ve all seen of late, missing expectations by a penny or two these days is likely to lead to a 4%-8% drop in the share price, and should that happen with MKC shares we’re inclined to scale into the position near or below our original cost basis of $91.80 on the Tematica Investing Select List.

  • Our price target on Applied Materials (AMAT) shares remains $55
  • Our price target on McCormick & Co. (MKC) shares remains $110

The Impact of the Nike — Amazon Deal

Turning back to Nike’s earnings conference call, heading into it, one of the things we wanted was more color on was the company’s invigorated relationship with Amazon (AMZN). We were not disappointed. During the call, even we were somewhat surprised by how blunt Nike was about the pressures facing U.S. retail when it said:

“…a developed market like North America must embrace change to its legacy retail infrastructure. As the leader, we’re fully committed to energizing and growing the marketplace through both our own NIKE Direct businesses and with strategic wholesale partners… over the past 90 days, it has become increasingly evident to all that the North America marketplace is undergoing significant transformation. Several quarters ago, we said that the U.S. retail landscape was not in a steady state, but rather would continue to be disrupted by the accelerating consumer shift to digital and more personal brand experiences… those shifts are now profoundly impacting the more undifferentiated dimensions of retail, resulting in store closures, bankruptcies, and a promotional environment… We’ve proven, I think, through our ability to create some real great success with other consumer-oriented digital partners like Tmall and Zalando that there isn’t a real opportunity here, and we’re excited about where that can go with Amazon (AMZN).”

In our view, those comments sum up the impact on brick & mortar retail that is being had by our Connected Society investing theme. Odds are, Nike is only one of the initial branded apparel companies that will look to leverage Amazon’s logistics and related infrastructure, and this keeps up long-term bullish on AMZN shares.

  • Our long-term price target on Amazon (AMZN) shares remains $1,150.

We also clearly heard Nike is embracing several aspects of our Disruptive Technology theme when it said, “…we target doubling our direct connection to consumers, we are ramping up investment in digital capabilities ranging from data science and analytics to machine learning to augmented reality to image recognition and personalization.”

The only thing better than a company riding one of our investment tailwinds is when it is riding two or more. Over the last three months, NKE shares have underperformed the overall market falling nearly 2.5% vs. the S&P’s 3.3% climb. As the investing herd digests Nike’s comments and the shares drift lower, we’ll revisit the potential upside and downside to be had over the coming 12-18 months. If it’s compelling, we’ll be back with more on this Rise & Fall of the Middle-Class company that is looking to leverage our Connected Society and Disruptive Technology themes.

 

WEEKLY ISSUE: Earnings and Washington Drama Take Center Stage

WEEKLY ISSUE: Earnings and Washington Drama Take Center Stage

In this Week’s Issue:

  • No Real Shock in AT&T’s (T) Earnings, However, Some of the Details Have Us Downgrading Dycom (DY) from a “Buy” to a “Hold”
  • What We’re Expecting Later This Week in Earnings Reports from Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Starbucks (SBUX)
  • Developments in Our Positions in DIS, HACK, IFF, BETR

 

With the pace of corporate earnings picking up this week, we have a lot to cover so we’ll keep our opening comments rather brief.

You’ve likely noticed the strong rise to the market this week, following the initial round of French elections. That euphoria, however, could be short-lived as the market’s focus returns to earnings and the unfolding drama in Washington. While the earnings reports we’ve received thus far have been encouraging, in sifting between the headlines there are some reasons to be concerned and as we get the bulk of this week’s reports today and tomorrow, we suspect more concerns will bubble to the top.

On the political front, there is the risk of a federal government shutdown (low probability in our opinion), the renewed GOP effort on healthcare reform and now  Trump’s tax proposal. To us, the combination of earnings and Washington happenings are likely to cause some renewed uncertainty in the market, which could lead to some giveback in its recent gains. Yes, we know new records were set in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq Composite Index, but in our view that only means stretched market valuation are even more so. Given the findings of the Bank of American Merrill Lynch institutional money manager survey we shared in this week’s Monday Morning Kickoff that 83 percent find the stock market over-valued, we suspect that level has only ticked higher in the last few days.

We will continue to be prudent with the Tematica Select List and follow the latest thematic data points. Be sure to tune into the latest episode of the Cocktail Investing Podcast later this week, when we share a number of those data points.

Now let’s get to it…

 

No Real Shock in AT&T’s (T) Earnings, However, Some of the Details Have Us Downgrading Dycom (DY) from a “Buy” to a “Hold”

 

Last night Connected Society investment theme company AT&T (T) reported 1Q 2017 results that met bottom line expectations but missed on revenue for the quarter. With our underlying investment thesis intact — the transformation of the company into a mobile content player from simply a wireless services player — despite the wireless led revenue shortfall in the quarter, we will continue to watch AT&T shares with the intention of using weakness below $40 to round out our position size as the shares settle out from last night’s earnings report.

In looking into the details of what AT&T reported, we find that for the March quarter AT&T delivered earnings $0.74 per share on revenue of $39.4 billion vs. the expected $40.5 billion. The culprit in the revenue miss was a combination of lower new equipment sales (roughly 1 million fewer units vs. a year ago), a more challenging pricing environment and a loss of 191,000 postpaid subscribers — pretty much the same issues that plagued Verizon’s (VZ) Verizon Wireless business in the March quarter. The subscriber winner appears to have been T-Mobile USA (TMUS), but we offer our view that being a winner in an increasingly commoditized and price sensitive business is not really winning long-term.

In a somewhat surprising move, AT&T has decided it will no longer give full-year revenue guidance due to the unpredictability of the mobile handset market. Given the combination of the move to no longer subsidizing mobile phone purchases and a domestic wireless market that is more tied to the phone upgrade cycle than new subscriber growth, we are not shocked that forecasting wireless handset revenue has become increasingly difficult. Offsetting the 2.8 percent drop in AT&T’s revenue year over year, the company improved its consolidated margins by 80 basis points vs. year ago levels due to automation, digitization, and network virtualization. The company targets having 55 percent of its network functions virtualized by the end of 2017, which should offer incremental margin improvement opportunities over the coming quarters.

Our thesis on the T shares has centered on the pending transformation that will occur in the business model following the merger with Time Warner (TWX), which will shift the emphasis away from the increasingly commoditized mobile service business. Even ahead of the closing of that transaction, AT&T has taken steps to position itself within the content arena with the acquisition of DirectTV and the subsequent launch of DirecTV Now. On the earnings call, these were areas of focus with AT&T commenting that it continues to expect approval for Time Warner transaction and we’ve shared the environment toward it in Washington has warmed considerably since the 2016 presidential election. We continue to expect more details in terms of guidance and synergies to be had once the transaction closes late this year.

After what some would say was a slow start, DirecTV Now — the company’s s over-the-top service that offers a wide selection of live television, premium programming and On Demand content — continued to add customers in the quarter. AT&T is looking to get a little more aggressive in the second half of 2017 with DirectTV Now, particularly with wireless bundling and we’ve already started to see new TV ads with Mark Wahlberg touting the offering. With just five months under the belt, we expect AT&T to be patient with this business, especially since it is likely to be a direct beneficiary of the Time Warner’s content library in 2018.

The bottom line is while the revenue miss for the quarter was a disappointment, following Verizon’s results it was hardly a shock to the system. The revenue miss at both companies highlights the reasons for our owning the shares very much remain intact. As we said several months ago, with AT&T’s business poised to transform over the coming quarters, its shares are likely to be rangebound until we have some clarity and understanding on the synergies to be had. That same transformation means that investors are likely to look past near-term ups and downs in the wireless business. In our view, in hindsight, AT&T’s move to snare Time Warner shows the management team is rather forward-thinking and the same can be said for its leading wireless spectrum business as it looks to bring select 5G services to market in 2018.

AT&T’s focus on bringing 5G services to market are, of course, rather positive for our Dycom (DY) shares. During 1Q 2017, AT&T spent $6 billion on capital spending and reiterated its plans to invest $22 billion in full for 2017. With that expected spending level at Dycom’s largest customer unchanged to the upside, and following the additional 5 percent move in DY shares over the last few days, we now have just 6 percent upside to our $115 price target for Dycom.

To keep our Buy rating intact on DY shares from current levels, we’d need to see upside in the shares to more than $125; at the same time we recognize that given the 33 percent move in DY shares over the last three months, they could come under pressure should the market get a little rocky this earnings season. For those reasons, we’re downgrading DY shares to a Hold. We’ll continue to evaluate our price target as we other key customers update their 2017 capital spending plans and should we get wind of an accelerating 5G deployment timetable.

  • Our price target on AT&T shares remains $45, and we intend to use near-term post-earnings weakness to add to this long-term holding.
  • Our price target on Dycom (DY) shares remains $115 for now and given just percent upside to that target we are downgrading DY shares to a Hold from Buy. 

 

What We’re Expecting Later This Week in Earnings Reports from Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Starbucks (SBUX)

AT&T’s earnings report was just the start of what is to be a frenzied two weeks, as more than 2,000 companies report quarterly results and offer their latest outlook on what’s to come near-term. This week alone we have 40 percent of the S&P 500 reporting, and among that sea of results, we have three more Tematica Select List companies doing the same — Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Starbucks (SBUX) — all after the market close tomorrow (Thursday, April 27).

Here’s what the market’s expecting and our pre-results commentary:

 

AMAZON (AMZN): Amazon shares have been a strong performer amid the escalating brick & mortar retail death spiral, climbing more than 20 percent thus far in 2017. That sharp move higher compared to just 6.7 percent for the S&P 500 likely means expectations are once again running high for Amazon even though consensus expectations call for EPS of $1.13 on revenue of $35.3 billion. We’ve seen this several times over the years and at times Amazon surprises Wall Street with its investment plans that tend to weigh on its outlook. As we saw last September, that mismatch tends to weigh on Amazon shares, offering a solid buying opportunity for long-term investors.

Amazon is a stock to own for the long-term given several powerful tailwinds that power its various businesses. While the right investment strategy is to use weakness to build one’s position, for subscribers who are underweight Amazon, we would suggest holding off right now from adding more shares until after the company reports.

  • For now, our price target on AMZN remains $975.

 

Alphabet (GOOGL): Over the last week, Alphabet (GOOGL) shares have climbed more than 4 percent, bringing the year to date return to more than 12 percent. As we get ready for the company’s 1Q 2017 earnings report tomorrow, let’s remember the YouTube advertising snafu it had during the quarter, which could weigh on overall results. We would advise subscribers underweight GOOGL shares to be patient as we could see better prices late this week or early next. Longer-term, with the continued move in the Connected Society investment theme that bodes well for the core Search business as well as its own shopping portal efforts plus the launching streaming TV service, dubbed YouTube TV, the company still has several multi-year tailwinds behind it. On Alphabet’s earnings call, we’ll be listening for comments on returning capital to shareholders as well as signs the new regime remains focused on margins.

  • Our price target on GOOGL shares remains $975, which offers 10 percent upside from current levels. 

 

STARBUCKS (SBUX): Over the last week or so, Starbucks (SBUX) shares have broken out of the $54-$58 trading range they have been in over the last four months. Part of that move was due to an upgrade by the research arm of Stifel, which now sees upside to $67 for SBUX shares, which compares to our long-term price target of $74. Expectations call for Starbucks to deliver EPS of $0.45 on revenue of 45.41 billion for the March quarter and for the team to guide the current quarter to EPS between $0.52-$0.59 on revenue between $5.6-$6 billion.

They key for us will be the continued expansion overseas as well as an upgrade in the company’s food efforts, which to us are likely to be key areas of focus on the earnings call following the poor reception of its Unicorn Frappuccino. Coffee prices have abated over the last several months, which could help Starbucks project some additional margin lift in the coming quarters.

  • We continue to rate SBUX shares a Buy at current levels. 

 

Developments in Our Positions in DIS, HACK, IFF, BETR

 

The Walt Disney Co (DIS): This morning we’re hearing that Disney’s ESPN network could start issuing pink slips at its flagship cable sports channel today. Several reports suggest the layoffs may be more numerous than the expected, with some 70 employees ranging from anchors, reporters, analysts and online writers losing their jobs in coming weeks. We see this as the latest move by Disney to right the cost structure in a business that is finding its way among chord-cutters and Cash-Strapped Consumers seeking more cost friendly streaming services. Disney continues to explore such options, and we suspect more developments to be had on this in the coming quarters.

With the move in Disney shares in recent weeks, our positions are up 14 percent, with another 9 percent to go to our $125 price target. With a robust movie slate over the coming months that includes Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (May 5), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (May 26), Cars 3 (June 16) and Spider-Man: Homecoming (July 7), we’re reviewing potential upside to our $125 price target for DIS. 

 

PureFunds ISE Cyber Security ETF (HACK): This week we  received two quick reminders over the downside to our increasingly Connected Society that fuels ourSafety & Security investing theme and bodes well for the PureFunds ISE Cyber Security ETF (HACK) shares on the Tematica Select List. First, last night at the very end of its earnings conference call Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG) slipped in that it had detected “unauthorized activity” on a network that supports payment processing at its restaurants. Then this morning, French presidential candidate Emmmanuel Macron’s campaign team confirmed it had been the target of at least five advanced cyberattack operations since January.

  • We continue to favor the HACK ETF as a diversified play on the ever-growing need for cyber security, which is just one aspect of our Safety & Security investing theme. 

 

International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF): During PepsiCo’s (PEP) earnings call last night the company reported higher-than-expected quarterly revenue and profit as it benefits from demand for its healthier drinks and snacks and kept a tight leash on costs. The company has said it now gets about 45 percent of its net revenue from “guilt-free” products — beverages that have fewer than 70 calories per 12 ounces and snacks that have lower amounts of salt and saturated fat.

We see that as a very favorable sign for our International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) shares, which are up more than 8 percent since we added them, which leaves some 4 percent to our $145 price target.

  • Given the accelerating move by PepsiCo and others into health snacks and drinks, we are reviewing that $145 price target for IFF.

 

Amplify Snack Brands (BETR): As you are probably thinking, PepsiCo’s results mentioned earlier are very much in tune with our Food with Integrity investing theme as well as our decision to add Amplify Snack Brands (BETR) to the Tematica Select List last week. Over the last week, BETR shares slipped some 2 percent, but we’d remind subscribers that stocks under $10 can be volatile week to week. We continue to like Amplify’s expanding offering and footprint, and when the company reports its results we expect to hear more on those efforts.

  • We continue to rate BETR shares a Buy with an $11 price target. 
WEEKLY ISSUE: Adding 2 new positions as part of our Cashless Consumption and Food with Integrity themes

WEEKLY ISSUE: Adding 2 new positions as part of our Cashless Consumption and Food with Integrity themes

Welcome back and we hope you enjoyed any and all of the various holidays over the last ten days and didn’t gorge on chocolate and jelly beans.

Since our last issue of Tematica Investing, we’ve seen a shift in market sentiment toward the disconnect between the speed of the economy and earnings expectations, something we’ve been discussing for what seems like more than several weeks. We’ll chalk it up to the forward-looking nature of thematic investing. In our view, it’s always best to be ahead of the market and well positioned than be late and caught with your pants down.

During our downtime last week, we’ve rolled up our thematic sleeves on several companies, and today we are adding two to the Tematica Select List as part of our Cashless Consumption and Food with Integrity investing themes (details further down). As we do this, we’re mindful that 1Q 2017 earnings season is only now gearing up with more than 300 companies reporting this week, more than 975 next week and another 1,250 during the first week of May. Previously we’ve said and we continue to suspect these reports will lead to a reset in earnings expectations for the 2Q-3Q 2017 as economists reduce GDP forecasts and Trump initiatives get pushed into the back half of 2017 at best, with any likely impact not being seen until early 2018.

While that may seem like “Debbie Downer” outlook, we’re hopeful any market pullback will provide the potential to either scale into existing Tematica Select List positions at better prices or begin new ones in well-positioned companies at better prices that we’ve seen in January and February.

Finally, we’d also remind you to head to the Tematica website, Apple’s iTunes, Google Play or other podcast outlet to listen to our Cocktail Investing podcast. Recent episodes have included conversations with The Hartford Funds on its new bond ETFs, and Teucrium Trading on its commodity ETFs as well as the weekly dialog between Chris Versace, Tematica’s Chief Investment Officer, and Lenore Hawkins, Tematica’s Chief Macro Strategist. We’ll have another new episode out this week so be sure to tune in — you don’t want to miss it.

 

Brief Comments on Our Existing Positions

With two new positions on the Tematica Select List to dive into, we’ll keep our larger portfolio comments to the vast majority of positions are little changed over the last two weeks. Of course, there are some exceptions like Dycom (DY) shares, which have climbed more than 8 percent over the last week. We’re also keeping our eyes on AT&T (T) shares, which are hovering just over $40 and look rather tasty given the 4.9 percent dividend yield at current levels. We suspect that yield is bound to attract investors should market volatility ramp over the next three earnings filled weeks.

Oh wait, we’d said we wanted to get to those two new positions… be sure to check back to the Tematica website for additional comments on Facebook (FB), Applied Materials (AMAT), Dycom (DY) and CalAmp (CAMP) and other existing positions later this week.

 

 

Adding Cashless Consumption Company USA Technologies (USAT)

Over the last few days, we’ve been digesting one of Facebook’s (FB) new moves, which is bringing digital payments to its WhatsApp app in India. From a fundamental basis, we see the shift toward digital payments expanding for a number of reasons both here at home as well as in the emerging markets. In the U.S., the proliferation of the smartphone and apps like Apple Pay (AAPL), Square (SQ) and PayPal (PYPL) as well as initiatives from American Express (AXP), Visa (V), MasterCard (MA) and Verifone (PAY), is fostering mobile payment adoption. Recently Chris Versace used Apple Pay to pay for gas at an Exxon Mobil (XOM) station.

We see this as a sign that more applications for mobile payments are coming beyond paying at the grocery store, like we’ve seen people do more frequently. One of the markets that is being tapped, no pun intended, is vending machines, which have already migrated from bills and coins to credit cards. One of the companies behind that shift is USA Technologies (USAT) and it is using its ePort acceptance technology to vending machines as well as kiosks, laundry, arcades and other self- serve and unattended retail applications.

All told, USA Technologies has 11,900 customers and over 500,000 point-of-sale cashless payment connections on the ePort Connect platform. In terms of its revenue stream, recurring monthly service plus transaction processing accounted for approximately 77 percent of fourth-quarter 2016 revenue. We like recurring revenue as it offers predictability as well as cash flow, which in turn tends to offer better valuation metrics. Recently, six Pepsi-licensed bottlers have agreed to bring USA’s payment solutions to 2,000 machines, enabling the firms to track the acceptance of cash, credit/debit cards and contactless payments, including mobile wallet payments such as Apple, Android and Samsung Pay. The rollout includes 1,750 of USA’s touch-screen-enabled ePort Interactive payment devices as well as 370 of its NFC-enabled G9 ePorts, for a total of 2,120 units.

What also caught our eye was that USAT’s cloud-based interactive media and content delivery management system will serve up targeted advertising to consumers visiting these vending operators, including multimedia marketing campaigns, delivery of nutritional information and sampling. This media-content business could drive incremental revenue, with potentially far higher margins compared to USAT’s reported gross margin of 29 percent.

With just four analysts covering the shares and institutional ownership near 45 percent, we suspect USAT shares remain largely undiscovered. Looking at the expectations of those four analysts, the consensus view is for revenue to grow almost 24 percent this year to $96 million before climbing to nearly $115 million in 2018. With Apple launching more banks and credit unions on Apple Pay both in and outside the U.S., as well as Alphabet (GOOGL) doing the same, odds are there is upside to be had with that 2018 revenue forecast, especially as more applications by Verifone and others are deployed. We’d note USA Technologies recently appointed a new chief financial officer, and when this happens there tends to be clearing of the decks, or as some call it, “throwing out everything and the kitchen sink,” when it comes to guidance. In our view, should this come to pass it could allow us to scale into the position at better prices.

 

 

USAT shares are trading at between 1.3x and 1.5x enterprise value to consensus 2017-18 revenue, and the balance sheet is rather clean with net cash of more than $16 million. Year to date, the shares are up modestly and well off the 52-week high of $5.81, which in our view offers an opportunity to begin building a position for the long term. We see upside to $6 over the coming quarters as more mobile payment applications are deployed and acceptance rises. Given USA’s position in self- serve retail and mobile payments, we would not be surprised if it was scooped up one day by Verifone, Par Technology (PAR) or another entity in the space.

 

The Bottomline on USAT Shares:

  • We are adding USAT shares to the Tematica Select List with a Buy rating and $6 price target.
  • Our intention is to build the position out on weakness, scaling into the shares between $3.50 and $3.85, or on signs mobile payment adoption is accelerating faster than expected.
  • We intend to be patient investors and hold the shares as mobile payment adoption grows.

 

 

BETR Shares are a Foods with Integrity Play

If you’ve wandered the aisles of your local grocery chain, odds are you’ve noticed more shelf space and end-caps increasingly giving way to natural, organic and “better for you” foods. Recent comments from Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG) that it will shed all artificial additives and Darden Restaurants’ (DRI) Olive Garden focusing on healthier recipes echo similar moves by Panera Bread (PNRA) to offer “cleaner” food to customers.

Beverage companies ranging from Coca-Cola (KO) to PepsiCo (PEP) and Dr. Pepper Snapple (DPS) are exploring ways to reduce sugar in their carbonated beverages, and the same is happening at candy companies. We see these moves as confirming signs for our Foods with Integrity investing theme that is also powering the Tematica Select List position in United Natural Foods (UNFI).

Industry forecasts call for the global organic food and beverage market to grow to $238.4 billion by 2022, up from $89.8 billion in 2015. There are a variety of factors fueling this growth, but the two major ones are growing consumer awareness and increasing interest of large retailers. Over the last several quarters, we’ve seen Costco Wholesale (COST) and Kroger (KR), among others, increase their natural, organic and fresh food offerings. Over the last few quarters, confirming comments from Kroger included “Natural, organic and health and wellness continued to be a food megatrend,” “we continue to focus on the areas of highest growth like natural and organic products,” and“ Our natural and organic sales continue to outpace total sales growth.“

This brings us to Amplify Snacks (BETR), a company whose primary product line is SkinnyPop, a market-leading better for you (BFY) ready-to-eat popcorn brand that uses simple, allergen-free and non-GMO ingredients. Other products include Crisps Topco, Paqui, Oatmega protein snack bars and Perfect cookie products. With the Crisps Topco acquisition that closed in the third quarter of 2016, Amplify acquired a foothold into the international better-for-you snack market, while the Oatmega purchase brings the company into the $6-billion bar category in the U.S.

In terms of customers, Amplify serves the natural, grocery, mass and food service markets across the U.S., with Costco Wholesale and Wal-Mart’s (WMT) Sam’s Club accounting for 22 percent and 12 percent of sales in 2016, respectively. We’d note those percentages have fallen over the last few years from 33 percent and 22 percent as Amplify has continued to grow its revenue from $55 million in 2013 to just under $271 million in 2016.

Current consensus forecast call for Amplify to deliver revenue of $405 million this year before climbing to just under $460 million in 2018. Continued consumer adoption of better-for-you foods, growing distribution both in and outside the U.S. and new product offerings are driving revenue expectations. In 2016, Amplify’s sales in North America accounted for 85 percent of overall revenue, which reflected one quarter of Crisps Topco. Management targets launching SkinnyPop in international markets in the first half of 2017 and Crisps Topco products in the U.S. in early 2018.

 

 

Our price target for BETR shares is set at $11, which offers roughly 23 percent from current levels. The shares recently bottomed out at $7.86, 12 percent below current levels, following a modest earnings miss in the fourth quarter. Our strategy for this Foods with Integrity stock will be to use either market weakness or signs that its products are gaining acceptance and incremental distribution faster than the market expects. Should shares fall below $8.50, we’d be inclined to scale into the position given the favorable risk-to-reward dynamics.

While we don’t invest in companies simply on potential takeout speculation, given the trend of larger companies looking to tap into the growing organic/natural food market there is the possibility that Amplify is showing up on acquisition radar screens. Over the last several quarters we’ve seen

  • Hershey (HSY) acquire Krave to tap into the paleo and protein snack market,
  • Campbell Soup (CPB) bought Garden Fresh Gourmet,
  • Mondelez International (MDLZ) scooped up Enjoy Life Foods,
  • Danone (DANOY) acquired WhiteWave,
  • General Mills bought Annie’s, and
  • PepsiCo attempted to acquire Chobani Yogurt.

As Amplify continues to expand its footprint and deliver continued revenue growth, odds are it will pop up on competitor radar screens that include PepsiCo, Kellogg, General Mills, Snyder’s-Lance and other larger snack and food companies. Again, we are adding BETR shares to the portfolio given the fundamental drivers behind the business, but as investors, we certainly would not fight a premium takeout offer on the shares.

During the coming earnings season, we’ll be listening to comments on the organic, natural and better-for-you food adoption from Wal-Mart, Sprouts Farmer Markets (SFM) and Costco as well as product mix data from PepsiCo, Kellogg (K), ConAgra (CAG), General Mills (GIS) and Snyder’s-Lance (LNCE).

 

The Bottomline on Amplify (BETR) Shares:

  • We are adding BETR shares to the Tematica Select List with a Buy rating and a $11 price target.
  • We would look to scale into the position below $8.50

 

 

WEEKLY ISSUE: As April starts off more like March than January and February, we tighten up several price targets

WEEKLY ISSUE: As April starts off more like March than January and February, we tighten up several price targets

We have entered 2Q 2017 and with all of two days under our belt, it looks like April is at least starting off more like March than January or February. As we discussed in this week’s Monday Morning Kickoff, we are in what we call No Man’s Land — that time period after the quarter close and before companies start reporting their earnings. It tends to be a time of reduced trading volume, something we’ve seen at both NYSE and Nasdaq listed stocks, as investors wait for tell-tale signs of what’s to come. Another way to phrase it is to say they are waiting for the first signs of what is likely to come.

 

Retailer Woes Means Even Stronger Tailwinds for Amazon

In the last few weeks of March, we had less than stellar results from LuluLemon (LULU), Nike  (NKE), FedEx (FDX) and several other companies. While Urban Outfitters (URBN) won’t report its quarterly results for a while, on Monday night it shared that thus far during the quarter, its comparable retail segment net sales are “mid-single digit negative” vs. up 1 percent in the year ago quarter. Last night, Saks owner Hudson Bay (TSE) shared that overall consolidated sales fell more than 1 percent year over year. More signs that traditional retail remains a challenging environment due in part to Connected Society investing theme company Amazon (AMZN).

Amazon shares, have been on a tear over the last three months, climbing more than 19.8 percent vs. 3.9 percent for the S&P 500. Along the way, the shares have set several new highs, including a fresh intraday high yesterday at $908.54 before closing at $906.83 and firmly in overbought territory. As we head into earnings season, we remember that despite the continued tailwinds that are pushing Amazon’s businesses — the shift to digital consumption and the cloud — Amazon continues to invest heavily in its business. The risk is that from time to time the company’s investment plans tend to be larger than those expected by Wall Street, and when confronted with that realization investors shed shares.

We’ve seen that several times in recent years, and given our view that first-quarter earnings season is likely to bring a return of volatility to the market, we’re going to get a little more cautious on AMZN shares.

  • With an additional 7.5 percent to our $975 price target, we are reducing our rating on AMNZ shares to a Hold from Buy. 
  • We would look to revisit our rating below $850 or on signs that potential upside to our price target is closer to $1,050. 

 

AT&T Gets the FirstNet Nod and That’s Also Good for Dycom

As expected, it was announced AT&T won a lucrative contract to build and manage a nationwide public safety network for America’s police, firefighters, and emergency medical services. Dubbed FirstNet, it will cover all 50 states, five U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia, including coverage for rural and tribal lands. Besides basic voice and Internet service, AT&T expects the network to be used for applications “providing near real- time information on traffic conditions to determine the fastest route to an emergency.”

This win also bodes well for specialty contractor Dycom (DY) that counts AT&T as its largest customer. As Dycom’s other key customers that include Verizon (VZ) and Comcast (CMCSA), deploy both next-generation solutions as well as add incremental capacity to existing networks, we continue to see blue skies ahead for DY shares on the Tematica Select List.

Circling back to the key item of 2017 for AT&T shares — the pending merger with Time Warner (TWX) — chatter in and around DC seems to suggest that President Trump has softened his opposition to the combination of the two companies. We’d note this follows the recent approval of the pending acquisition by the European Commission.

  • As more clarity on the merger between AT&T and Time Warner develops, we are likely to revisit our $44 price target. All things being equal, we are likely to add to our position below $40
  • Our price target on DY shares remains $115.

 

Easter and Spring Break Bode Well For Disney

As we enter peak Spring Break travel season, which bodes well for Disney’s (DIS) parks business, particularly Disney World and its other Florida attractions, we remind subscribers that the company recently announced it was boosting ticket prices, which we may cringe at as consumers, but love as shareholders. Combined with leveraging its Frozen and Star Wars content at the parks over the coming years, we see Disney providing new reasons to revisit these destinations.

Looking beyond the April travel season and continued performance of Beauty and the Beast at the box office, the next catalyst we see for the shares will be several box-office films being released by Disney — Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (May 5), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (May 26), Cars 3 (June 16) and Spider-Man: Homecoming (July 7).

  • We have just over 10 percent to our $125 price target for DIS shares.

 

Housekeeping Items

First, if you missed our comments on either Alphabet (GOOGL) or McCormick & Co. (MKC) shares that we posted yesterday, you can find them here and here, respectively.

Second, later this week on TematicaResearch.com we’ll share our thoughts on the purported acquisition of Panera Bread (PNRA) by Guilty Pleasure investment theme company Starbucks (SBUX) as well as our take on the rash of economic data to come later this week.

Third, be sure to the website later in the week for the latest edition of the Cocktail Investing Podcast as well as archived episodes.

Finally, in observance of the upcoming Easter holiday, US stock markets will be closed on Friday, April 14. With the aforementioned spring break in full swing next week, we too here at Tematica will be taking a respite as we get ready to gear into 1Q 2017 earnings the following week.

Odds are we won’t be able to keep ourselves from posting some commentary throughout the week on TematicaResearch.com, but your next regularly scheduled Tematica Investing issue will be on Wednesday, April 19.

 

And the Hacking Continues!

And the Hacking Continues!

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After Gapping Up Following Friday’s January Employment Report, The Market Is Trading Sideways Again This Week

Over the last week, the S&P 500 rose 0.6 percent, with the bulk of that move coming on the heels of the January Employment Report. As we pointed out in this week’s Monday Morning Kickoff, the face of that report was mostly positive, and when paired with other January manufacturing reports out last week, it likely paves the way for the Fed heads to start jawboning about a potential rate hike at the March FOMC meeting.

Well, we heard just that when Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank President Patrick Harker on Monday said an interest-rate hike should be on the table at the U.S. central bank’s next meeting, in March. Should other domestic economic data, like the aforementioned January manufacturing data, continue to improve month over month, we expect the herd view to skew toward a March rate hike.

Looking across the Atlantic, however, as expected we are indeed hearing more about Grexit and Frexit this week. Odds are, we have not heard the last of those rumblings as we head into the 7th inning with 4Q 2016 earnings reports. Given where we are in the current earnings season, we have several updates to share on the Amazon (AMZN), CalAmp Corp. (CAMP), Dycom Industries (DY), Facebook (FB), and International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) positions on the Tematica Select List.

At the same time, we see not only cyber attacks once again taking over the headlines — or at least what non-President Trump headlines there are — but we see impressive order and booking metrics as cyber security companies report their quarterly results.

This sets us up with a new position for the Tematica Select List so without further ado…

And the Hacking Continues!

Issuing a Buy on PureFunds ISE Cyber Security ETF (HACK) shares
as part of our Safety & Security investing theme

Once again cyber hacking is back in the news on several fronts:

  • The hospitality giant InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has confirmed that payment systems of 12 US hotels were victims of a massive data breach between August and December 2016.
  • An anonymous attack took down web-hosting company Freedom Hosting II, which hosts dark websites — sites that require software to access. All told, thousands of dark websites were taken offline in the process.
  • Taiwan is investigating an unprecedented case of threats made to five brokerages by an alleged cyber-group seeking payment to avert an attack that could crash their websites.
  • Norway’s foreign ministry, army, and other institutions have been targeted in a cyber-attack by a group suspected of having links to Russian authorities, according to Norwegian intelligence.

And that’s just a sampling of the cyber attack related headlines over the last few days. When we add in the growing number of corporate cyber attacks as well as those against government institutions (remember those from last November?), we are reminded that a few years ago former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned that the United States was facing the possibility of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor” and was increasingly vulnerable to foreign computer hackers who could dismantle the nation’s power grid, transportation system, financial networks, and government.

This earnings season we’ve seen a pickup in orders at a number of cybersecurity companies ranging from Fortinet (FTNT) and Checkpoint Systems (CKP) to Proofpoint (PFPT). Sifting through those reports, we find several common items bubbling to the surface:

There is the secular trend in cybersecurity that includes not only adoption of cyber security solutions for Internet of Things and Cloud, but also customers migrating to integrated solutions over single-point ones.

That migration is driving vendor consolidation, which with hindsight explains some of the extended sales cycles we heard about in the back half of 2016.

One positive is companies like Fortinet are seeing a pronounced pick-up in larger deal size, even as they add more customers. With Fortinet, it added 10,000 customers during 4Q 2016, which left it total customer base to more than 300,000. Meanwhile, Fortinet experienced significant growth in its larger deal sizes, up 31-39 percent for deal sizes above $500,000 and $1 million respectively.

This tells us that corporations and other institutions are stepping up their game for this dark side of our Connected Society investing theme. That bodes very well for cybersecurity stocks, which represent a key aspect of our Safety & Security investing theme.

The issue is deciding which one to place our hard-earned capital in… in our view, the near constant one-upmanship between hacker & attackers and cyber security firms looks an awful lot like the gaming console “wars” from a few years ago. Every time there was a hot new game, gamers would flock to the new platform. As cyber attackers become more creative, we suspect we are likely to see some cyber security firms respond more quickly than others, leading to market share shifts and better revenue and profit growth.

 

While this may sound like a complex problem, the solution could not be simpler.

Rather than focus on any one or two cyber security companies, instead we’ll place a basket of them onto the Tematica Select List. That basket is PureFunds ISE Cyber Security ETF (HACK), which counts Fortinet, Checkpoint Software, Palo Alto Networks (PAWN), Proofpoint, Symantec (SYMC), Qualys (QLYS), CyberArk Software (CYB) and Imperva (IMPV) among its top holdings. In sum, those eight positions account for just under 41 percent of the ETF’s assets.

Over the last several months HACK shares have been on a tear, but as our Connected Society theme continues to expand to include more devices (the Connected Car, Connected Home, the Internet of Things) across more of the globe (see Facebook’s 4Q 2016 earnings results below for an example of this), odds are the demand for cyber security solutions will remain robust. Just take a look at how often people in restaurants and elsewhere are checking their smartphones — the Connected Society toothpaste is not going to go back into its tube.

  • As such, we see long legs ahead for the cybersecurity aspect of our Safety & Security investing theme, which to us makes HACK a core, long-term holding.
  • In keeping with that, we are issuing a Buy on PureFunds ISE Cyber Security ETF (HACK), with a long-term price target is $35.
  • We’re inclined to use pullbacks below $25 to improve our cost basis. 

We would point out that cyber security is one aspect of our Safety & Security investing theme, which also includes personal, homeland and corporate security. President Trump continues to speak about rebuilding the US military, which should spur demand for a variety of defense companies. As more clarity comes to these proposed plans, we’ll look to include the proper exposure should valuations offer a compelling entry point. Stay tuned.

 

 

Amazon (AMZN) Connected Society 

Since the calendar turned to 2017, Amazon shares have been on a nice trajectory. Following December-quarter results, however, which included weaker-than-expected guidance for the current quarter, largely due to foreign currency issues, Amazon shares slipped just over 3 percent this past week. Given the comments we’ve heard across the earnings spectrum this reporting season about foreign currency, Amazon was bound to disappoint. Excluding the $558 million unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, net sales increased 24 percent compared with fourth quarter 2015 versus the reported 22 percent increase for the quarter.

We also continue to see the company investing for the long term as it builds out its streaming content, expands its Fulfilled By Amazon and other initiatives such as Alexa, its voice digital assistant. Even so, margin expansion at both the North American business, as well as Amazon Web Services, enabled Amazon to handily beat consensus EPS expectations of $1.42 with reported earnings of $1.54 for 4Q 2016. Year over year, EPS improved more than 50 percent despite the stepped-up level of investments in the second half of 2016 and revenue shortfall of nearly $1 billion in the December quarter. To us, this means those who have questioned Amazon’s ability to deliver profitable growth while continuing to invest are likely to rethink their position . . . or they should be.

As investors, our view tends to be skewed to the medium to longer term. It’s that view that recognizes Amazon continues to invest for future growth as it benefits from the accelerating shift to digital shopping and Cloud adoption that led Amazon Web Services (AWS) to grow 47 percent year over year in the December quarter. For 2016 in full, AWS revenue rose 55 percent to more than $12 billion, with margins rising to 30 percent from 23.6 percent in 2015. To put this into context, AWS accounted for just 9 percent of overall Amazon revenue in 2016 but was responsible for just over half of the company’s 2016 operating income.

Turning to Amazon’s North American business, revenues climbed 22 percent in the December quarter, but operating margins in that business rose to 4.7 percent. Doing some quick math, we’d note the incremental margin for the North American business clocked in at 6.8 percent, which tells us the company is indeed realizing volume benefits and other synergies in this business.

Amazon’s international business continues to be a drag on overall profits as it posted operating losses both for the December quarter and for 2016 in full. As we have seen in recent quarters, Amazon will continue to invest for future growth, but it has developed a more disciplined approach, and we suspect that approach will be utilized in the International business as well.

This brings us to the company’s guidance for the current quarter, which fell short of consensus expectations due in part to foreign exchange rates. As Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook noted on that company’s earnings call, foreign exchange will be a “major negative” as the company moves from the December to the March quarter.

The same holds true for Amazon, which shared that it expects foreign currency to impact current quarter revenue by $730 million. Factoring that into the consensus view that expected revenue for the current quarter will land near $36 billion, Amazon’s guidance of $33.25 billion to $35.75 billion, up 14 percent-23 percent year over year, is far more understandable. Stepping back, that year-over-year guidance is in a very challenging retail environment and in our view implies continued share gains at both the North American and AWS businesses. On the operating income guidance, Amazon again offers a range that is wide enough to fly a 747 through.

Stepping back and looking at the company’s competitive positions poised to benefit from their respective Connected Society tailwinds — the shift to digital consumption (shopping, content streaming, grocery) and Cloud adoption — we continue to see favorable revenue and profit growth for AMZN over the long term.

  • We’ll continue to monitor retail sales data and Cloud adoption as well as other relevant data points, but for now, are keeping our $975 price target for Amazon shares as well as our Buy rating. 
  • To be blunt, Amazon is a stock to own, not trade. We’d suggest subscribers who are underweight in the shares use the recent pullback to their long-term advantage.

 

The Walt Disney Company (DIS) Content is King

Last night Content is King company Walt Disney reported December quarter earning of $1.55 per share, $0.06 per share better than consensus expectations. Offsetting that upside surprise, which was partly fueled by the company’s share buyback efforts given the near 4% drop in the share count year over year, revenue for the December quarter came in lighter than expected at $14.78 billion vs. the consensus that was looking for $15.29 billion.

In our view, even though revenue and earnings fell compared to the December 2015 quarter we have to remember the year-ago quarter was one for the record books due in part to the impact of Star Wars: the Force Awakens on several Disney businesses.

  • Given the tone of the underlying business, which should improve throughout the year, and prospects for Disney to further shrink its share count in the coming quarters thereby enhancing EPS metric in the process, we are keeping our $125 price target intact even as several Wall Street firms are boosting their price targets to levels higher or inline with ours.
  • We continue to rate the shares a Buy, but would advise subscribers that are underweight the shares to be more aggressive at price below $105 should they arise in the coming weeks. 

 

Let’s Dig into the Details of Disney’s Latest Quarter

For a year at the company that had been described as one starting off slow and building throughout the year, the December quarter was, in our view, a solid one, especially after factoring in the results from the latest installment of the Star Ware franchise, The Force Awakens.

Without question, the standout-out performance was had at the company’s Parks and Resorts business which delivered a 13% increase in operating income on “just” a 6% revenue increase year over year. That business continues to benefit from tight cost controls as well as price hikes taken during calendar 2016. As we get ready for spring break travel season, we’ll be watching for potential 2017 price hikes at the domestic parks. In late May, Pandora: The World of Avatar will open at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida. This follows the roll out of Frozen across several parks, and longer-term yet-to-be-named Star Wars-themed lands at Walt Disney World and Disneyland in 2019.

Near-term, the Parks business will benefit from an extra week in the current quarter, but with the Easter holiday falling later than usual this year and landing in the June quarter that timing issue is expected to weigh on current quarter prospects. Timing will also impact the Studio business, which has just one major release in the current quarter — Beauty & the Beast — which looks to be a strong performer, but will be forced into comparisons to The Force Awakens and Zootopia in the year ago quarter.

Moving past the current quarter, the Studio business has a number of Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars films in the pipeline that include a new Spider-Man movie, a sequel to the Cars film, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and the next Star Wars installment, all of which makes for a very strong second half of the year.

That brings us to the company’s Media Networks business, which is composed of Cable Networks and Broadcasting. This segment has been one investors have been watching closely given the performance of ESPN over the last several quarters and questions about the broadcasting business as streaming alternative become more robust. Case in point, our own AT&T’s DirecTV Now and a similar service soon to be launched by Hulu. During the yesterday’s earnings conference call, Bob Iger reminded participants of initiatives to bring ESPN content to various streaming platforms (Sling TV, PlayStation Vue, DirecTV Now, and Hulu). After the call, The Wall Street Journal reported a new unannounced but signed deal with YouTube. Combined with its BAMTech acquisition, Disney continues to move in the right direction to reposition the Media Networks business to deliver content to consumers when and where they want it. We’ll be looking for additional color on the YouTube relationship, including advertising revenue potential.

Outside of the company’s performance and business outlook, the biggest news that likely has investor tongues wagging this morning is the news that CEO Bob Iger is open to staying after his contract expires in 2018. We see that helping to calm the transition concerns and reassures investors that Iger is likely to remain on board to groom his successor.

On the housekeeping front, Disney repurchased about 15 million shares for about $1.5 billion during the December quarter. Including the current quarter, Disney has bought back some 22 million shares for approximately $2.2 billion leaving $5-$6 billion to go on its announced plan to spend $7-$8 billion on buying back shares this year.

 

CalAmp (CAMP) Connected Society

CAMP shares rose modestly last week, bringing the year-to-date return to 5.0 percent, which is well ahead of the major market indices on the same basis. As we’ve shared, one of the key near-term catalysts for CAMP shares is the electronic logging device (ELD) mandate, which requires trucking companies to move from paper logbooks to electronic logs to record drivers’ hours of service by Dec. 18, 2017.

Last week, freight transportation companies Landstar (LSTR) and Hub Group (HUBG) reported quarterly earnings and inside those conference calls was some bullish commentary for CalAmp. Landstar shared that it has programs to migrate the non-complaint portion of its truck fleet to ELDs before year-end and it’s “beginning those conversations now in order to make that occur.” While Hub Group did not call out ELD spending specifically, it acknowledged that its capital spending would trend higher year over year in 2017 due in part to technology-related investments. Given the ELD mandate, we suspect there at least a portion of that spending will be to ensure its vehicles comply by the current deadline.

Industry estimates suggest more than one million ELDs will be deployed in the U.S. this year to comply with that mandate. This bodes very well for CalAmp’s core telematics systems business (57 percent of revenue) in the coming quarters. Longer term, we continue to see the company’s business model benefiting from the connected vehicle market, which includes autos, trucks and other equipment like that from customer Caterpillar (CAT).

  • We continue to rate CAMP shares a Buy with a $20 price target.

 

Dycom Industries (DY) Connected Society

As we noted in last week’s Tematica Investing, several of Dycom’s key customers recently reported quarterly earnings and the combined capital spending plans of those customers — AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast — look to be flat to up year over year, with a greater portion of spending on network capacity and new technologies (5G, Gigabit fiber). This week we’ll get quarterly results from CenturyLink (CTL) and given the prevailing trends we expect it, too, will offer a favorable capital spending outlook for 2017 and beyond. Having said that, we will listen for any positive or negative impact in CenturyLink’s $34 billion plan to buy Level 3 Communications (LVLT).

We continue to see Dycom as a prime beneficiary of that wireless and wireline capital spending required to keep feeding our data-hungry Connected Society investment theme. In our view, the current share price offers subscribers who are underweight in Dycom an excellent opportunity to pick up the shares at better prices than we’ve seen recently.

  • We continue to rate Dycom shares a Buy with a $110 price target.

 

Facebook (FB) Connected Society

Despite delivering better-than-expected December-quarter earnings with strong user metrics and average revenue per user (ARPU), FB traded modestly lower following those quarterly results. To us, the one statistic that jumped out at us was the company’s ability to get nearly 30 percent more revenue per user during the quarter.

  • With advertising dollars continuing to shift to digital platforms, we continue to see Facebook’s efforts paying off in the coming quarters. 
  • As such, we continue to rate shares a Buy. As we do this, we’re boosting our price target to $155 from $150.

 

Now onto the quarter results . . . 

Facebook reported December quarter EPS of $1.41, well ahead of the $1.31 per share consensus forecast. Revenue for the quarter climbed more than 50 percent, year over year, to $8.63 billion, besting revenue expectations of $8.49 billion. Sifting through the various metrics from daily active users to mobile daily active users, all the metrics were trending in the right direction with both up 17  to 18 percent year over year.

We continue to see the growing influence of mobile on Facebook’s business with 1.74 billion mobile monthly active users, roughly 93 percent of the company’s monthly active user base. As we mentioned above, we continue to see Facebook capturing advertising share, and it did just that in the December quarter as mobile advertising accounted for roughly 84 percent of its advertising revenue in the quarter. We chalk this up to Facebook monetizing more of its platforms (Facebook, Instagram and now Messenger) as well as the greater use of video. As the company continues to improve its ad targeting across users, we would expect some lift in pricing, which should benefit margins.

Part of our initial investment thesis for Facebook was not only the social network company’s ability to not only expand its reach across the globe, but also improve average revenue per user (ARPU) metrics as it does this. During the quarter, the company’s ARPU climbed more than 30 percent, year over year, on a global basis. As one might expect, ARPU remains skewed heavily to the U.S. and Canada, which clocked in at $80, up some 47 percent year over year. As a result, U.S. and Canada accounted for just over 50 percent of revenue followed by Europe (23 percent), Asia-Pac (15 percent) and Rest of World (10 percent). Even so, all geographies were up double-digits, year over year, from a low of 17 percent (Asia-Pac) to a high of 28.7 percent (Europe).

The bottom line is our thesis on the shares remains intact, and we continue to see the tailwinds blowing hard as advertisers continue to focus on digital advertising. We liken this to the shift to digital shopping by consumers that is benefiting our Amazon (AMZN), $839.40, 5.54 percent) shares. Much like that shift, we do not see the one behind Facebook slowing in the near-term.

 

International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) 

Rise & Fall of the Middle Class

In a quiet week of trading, with no company-specific news, IFF shares were down 1.6 percent, keeping them in the same range they’ve been in over the last several weeks. We continue to see ample upside to our $145 price target over the coming quarters fueled by rising disposable income, particularly in the emerging markets, but also from the shift in consumer preferences to natural and organic flavors. We saw confirmation in this from competitor Givaudan, which as part of its December-quarter earnings report last week shared that, “Natural flavors have been going at an average of 8 percent over the last two years… and represent more than 40 percent of our flavor sales.”

For its fragrance business, Givaudan achieved double-digit growth in North America and a solid performance in Latin America and the Middle East. We see these results as a positive for IFF when it reports its quarterly results on Feb. 15, but we will remind subscribers that given IFF’s international exposure, currency is likely to weigh on its results as well as its near-term outlook. But as we have said before, we see that largely reflect in the share price. We continue to focus on the growing shift to organic flavors and fragrances, the former of which has soda companies such as Coca-Cola (KO) and PepsiCo (PEP) looking to reformulate their products to exclude sugar.

Longer term, the outlook remains bright for this market as the Freedonia Group’s forecast calls for global demand for flavors and fragrances to reach $26.3 billion by 2020, which would be a 21 percent increase from $21.7 billion in 2015.

  • We continue to rate IFF shares a Buy at current levels.

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Adding defensive measures as earnings season brings back volatility

Adding defensive measures as earnings season brings back volatility

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Our Thoughts on Connected Society Company
Apple’s “Record” Earnings

We wish we could say it’s been a quiet week since our last issue of Tematica Investing, a smooth sailing one in fact, but thanks to the growing political drama coming out of the new White House and a pick up in the velocity of earnings reports this week, the only word we can use to describe it is “frenetic.”

Last night I was a guest on CGTN America to discuss Apple’s (AAPL) quarterly results. The long and short of it is that while Apple CEO Tim Cook called it a record quarter, the reality is the iPhone still accounts for 70 percent of Apple’s overall business. While Cook boasted of strong Apple Watch growth, iPhone shipments were up 5 percent year over year, hardly the robust growth levels we’ve seen in the past.

Meanwhile, the Mac business — the next largest business line next to the iPhone — saw volumes rise 1 percent year over year, while iPad units fell 19 percent compared to the year-ago quarter. If Apple didn’t flex its cash position, which now sits at $246 billion, to buy back stock during the quarter, reported earnings would have been flat year over year.

To us here at Tematica this means until Apple can bring to market a new product, or reenergize an existing one that can jumpstart growth, the company will be tied to the iPhone upgrade cycle. Expectations for the next iteration, the presumed iPhone 8, call for a new body, new display — hence our position in Disruptive Technology company Universal Display (OLED) — and a greater use of capacitive touch that should eliminate the current home button. But we’ll have to see if this new model on the 10thanniversary of the transformative device’s launch will capture the hearts of customers, as the last couple of models have only had a meh response.

Despite Apple’s current reliance on the iPhone, there are hopeful signs in other areas, such as the new AirPods that echo past design glory, an Apple TV business that has 150 million active subscriptions and a growing services business. We’ll continue to keep tabs on this poster child company for our Connected Society company, but with no evident catalyst over the coming months, we’re inclined to sit patiently on the sidelines and pick off the AAPL shares at better prices.

In the meantime, our position in Universal Display (OLED), up 24 percent since initiating the position in October, gives us exposure to any Apple upside as the rumors persist it will integrate the OLED technology into the iPhone 8. As we often like to say — even though it’s somewhat politically incorrect in today’s hyper-sensitive world — “it’s better to buy the bullets, not the gun.”

  • Until there is more confirmation of the integation of OLED’s into the next iPhone, or another thematic tailwind reveals itself, we are maintaining a Hold rating on Universal Display (OLED) as the current price of $66 per share is close to our $68 per share target. 

 

Confirming Thematic Data Points From Earnings Reports and Other Sources

While we are not buyers of Apple shares just quite yet, there was a number of confirming thematic data points shared during the company’s earnings conference call last night:

  • Rise & Fall of the Middle Class — “The middle class is growing in places like China, India, Brazil, but certainly, the strong dollar doesn’t help us.”
  • Cashless Consumption — “Transaction volume was up over 500% year over year as we expanded to four new countries, including Japan, Russia, New Zealand, and Spain, bringing us into a total of 13 markets. Apple Pay on the Web is delivering our partners great results. Nearly 2 million small businesses are accepting invoice payments with Apply Pay through Intuit QuickBooks Online, FreshBooks, and other billing partners. And beginning this quarter, Comcast customers can pay their monthly bill in a single touch with Apple Pay.”
  • Content is King — “In terms of original content, we have put our toe in the water with doing some original content for Apple Music, and that will be rolling out through the year. We are learning from that, and we’ll go from there. The way that we participate in the changes that are going on in the media industry that I fully expect to accelerate from the cable bundle beginning to break down is, one, we started the new Apple TV a year ago, and we’re pleased with how that platform has come along. We have more things planned for it but it’s come a long way in a year, and it gives us a clear platform to build off of… with our toe in the water, we’re learning a lot about the original content business and thinking about ways that we could play at that.”
  • Connected Society — “every major automaker is committed to supporting CarPlay with over 200 different models announced, including five of the top 10 selling models in the United States. “

Aside from Apple, there has been no shortage of thematic data points buried in earnings reports over the last few days. Even though we cut Under Armour (UAA) from the Tematica Select List yesterday, we’d note its Direct to Consumer business, which reflects its online and mobile shopping efforts, rose 26 percent year over year in the December quarter. H&M Stores has announced it will slow its physical store openings and instead focus more of its efforts online.  Both confirming data points for our Connected Society investment theme.

Shifting gears somewhat, a new study from the Food Marketing Institute and Nielsen projects online grocery sales in the U.S. could grow tremendously in the next decade. By 2025, the report suggests that American consumers could be spending upwards of $100 billion on online grocery purchases, comprising some 20 percent of the total market share. Currently, 23% of US consumers purchase groceries through digital channels.

Confirming the accelerating shift toward digital shopping that is a hallmark of our Connected Society investing theme, during the December quarter United Parcel Service (UPS) saw its domestic average daily volumes rose 5% year over year with International domestic growth up more than 20% in Asia and 10% across the Eurozone. Noting the strong growth in Asia, we’d say it likely reflects the Rise aspects of our Rise & Fall of the Middle-Class thematic.

We expect to hear much more on the accelerating shift toward digital shopping when Amazon (AMZN) reports its quarterly earnings tomorrow (Feb. 2).

Getting back to Cashless Consumption, Juniper Research now expects $1.35 trillion to be spent worldwide through mobile wallets by the end of 2017. The nearly 30 percent increase over 2016 spending will be due to users in the Far East and China through Alipay and WeChat while Westerners continue to embrace mobile wallets from Apple Pay, MasterCard (MA) and PayPal.
Turning to our Fattening of the Population theme: 

  • McDonald’s (MCD) is deploying Big Mac vending machines… yes, we know what you’re thinking and there is no way we could make something like that up.
  • Civil servants in the UK have been warned that bringing cake into work for birthdays and celebrations could be a “public health hazard”. The Faculty of Dental Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) warned that in large offices, sweets and cakes have become a daily occurrence and the growing trend is contributing to poor oral health and the obesity epidemic. (There is a “bad teeth” joke somewhere in there, but for once we’ll take a pass on that one) On a serious note, sadly it seems that yes, despite what we may like to think, too much a good thing may not be good for us.

 

 
Hey Alexa, Order My Starbucks

Our most recent addition to the Tematica Select List was Disruptive Technologycompany Nuance Communications (NUAN) given the explosive growth that is expected in voice digital assistants over the coming years. We know that Starbucks (SBUX) has been an early adopter of technology that allows customers to pay and order ahead online with the Starbucks app. Starbucks Mobile Order & Pay currently accounts for more than 7 percent of transactions in US company-operated stores. Building on that, Starbucks has launched My Starbucks Barista, a voice-activated “barista” baked into the company’s existing iOS mobile app that uses artificial intelligence. Currently in beta testing, My Starbucks Barista will be available to 1,000 select US customers initially, with a planned rollout through summer 2017 and an Android version to follow.

As we pointed out when we added NUAN shares to the Tematica Select List, Amazon’s Echo technology is leading the way, and the same holds with Starbucks. Select customers can now use Amazon’s Alexa to order “on command”  and the ability to recall and repeat past favorite drinks is also included. Customers simply need to say “Alexa, order my Starbucks” from wherever they have an Alexa device.

As with My Starbucks Barista, we expect Starbucks will deploy this across more Echo devices in the coming months. What it means is more people adopting the use of voice technology, and we find that very bullish for our NUAN shares.

  • We continue to rate NUAN shares a Buy with a $21 price target, as well as Guilty Pleasure company Starbucks (SBUX) with a price target of $74.

 

 

Beholden to the All-Mighty Buck

Finally, one recurring standout this earnings season is the impact of currency given the dollar’s strength during 4Q 2016. We’ve heard it from Buy-rated McCormick & Co. (MKC), United Parcel Service (UPS) and others, but it was Apple that really hammered the point home. In the earnings call last night, Apple said, “we expect foreign exchange to be a major negative as we move from the December to the March quarter.” Not exactly a surprise, given that 60 percent of its revenue is from outside the US.

 

 

Housekeeping at the House of Mouse

While The Walt Disney Company (DIS) will not report its December quarter results until February 7, we’re boosting our protective stop loss on the shares to $101.50 from $87. Currently, we’re up 10 percent% on a blended basis with the shares and while we are enjoying that nice return, after languishing in the red for a while on the positions we are aware of how volatile earnings season can be. This move in the stop loss should prevent any losses in the Disney position on the Tematica Select List.

Why $101.50? Because our blended buy-in price is $101.50.

Even as we reset this stop loss level, we remain bullish on Disney shares given the slate of Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars films that will hit theaters in coming quarters. We are also encouraged by Disney’s other moves to spread the content wealth across its licensing and parks businesses as well as its exploration of streaming alternatives for ESPN.

  • As we boost our protective stop-loss on DIS to $101.50, our price target for the shares remains $125

 

 

Setting a Stop Loss on Facebook (FB) Shares

We’ve come to appreciate the volatile nature of corporate earnings season and we’re starting to see that once again these last few days. While we continue to see Facebook (FB) benefitting from its monetization efforts across its various social media platforms as advertisers embrace digital over radio, print and broadcast, we’ve noticed a something that could be a near-term issue. Over the last several weeks, we’ve noticed a shift toward people curbing their Facebook usage due to a growing sense of political outrage complete with over the top comments. This has prompted some to start referring to Facebook as “Hatebook”.

Our concern is all of this could lead to a softer short-term outlook than most might be expecting for the current quarter.

  • As such, we’re going to install a protective stop loss at $112 for our FB shares. Better to be prudent ahead of time, than sorry later is our thinking. 

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As the market scales new heights, we review our current holdings

As the market scales new heights, we review our current holdings

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Over the last few days, we’ve been attending the Inside ETF conference in warm and sunny Hollywood, FL. While we were focused on the latest developments in the ETF space, we’ve kept one eye on the markets and the renewed climb in the stock market, with the DOW tipping over the 20,000 mark for the first time in history just this morning.

With yesterday’s close both the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index and the S&P 500 powered to new all-time highs amid news that President Trump is already getting down to business, the domestic manufacturing economy perked up further in January and the continued mixed bag of December quarter earnings.

As we shared in this week’s Monday Morning Kickoff, this is the first full week of the year that teems with both data and earnings, with the latter escalating as the week goes on and on into next week. Toward the end of the week, we get the first print on 4Q 2016 GDP and we close it out with the start of Chinese New Year. As that holiday begins, we’ll be looking for confirming points for our Affordable Luxury, as well as Rise & Fall of the Middle-Class themes.

This week we have four positions on the Tematica Select List reporting – Cash-strapped Consumer company McCormick & Co. (MKC), Connected Society player AT&T (T), Guilty Pleasure company Starbucks (SBUX) and Alphabet (GOOGL), which resides in our Asset-lite Business Model investing theme. This morning McCormick reported is 4Q 2016 results, and despite the impact of currency, which was expected given the company’s geographic mix, we found the results rather favorable and the same can be said for the outlook over the next year – more on that below.

After today’s market close, AT&T will share its full results for the December quarter. Last week the company pre-announced several metrics for its December quarter, but yesterday Verizon’s (VZ) results fell short of Wall Street expectations. As part of our monthly position review below, we’ve laid out some of those metrics as well as shared reporting dates for those companies that have made their reporting dates known. That’s right, today is the last Wednesday in January and it’s time to take stock (pun intended) of the positions on the Tematica Select List.

This week’s issue is jammed packed, with updates on the 15 of the holdings in the Tematica Select List along with our current ratings and guidance on each position. Given the length, we recommend you download the full issue by either clicking on the download button below or simply clicking here.

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The full content of Tematica Investing is above; however downloading the full issue provides detailed performance tables and charts. Click here to download.

A Wait-and-See Approach as Trump Inauguration and Earnings Cocktail Unfolds

A Wait-and-See Approach as Trump Inauguration and Earnings Cocktail Unfolds

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The full content of Tematica Investing is below; however downloading the full issue provides detailed performance tables and charts.Click here to download.

As you sit down and digest this latest issue of Tematica Investing, you’ll notice it’s a tad shorter than the usual 6-10 pages that we fill to the brim. On the one hand, we’re inclined to say “you’re welcome,” but the reality is with the market rangebound over the last 20 plus days, the presidential inauguration about to take-over the news cycle, the velocity of earnings reports about to pick up, and Eurozone drama likely to re-emerge in the coming days, we’ve opted to see how things unfold over the next several days before making any new moves with the Tematica Select List.

That said, the thematic tailwinds are still blowing for a number of our positions with a “Buy” rating, including: Facebook (FB), Nuance Technologies (NUAN), McCormick & Co. (MKC), Dycom Industries (DY), Universal Display (OLED), CalAmp Corp. (CAMP), United Natural Foods (UNFI), Starbucks (SBUX) and International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF).

With the market move over the last several weeks, we’d recommend subscribers continue to hold their positions in AT&T (T), Costco Wholesale (COST), Disney (DIS), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN), but wait for a pullback before adding any more capital to those positions. For new subscribers that means we’d recommend you watch from the sidelines for now on those positions.

 

Is the Trump Rally Over as Investors Keep the Markets Range Bound Since the New Year?

Since last week’s Tematica Investing, we’ve seen the overall stock market little changed, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down slightly, the S&P 500 essentially flat and the Nasdaq Composite Index up a tick.

range-bound index

We’ve had a number of favorable moves on the Tematica Select List, with Facebook (FB) climbing more than 2 percent and Amazon (AMZN) up more than 1.5 percent with favorable moves in International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), AT&T (T), Costco Wholesale (COST) and Universal Display (OLED) were had. Several Tematica Select List positions moved relative sideways during the week, like Alphabet (GOOGL) and Nuance Communications (NUAN), but we see that as treading water ahead of the earnings report deluge.

As the market braces for the deluge of fourth quarter earnings announcements, we continue to find confirming data for our active positions. Case in point, reports that smartphone vendors are concerned Apple (AAPL) could “monopolize OLED supply capacity for this year’s iPhone 8,” and are looking to secure organic light emitting diode capacity fits with our thesis and bodes well for our Universal Display (OLED) shares.

Another, even though we just added Disruptive Technology theme company Nuance Communications (NUAN) to the Tematica Select List last week, we continue to hear about new voice-enabled applications like the one from Adobe Systems (ADBE) called “intelligent digital assistant photo editing” that is more simply put a voice-controlled photo editor. We have to admit, we are rather excited for that one assuming it helps reduce the trial and error effort to touch up photos and get rid of all those red eyes.

As we mentioned above, we are preparing to drink from a firehose-like deluge of earnings announcements this week and the next few. As evidenced by what we’ve seen thus far from JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Bank of America (BAC), PNC Bank (PNC), United Continental (UAL), WD40 (WDFC), CSX (CSX) and Gigamon (GIMO) it’s going to be a rather mixed bag of reports over the coming weeks. Once again we’re seeing earnings misses relative to expectations lead to falling stock prices. Not a bad thing considering how far and how fast the stock market has jumped since early November, especially if you’ve been a prudent investor like we have been these past several weeks. During that time we added Rise & Fall of the Middle Class McCormick & Co. (MKC), Facebook (FB) as our latest Connected Society play and last week Nuance Communications (NUAN) given its disruptive voice technology.

While we could point out that all three have moved nicely higher, especially Facebook, which certainly has us feeling pretty good, it’s the opportunity to circle back to the ones that got away that has us rather excited this earnings season. It’s not that we want bad news, but rather the opportunity to buy well positioned, thematically driven businesses at better prices. That’s how we added Facebook shares to the Tematica Select List — we knew the company was a key player in our Connected Society investing theme, but we waited until we had a compelling risk-to-reward tradeoff in the share price.

This reminds us of one of “Uncle” Warren Buffet’s most used sayings, “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

We suspect there will be far more value to be had in the stock market over the next few weeks compared to the last several as December quarter earnings kicks into gear. As we’ve shared in the last several issues of The Monday Morning Kickoff, expectations have been running high, but recently more investors have been scratching their heads as they put the economic reality puzzle pieces together and reassess what is “expected.” Making this even more challenging is we have the Volatility Index near its lowest levels in over a year. Looking at the chart below, the words “reversion to the mean” ring in our head.

What this tells us is should the news turn to something less than expected, we are bound to see a far more bumpy time in the market than the smooth sailing we’ve seen since early November.

 

President-elect Trump’s Tweets and Interviews Suggest a Bumpy Ride 

Unless you live under a rock or are stuck under a very large piece of furniture with no access to a TV or the internet (yes, the internet has become so ubiquitous that it now lowercase), you know this week also marks the presidential inauguration, which will dominate headlines over the next few days. While we will watch the events of the week and listen to the speeches and confirmation hearings for clues as to what’s to come from the new Trump administration, we won’t be shedding a tear as we move past the event and onto the work that needs to be done.

As that happens, we also hope that President Trump rethinks his Twitter (TWTR) usage, but not necessarily for the same reasons as the media. While we like the push to bring jobs back to the US and put a more effective healthcare program in place, as investors we are not fans of the policy-by-bullhorn we have seen.

What makes this even more challenging is we have yet to receive a holistic view on what President-elect Trump’s policies will be, and this “keep them guessing” approach of one-off pronouncements may be good for his intended deal making, it’s added a layer of uncertainty for the stock market, and as we know the market doesn’t like uncertainty.


As we’ve seen from president-elect Trump’s tweets and interviews, his words have the potential to be very disruptive to the investment playing field:

  • Earlier this month, close to $25 billion was shaved off the value of the S&P 500’s top nine pharmaceutical companies in a matter of minutes, following President-elect accusing them of “getting away with murder.”
  • Last week following a newspaper interview with President-elect Trump in which he warned he would impose a border tax of 35 percent on vehicles imported from abroad to the US market, German carmaker stocks sold off sharply.
  • The US dollar slumped to a seven-week low against Japan’s yen late Tuesday, and continued to trade lower against a slew of currencies early this morning after President-elect Trump said that the buck was “too strong”. In an article in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Trump said the strength of the US dollar against China’s yuan “is killing us.”

 

Amidst All This Uncertainty, We’re Taking a Wait and See Approach 

We’ve encountered many disruptions in the past and odds are these current events won’t be last. Over the last few years, we’ve seen earnings season become a greater source of stock price volatility — miss EPS expectations by a penny, and we now see share prices fall 10-20 percent, far greater than the single digits selloffs that had been the norm. These tend to be short-term disruptions that give way to market forces, which means that as we continue to focus on thematic fundamentals, we’ll be vigilant for opportunities presented by wide swings in stock prices.

With this in mind, we’re holding off making any moves with the Tematica Select List this week as we instead digest company comments regarding the tone of the economy, impact of the dollar on their business outlook and of course the strength of our thematic tailwinds.

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Making a Nuanced Move With The Tematica Select Investment List

Making a Nuanced Move With The Tematica Select Investment List

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Over the last week, while many have been watching the Dow Jones Industrial Average flirt with 20,000, the Nasdaq Composite Index continued to climb higher. That led our Connected Society investment theme positions in Facebook (FB), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN) higher over the last week.

  • Even so, we still have ample room to our respective price targets for each of those positions and our buy rating on all three remains.

 

Over the last few months, we’ve been talking about the impact of food deflation, which has been confirmed by our Cash-strapped Consumer play that is Costco Wholesale (COST) as well as grocery chain Kroger (KR) and others.

We’ve also called out the inability of restaurants to harness that deflation for their own margins given minimum wage increases and other cost drivers. The latest findings from Fitch Ratings sees restaurant sales slowing this year, and the NPD Group expects traffic will be flat this year, with a 2 percent decline at dine-in restaurants offsetting a 1% increase at quick-service concepts.  We expect confirmation to be had this coming earnings season, and if Kona Grill’s (KONA) 4 percent decline in same-store sales for the December quarter is any indication it’s not going to be pretty.

Still, we know that people need to eat and are continuing to shift toward organic and natural foods and other products, which bodes well for our McCormick & Co. (MKC) and United Natural Foods (UNFI) shares. Recent findings from a new poll conducted by Pew Research Center underscore our bullish position. According to the Pew poll, 55 percent of Americans believe that “organic food, particularly organically grown fruits and vegetables, are healthier than conventional.” The same poll also showed a growing distrust of GMO foods and concern over pesticide use.

A different study conducted by the European Parliament’s Independent Research Service, titled “Human health implications of organic food and organic agriculture,” concluded that eating organic food improves early development, reduces pesticide exposure, strengthens the nutritional value of food, and mitigates disease risks.
We do not see this as a short-term fad and point to a recent report from Research and Markets that forecasts the global market for organic food to grow at “a CAGR of over 14 percent during 2016-2021, on account of high demand for organic food.”

  • Both MKC and UNFI remain Buys at current levels.

 

rogueonecharact-6d3c3120104-originalOn the continued strength of Rouge One at the box office and the news that Content is King investment theme company The Walt Disney Co. (DIS) is firming up plans for a streaming ESPN service, our Disney shares moved higher over the last several days.

The same can be said with our CalAmp (CAMP) shares following management’s presentation at the annual Needham Growth Conference that focused on its expanding market opportunities across fleet management, Connected Car and enterprise asset tracking markets.

Adding Nuance Communications (NUAN)
to the Tematica Select List as Voice Goes Big

Last week was the tech world descended upon Las Vegas for CES 2017. The annual trade show kicks off the new year and introduces a number of new consumer gadgets that we’re likely to see — some this year and others in the coming ones.

Among the sea of announcements, there were a number that focused on one aspect of our Disruptive Technology investing theme and that is the area of voice recognition technology. Over the years we’ve seen various incarnations of this technology, most recently with Siri from Apple (AAPL), Cortana from Microsoft (MSFT), Google Assistant from Alphabet (GOOGL) and Alexa from Amazon (AMZN). Each of these has come to the forefront like in products like Amazon Echo and Google Home that house these virtual digital assistants (VDAs), but for now one of the largest consumer-facing markets for voice interface technology has been the smartphone. Coming in 2016, Parks Associates found that nearly 40 percent of all smartphone owners use some sort of voice recognition software such as Siri or Google Now.

 

 

In 2016, the up and comer was Amazon as sales of its Echo devices were up 9x year over year this past holiday season and “millions of Alexa devices sold worldwide this year.” If you’re a user of Amazon Echo like we are, then you know that each week more capabilities are being added to the Alexa app such as ordering a pizza from Dominos (DPZ), calling for an Uber, checking sports scores and weather to getting holiday cocktail recipes.

As we entered 2017, Amazon announced that Prime members can voice-order their next meal through Amazon Restaurants on their Alexa-enabled devices including the Amazon Echo and Echo Dot. Once an order is placed, Amazon delivery partners deliver the food in one hour or less. Pretty cool so long as you have Amazon Restaurants operating in and around where you live.

 

 

Virtual digital assistants cut across more than just smartphones and devices like Amazon Echo and the recently announced Google Home. According to a new report from Tractica, while smartphone-based consumer VDAs are currently the best-known offerings, virtual assistant technologies are also beginning to penetrate other device types including smart watches, fitness trackers, PCs, smart home systems, and automobiles.

We saw just that at CES 2017 with some landscaping changing announcements for VDAs. Alphabet had several announcements surrounding its Google Home product at CES 2017, including integration into upcoming Hyundai and Chrysler models; and acquiring Limes Audio, which focuses on voice communication systems, and will likely be additive to the company’s Google Home, Hangouts and other products. Microsoft also scored a win for Cortana with Nissan.

While those wins were impressive, the big VDA winner at CES was Amazon as it significantly expanded its Alexa footprint on deals with LG, Dish Network (DISH), Whirlpool (WHR), Huawei and Ford (F). In doing so Amazon has outflanked Alphabet, Microsoft and even Apple in the digital assistant market. To us, that’s another leg to the Amazon stool that offers more support to the share alongside the digital shopping/services, content, and Amazon Web Services businesses. You don’t need to read between the lines to think that we still see big upside to our $975 Amazon price target.

To be fair, Apple originally did not license out its Siri technology and only in June 2016 did it announce that it would open the code behind Siri to third-party developers through an API, giving outside apps the ability to activate from Siri’s voice commands, and potentially endowing Siri with a wide range of new skills and datasets.
Tractica forecasts that unique active consumer VDA users will grow from 390 million in 2015 to 1.8 billion worldwide by the end of 2021.  During the same period, unique active enterprise VDA users will rise from 155 million in 2015 to 843 million by 2021.  The market intelligence firm forecasts that total VDA revenue will grow from $1.6 billion in 2015 to $15.8 billion in 2021.

 

An Overlooked Player in the VDA Segment

Nuance Communications logoThe one drawback when it comes to the VDA market is the players mentioned above have large existing businesses, which means their respective VDA businesses, at least in the next few yeas, will have at best modest influence on their overall financial picture. In keeping with our “buy the bullets not the guns,” coming out of CES 2017 we find ourselves looking at speech technology and voice recognition company Nuance Communications (NUAN).

Nuance’s voice solutions compete in four markets:

  • Healthcare (49 percent of revenue): In this business, Nuance supports clinical documentation workflows and electronic medical record (EMR) adoption through flexible offerings, including transcription services, dictation software for the EMR, diagnostics workflow, and mobile applications. Recently Nuance released Dragon Medical Advisor, an AI Assistant for doctors. More than 500,000 clinicians and 10,000 healthcare facilities worldwide use Nuance’s healthcare solutions, which are sold through customers that include Cerner (CERN), Epic, McKesson (MCK), UPMC, Cleveland Clinic, Siemens, and the Mayo Clinic. Over the last few quarters, Nuance has been transitioning this business from a perpetual license business to a software as a service (SAAS) one, but with that shift expected to be largely completed by the second half of 2017 that revenue drag should be eliminated.
  • Enterprise (20 percent of revenue): This business segment offers automated intelligent self-service solutions that include speech and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that reduce or replace human contact center agents with conversational systems, across voice, mobile, web and messaging channels. Think of when you call your bank, broker or even consider using the phone to call for a pizza from Dominos (candidly we’re not sure why you would call given the ease of the Domino’s app that can be used on either your smartphone, Apple TV, or Amazon’s Alexa, but hey that’s us). Representative customers include Avaya, BT, Cisco, DiData, Genesys, Huawei, MoshiMoshi, NICE, Telstra, and Verint. Nuance’s customers include: American Airlines, Amtrak, Bank of America, Barclays, Dominos, Delta, Deutsche Telekom, e*trade, ING Bank, Lloyds Banking Group, T-Mobile, Telefonica, Telstra, and Vodafone.
  • Mobile (19 percent of revenue): Here Nuance offers a portfolio of specialized virtual assistants and connected services built on voice recognition, text-to-speech, natural language understanding, dialog, and text input technologies across automotive, device and mobile operator solutions. With regard to automotive in particular, Nuance has announced Daimler, Ford and BMW as customers, and as evidenced at both CES 2017 and the 2017 North American International Auto Show we are nearing the tipping point for the Connected Car, which should bode well for this business segment.
  • Imaging (12 percent of revenue): In this division, segment Nuance provides software solutions and expertise that help professionals and organizations to gain optimal control of their document and information processes. Customers and partners include Ricoh, Xerox, HP, Canon, and Samsung. This business has been bumping along at around 11 to 12 percent of revenue the last few years as Nuance has reorganized itself over the last several quarters.

When we step back from Nuance’s business segments and look at the overall market growth for voice recognition technologies, BCC Research sees it growing to $184.9 billion in 2021, up from $90.3 billion in 2015. Breaking these two markets down into Consumer and Enterprise markets, BCC expects the Consumer market to grow to $95.9 billion in 2021 from $54.4 billion in 2016 and the Enterprise market to reach $79.0 billion by 2021 up from $44.0 billion in 2016. Viewed against that larger market, we see ample room for Nuance to expand beyond the $1.9 billion in revenue it generated in 2016.

Over the last few years, after delivering significant revenue growth during 2010-2014,  the pace of revenue growth, while positive, has dipped. Part of that is due in part to erosion for the transcription business in the company’s Healthcare business, as well as the shift from a contract business model to a Cloud based one that offers integrated solutions. In 2016, roughly 70 percent of the company’s revenue stream was recurring in nature, up from 65 percent or so in 2015.

What this tells us is the bulk of the revenue shift is largely behind the company. Like a turning tanker, these changes take time, but once they catch momentum they tend to pick up speed and Nuance should see its recurring revenue growth to 70-75 percent of overall revenue during 2017. As investors, we like the nature of a recurring revenue model, given that it affords far greater visibility and shares tend to be rewarded with better multiples given that predictability.

We’ve seen the power of this business shift already at Adobe Systems (ADBE), which now has more than 70 percent of its revenue recurring in nature, up from 19 percent in 2011, and its shares that have climbed to just over $108 from $28 at the end of 2011.

Looking Ahead to 2017 for Nuance

The growth businesses at Nuance include its automotive, voice biometrics, omni-channel customer care, unified print and scan solutions, Dragon Medical, CDI and diagnostics. Paving the way is the company’s most recent quarterly bookings, which were up 45 percent year on year. Longer-term we expect more applications across the consumer electronics market to develop. As noted above, Whirlpool is working with Amazon and odds are that means before too long we’ll see VDAs built into various appliances across the kitchen and laundry rooms. In our view, that’s just scratching at the surface.

The big question circling Nuance is the competitive landscape, particularly the move by Amazon, Alphabet and Apple to open up their application programming interface (API) to third-parties. Just like Rackspace (RACK) specializes in Cloud computing, but thus far has remained unharmed by Amazon’s AWS, Nuance specializes in selling to global brands, health care, and large corporations, which are not likely to utilize Google’s free API for its business needs. As you’ve probably notice with Android, one of the issues with a free API is malware and cyber hacking.

It’s also not lost on us that Alphabet recently acquired Limes Audio to improve its voice recognition capabilities. As anyone who has used Apple’s Siri knows, it’s far from perfect in voice recognition and voice to text. In our view, this means Nuance could be an attractive candidate for a larger player that needs to improve its technology positioning.

 

What are NUAN shares worth?

In looking over historic multiples, including P/E and Enterprise Value to Revenue, and applying them to consensus 2017 earnings expectations that call for EPS of $1.59 on revenue of just over $2 billion, we see upside to $21 and downside to just under $15.

At the current share price — $15.45 as of market close on 1/10/17 — NUAN shares are trading at under 10x expected 2017 earnings of $1.59 per share. We certainly like that risk-to-reward trade-off in NUAN shares at a time when voice technology is expanding its market size across the device, automotive and Internet of Things markets.

 

Bottomline on Nuance Communications (NUAN)
  • We’re adding NUAN shares to the Tematica Select list with a price target of $21.
  • Because this is a new position, we are holding off with a stop loss recommendation at this time, preferring to use near-term weakness to scale into the position and improve the cost basis.

 

* We strongly recommend you use the link below to download the full report on Nuance Communications (NUAN), which includes background on our Disruptive Technology thematic as well as financials on NUAN.

DOWNLOAD THIS WEEK’S ISSUE
The full content of Tematica Investing is above; however downloading the full issue provides detailed performance tables and charts. Click here to download.