STOCK MARKET: Let's talk stocks and investing

Thoughts on Snowflake IPO?

 

That's funny - I'm doing the same thing. I'm thinking SPAC have a bottom at $10 given the structure, so I'm risking 10% or so for the hope of one of them hitting. In retrospect, I should have done that with 10 SPACs vs just 2. Oh well, hopefully one of the 2 hit and then whatever.

 

https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/12/21434110/softbank-may-sell-arm-to-nvidia
SoftBank is reportedly preparing to sell ARM to Nvidia for more than $40 billion

Need to see how this affects NVDA.

 

This is really wild, especially with the 3080 launch happening too, could make it even more interesting.

 

Super interested in Snowflake but my guess is it will be overhyped and overpriced, especially now Buffett took a big stake in it.

 

MSFT didn’t get TikTok.
Hopefully we don’t take a hit tomm. Ugh.

 

Big, but somewhat expected, news for the semis :

Nvidia to buy Arm Holdings from SoftBank for $40 billion
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/nvidia-to-buy-arm-holdings-from-softbank-for-40-billion.html

 

There's always still Oracle. At least that's the rumor. If the market goes down, it was going down anyway. I'm more interested in seeing how this affects Oracle and Microsoft stock.

 

Speaking of which :

Oracle poised to become TikTok’s U.S. technology partner after Chinese owners reject Microsoft’s bid
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/microsoft-bid-for-tiktoks-us-operations-rejected-by-bytedance.html

 

Ya I am mostly concerned about MSFT.

 

Maybe I'm too old to appreciate the value of tik tok... but the idea of the market basing decisions whether to buy or sell msft on a "discounted" tik tok deal sounds ludicrous to me haha. Much more excited about game pass and other subscriptions they are selling.

 

the deal that Bytedance has agreed to w ORCL calls for the US co to be a partner for the Chinese co, kinda like a joint venture

Tiktok user info will be stored / housed w ORCL;
the algorithm stays w ByteDance​

but this is not an out-right sale of TikTok's US operation to a US co, which had been called for by Trump


did the Trump admin move the goal post mid-game ?

 

posted this last Wed

that confirmation never came to fruition last Thu.

​

but it does look like it's bouncing off the low trading channel, w higher lows.

gonna be conservative / patient / disciplined, wait for the trading action to hit the 20dma

 

are there anti-competitive concerns ?

 

There's a lot of unhappiness over it from arm licensees, but it's hard to call it a monopoly, since arm and nvidia don't compete in the same market. The concern is that nvidia will slow walk designs for licensees while getting first dibs on the latest architectures from Arm engineers, letting Nvidia have the edge in all arm CPUs. Arm will go from a neutral IP provider to an engineering division of a direct competitior. This will be very painful for many licensees, but I don't think you can really say it's anti-competitive.

There could also be international barriers, Qualcomm's deal with NXP didn't go through cos of China (in response to trade war). Haven't read anything about EU yet, but if they can hold up a fitbit-google deal, who knows. Regardless I'm bullish on Nvidia though. Nice to have arm, but they can still do very well without arm.

Btw, CRWD's chart is looking nice too, was tempted to buy calls, but decided to save money for snowflake and unity.

 

That remains to be seen. There are countries/companies around the globe that will probably complain about this, so it remains to be seen if it will go through (which could take months). Even with this, there's going to be geo-political concern, even from US allies, since ARM is a UK-based company and is now being sold to the US. Add to that, ARM chip designs are involved in EVERYTHING including smart phones, wearables, tablets, AI-related applications, etc., and it becomes another battleground for the US vs China trade spat. Unlike companies like TSM, they aren't making chips -- they license their designs to others and, in a sense, become a part of other companies' designs. This would make Nvidia a chip powerhouse.

 

This is starting to look like basically what China does : "we'll let you operate here, but we want one of our companies to work with you". This almost seems like Oracle is just becoming their cloud operator which would be a far cry from what Microsoft was wanting to do. Oracle isn't a top-tier (as in top 5) cloud player, or if they are, they're barely there, so this seems it has some political favors mixed in from the looks of it. When I think of "modern digital", "future of AI", etc. I don't think of Oracle. On the cloud front, they were passed up by Amazon and Microsoft easily, but they did have a big win earlier this year with Zoom using them for their cloud infrastructure, so who knows.

As for moving the goalposts, I don't know. Trump is known for asking for the moon and settling for a moon pie, so it could just be part of his game. But this is shaping up to be nothing close to what we heard the deal was going to be about. Where is WalMart in all this? Are they still involved? I don't even hear a mention of them anymore. In a cloud infrastructure play, how is Amazon not even mentioned, or were they "behind the scens"?

BTW, Fastly is moving up big on the news today. Anyone interested?

 

This deal feels like it will be collateral damage - high profile, on heels of Tik Tok, hits at multiple countries....just a hunch...

 

Look at how JEDI went down. No deal for you if you own fake news wapo. For tik tok, deal for you if you donate to me? If he gets a 2nd term I'll put money into Palantir.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/public...protest-politically-corrupted-contract-award/

Re: fastly, is oracle able to provide CDN services for tik tok? I'm not sure.

 

Haha. I was saying that tongue-in-cheek with that AMZN comment, sort of. Interesting call on Palantir. I may have to think about it.

Speaking of which, Snowflake IPO is Wednesday. Last I read it was pricing $100-$110.

*EDIT* : IPO is Wednesday not tomorrow as I originally stated. Oops!