Overview of The Week #15: Laughing Is Healthy
With content about Nvidia, CrowdStrike, Shopify, Hims, Google, memes and much more.
Hi Multis
I'm finally feeling better after two weeks of being sick. It showed me once more that healthy people want many things, but if you are sick, you only want one thing: to get healthy as soon as possible. It also makes me extra thankful that I'm almost never sick, so I can write the Overview Of The Week each week for you.
Articles in the past weeks
Even though I didn't feel great, this is already the fifth article again this week. Let's look back at the four previous ones.
The first article of this week brought you the Best Buys Now for this month.
In the second article, we looked at Mercado Libre and whether it is a good buy at the current level.
I also updated the Quality Score and valuation for Enphase and I concluded that the stock is a buy now. You can read why here.
In the fourth article, we looked at the CrowdStrike earnings, and the quality score and the valuation were updated. You can read the article here.
Memes Of The Week
This week was versatile for memes. This is the first one.
More about the acquisition will be discussed later in this OOTW.
This is one I made myself.
And here's another one.
Let's keep laughing! It's healthy and prevents tunnel vision.
Interesting Podcasts Or Books
This week, I listened to a great episode of the podcast The Diary Of A CEO. Jefferson Fisher talked about how to talk. That may sound funny, as we can all talk, but one word can make a huge difference. As an attorney, Fisher knows. He speaks about lies, body language, how to not try to win arguments (because you lose the relationship) and much more.
You can listen to the episode here.
The markets in the past weeks
After a few red weeks, this week, the indexes were slightly up. The Nasdaq had the weakest upside move with just 0.17%. The S&P 500 gained 0.51% and the Russell 2000 was up 0.63%.
Despite the small gains, the Greed & Fear Index remained in extreme fear.
Quick Facts
1. The Google Wiz acquisition
This week, it was made public that Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) will buy Wiz for $32 billion. Wiz is an Israeli cybersecurity player and it's Google's biggest acquisition ever. I referred already to this earlier, with the cartoon in the meme section.
Sources say that $32 billion means between 45 times and 60 times Wiz's annual recurring revenue, so it's safe to say Google pays a hefty price, but hey, that was also said when they bought YouTube. Google had already tried to acquire Wiz 8 months ago, but failed then. Google agreed that Wiz would remain an independent unit within the company. That means it can keep its ties with Microsoft and Amazon, Google's competitors for cloud services.
Some Multis wondered if this was a red flag for CrowdStrike.
Wiz and CrowdStrike compete for CNAPP or Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform but not for endpoint security, for example, which is CrowdStrike's first and most significant focus.
CrowdStrike itself says that compared to Wiz for CNAPP:
CrowdStrike emphasizes its agent-based Falcon platform, offering deep visibility into runtime application workloads and APIs, which Wiz lacks.
Wiz's runtime protection is limited to static prevention rules, while CrowdStrike offers real-time threat detection and response, leveraging AI and machine learning. I can't imagine CrowdStrike can make this up, so that's a really big one in CrowdStrike's advantage.
CrowdStrike also provides professional and managed services, which Wiz does not, potentially leaving customers with skill gaps in implementation and threat hunting.
This is an overview:
For more explanation, you can check out this link and this link, which offers more technical insight.
Now, of course, CrowdStrike is not an objective source. However, Gartner said that CrowdStrike's overall customer experience was better than that of Wiz for CNAPP.
In the Forrester Wave for Cloud Workload Security, Wiz is seen as having a stronger current offering but a much weaker strategy than CrowdStrike.
To summarize, there could be a bit of competition for CNAPP on the Google Cloud Platform, but I don't see this having a big impact.
2. Mercado Pago Changes Color
Mercado Pago, Mercado Libre’s payments arm, used to have a blue background for its logo. That was now changed to a yellow background, although a little blue was kept.
(Source)
Mercado Libre does this to tie Mercado Pago closer to its e-commerce business.