2021年7月3日 星期六
Splunk - perspective from Morningstar
Splunk: Future Tech Behemoth Still Trading At Modest Levels
Summary
- Shares of Splunk remain down ~20% year-to-date for no apparent reason.
- The company is just passing the jump of its cloud transition, as revenue has started turning positive again, with cloud bookings exceeding >50% of the total.
- ARR growth is still clinging to a rapid ~40% pace.
- A recent $1 billion convertible stock investment by Silver Lake Partners, with a strike price of $160, signals upward confidence in the stock.
- Splunk is still trading attractively at <8x next year's revenue.
Splunk
Economic Moat Rating increased to Narrow from None
“We are raising our fair value estimate for Splunk to US$154 per share from US$126 while changing our moat rating to narrow from none and maintaining our positive trend rating. We are upgrading our moat rating to reflect our increased confidence in Splunk’s ability to attain sustainable profitability.
In a world where machine data is growing at an exponential rate, Splunk’s platform is empowering companies to generate meaningful, real-time insights from the data in order to maintain critical operations related to security and IT infrastructure. A key advantage of Splunk’s platform is that it can easily index massive amounts of unstructured, machine data using a proprietary "schema on the fly" process. This indexing process quickly identifies fields like user IDs, time stamps, device sources, and error codes, and offers a user-friendly querying tool to generate real-time, actionable insights from the data. Machine data is expected to increase over 40-fold from 2009 to 2020, and the amount of data that Splunk’s platform allows customers to process in real time sets it apart, with its largest customer collecting over 7 petabytes of data per day. We believe that this unique schema-on-the-fly indexing process has allowed Splunk to carve out a moat and provides it the opportunity to increase by revenue double digits for the next decade.
Given the company's technology platform, which can be used to better manage operations at the busiest airports in the world as well as Subway restaurants, we believe no competitor can address the same breadth of use cases as Splunk. We believe that improving customer metrics indicate increasing customer reliance on Splunk due to its flexible deployment options and the growing importance of machine data. Over 80% of new license bookings come from existing customers while the average license order size more than doubled from 2014 to 2018. Splunk is seeing similarly strong trends in large order growth and rising maintenance renewal rates.”
--John Barrett, analyst
2021年5月3日 星期一
Splunk - a short guideline for recent drop on prices
Splunk Slides as Morgan Stanley
Downgrades on Business Transition Issues
Splunk shares were trading sharply lower onTuesday after Morgan
Stanley analyst Keith Weiss cut his rating on the data analytics software
company to Equal Weight from Overweight, reducing his target price on the stock
to $160, from $213.
As Barron’s outlined in a recent article, Splunk (ticker: SPLK)
is working through several major changes in its business, shifting toward a
subscription-based revenue model while gradually moving toward a focus on
cloud-based versions of its software. Those shifts have caused some disruptions
in the company’s growth rate.
In a research note, Weiss says that he expects “more bumps”
ahead for Splunk. He notes that the company has the potential to exceed $4
billion in annual recurring revenue within the next three years, which makes
the company’s $20 billion enterprise value “seem inexpensive.” But he adds that
he sees multiple near-term challenges that are likely to “keep multiples
depressed near term.”
He sees “lingering 揮之不去 issues
closing large deals,” increasing competition in the “observability” market, a
software segment focused on monitoring the health of IT systems, and a “more
challenging security landscape,” with increased competition in cyber analytics
and a smaller boost from the recent
Sunburst/SolarWinds hack attack than he had
originally
expected.
綜上所述 Splunk 產業優勢仍沒有大變動, 仍是Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Solutions項目的二大選擇之一 ( 另一個是IBM的QRadar )
不過reddit論壇這一段評論, 表示Splunk 近年來研發創新能力衰退, 反觀對手Elastic有迎頭趕上, 不斷研發許多新的功能給終端客戶
There are many more. Problem is, most of them rely on a way smaller set of use cases (security) so they aren’t frightening Splunk’s position. Elastic on the other hand.. they are investing more and more, especially into their endpoint client. While the Elastic query language and its usage for users is total garbage, the overall system is getting better.
While Splunk didn’t bring in any great features for the Universal Forwarder over the last couple years. Instead Splunk keeps acquiring companies and fails to integrate them. I’d say the time of creativity at Splunk is long gone. Just look at the .conf20, which was a 95% sales/marketing event. I know a lot of disappointed users.
What are some viable alternatives to Splunk that corporations use?
I'm looking into options for machine data log indexing and analytics (which I understand is Splunk's forte, correct me if I'm wrong), and I'm wondering what are some of Splunk's competitors in the same space. I heard there was a company called Elastic, how do they compare to Splunk? I also saw in the Magical Quadrant that IBM is a competitor, but I haven't heard much about that. Is that Red Hat or something else they are talking about? Any other competitors?
It depends on the use case. There are lots in both security and ops:
Data Dog, Loom, Moog all come to mind in ops; and QRadar, LogRhythm, ArcSight for security. There are plenty of others - APMs and NPMs which might be somewhat competitive but mostly I think they use Elastic.
In 'machine data' platforms most have been mentioned, Elastic and Sumo are the main ones I see, there are prob some others.
Ultimately if you want a leading SIEM and Ops platform in one it's Splunk.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Splunk/comments/esl68g/what_are_some_viable_alternatives_to_splunk_that/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Splunk/comments/k7n267/who_are_splunk_competitors/
https://kknews.cc/zh-tw/news/bmvgjvo.html
The Tully's departure “comes at a tough time” and compounds other risks facing Splunk, including sharper competition, pricing changes, and a transition of the customer base to the Splunk cloud platform, Keybanc analyst Michael Turits said in a note.
"The risk profile now looks balanced, with the departure adding yet another variable added to the equation,” Turits added.
Citi analyst Tyler Radke said the departure was an incremental negative for the stock, and investors may view the news as “a potential elongation of the transition/ongoing uncertainty.”
Rosenblatt Securities, on the other hand said, this was “a relatively minor setback for Splunk as its current product set and vision are well developed and its end markets remain robust
2021年3月22日 星期一
2021年3月8日 星期一
These Three Clues Will Lead You to Your Next Big Winner
Yesterday, I showed you two of the most important "clues" I use to uncover the world's greatest investment opportunities...
- The amount of free cash flow a company generates, and
- How it uses that cash to reward shareholders.
The third clue I look for when choosing a great investment is a great balance sheet.
The balance sheet is a financial statement that shows a company's assets and liabilities. Assets are what it owns, and liabilities are what it owes.
There are two kinds of great balance sheets we look for when finding a company that could potentially double or triple your money...
The first is a balance sheet with a massive amount of cash and relatively little or no debt. You can recognize a company like this in 30 seconds or less.
The best example is iPhone maker Apple (AAPL)...
Apple has more than $195.5 billion in cash and securities. And it has $112.1 billion in debt. That's a lot of debt, but it's nothing compared to the amount of cash Apple has. Apple could pay off all its debt and still have $83.4 billion in cash left over.
Imagine having 75% more cash than debt you have on your home, car, and credit cards.
You'd feel pretty secure with that much cash, wouldn't you?
Well, that's how Apple shareholders ought to feel right now. They can rest assured Apple will never have a financial problem with that much cash on hand.
Debt isn't always a dealbreaker, though – which brings me to the second type of great balance sheet I look for...
In short, sometimes a company has more debt than cash... But the business is so good that it earns enough to easily cover the debt payments.
Retail giant Walmart (WMT) is the best example of this...
It has $14.3 billion in cash... and $45.4 billion in debt. That's more than THREE TIMES more debt than cash.
That's a LOT of debt.
But remember, Walmart is a massive company... It does nearly $500 billion in annual sales. It has more than 11,600 locations around the world. It's bringing in a ton of cash every second of every day of the year.
The fact is, after Walmart pays all its expenses, taxes, and debt payments, it has enough earnings left over to equal more than eight times its debt payments.
How good is this?
Well, suppose you have $2,000 per month in debt payments.
Then suppose that after paying all those debt payments, plus all your other living expenses – income taxes and everything – you still have five and a half times $2,000 left over.
So, you'd basically have $11,000 a month left over after you paid all your expenses. That means you'd have an extra $132,000 per year you could spend any way you wanted.
You'd be pretty financially secure. And that's how Walmart shareholders should feel.
So, why do I care about this so much?
Well, in Extreme Value, we've closed out gains of 113% on tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PM)... 133% on chipmaker Intel (INTC)... 150% on beer titan Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD)... 125% on Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B)... and more than a dozen other double- and triple-digit gains.
And every single one of those companies had a great balance sheet.
I've lost count of how many e-mails I've received from Extreme Value subscribers who tell me they sleep better at night knowing each business we find is so financially strong.
So, to sum up this financial clue...
- Look for companies with great balance sheets.
- Some companies have a lot more cash than debt. That's a great balance sheet.
- Other companies have more debt than cash, but because they earn so much money, their debt payments are easily covered. This, too, makes for a great balance sheet.
2021年2月24日 星期三
聯準會貨幣政策目標與方針世紀大改：Jerome Powell 在傑克森洞年會演講全文導讀
聯準會主席Jerome Powell上週在傑克森洞年會上，
在會議後，
Jerome Powell不只是跨越紅線，
[聯準會政策目標與方針歷史背景]
從1960/70開始，
這個學說說的是，過低的失業率可能會導致過高的通貨膨脹。
在這個學說下，如果聯準會太過促進就業，反而會因為過熱的景氣、
而Jerome Powell這次的長期目標與貨幣政策策略，
---
[與歷史數據不同的新世界]
根據最新的數據，在過去十年當中，失業率持續下探，
另外，圖三是這十年的通膨。依照菲利浦曲線的說法，
在低失業的明顯好處下，沒有伴隨著可能的必要之惡通貨膨脹，
這是觸發這次聯準會政策大改的核心理由。
---
2021年2月6日 星期六
Tidewater (TDW) 的背景知識
Offshore wind installation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDvS7tizetg
Charter Rates
Chartering is an activity within the shipping industry. In some cases a charterer may own cargo and employ a shipbroker to find a ship to deliver the cargo for a certain price, called freight rate
A voyage charter is the hiring of a vessel and crew for a voyage between a load port and a discharge port. The charterer pays the vessel owner on a per-ton or lump-sum basis. The owner pays the port costs (excluding stevedoring), fuel costs and crew costs.
(24 hr) Day rate
Transit rate is same as Day RateDay starts 0800. Earlier departure times may incur additional charges
$8,800 Rate includes crew of 5, fuel, and food for 10 scientists (2 watch system, 1 crew in wheel house 1 on deck + cook). More crew for labor intensive operations can be provided with 30 days notice for an additional cost
船舶閑置（lay-up）船舶閑置俗稱“灣水”，是指船東將船舶退出營運的一種做法
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