The Razor’s Edge

We're back! With a lot happening in the last (checks notes) 22 months (!), but also not a lot changing, Akram's Razor and Daniel wade back into the market to talk about what's happening with Artificial Intelligence and everything around it. Specifically, we try to understand whether the cap-ex side of this trade is getting long in the tooth, and what the fundamental tensions are between different...

Our second podcast of this week and 2024 covers companies not priced for perfection, but that instead have struggled. We start with China stocks, and the question of whether China is uninvestible. We go into Akram's July 2023 Alibaba trade views and how that was also an investment thesis. We also talk about the connected nature of global economics now and in history. From there we jump to Boeing's...

The chip sector has been Hansel-level hot to start 2024. AMD and Nvidia have jumped 14% and 21% respectively in 2024, the SOXX ETF is up 8% in the last week, and the AI theme of 2023 is still driving things to start 2024. What does this say about the sector, and why is it like being a favorite to win the Super Bowl? We discuss the excitement, the build out of AI, the usage, and how that all conver...

Hey! We're back! It's been a while, but with 2023 finishing in such a one-direction flourish, we wanted to pick up the mic again. Akram and Daniel talk about what to make of the market's triumphal 2023. We cover the overall vibes in the market, but also get into the weeds on stocks like Nvidia, Micron, Docusign, Zoom, and even Alteryx and Roku, as well as a few older names. The plan is to publish...

It's been a while since we've posted a Razor's Edge episode, and a lot has happened! A whole banking crisis came and went and apparently is all resolved (?). More relevant to the sort of things we talk about, the Nasdaq has returned to full bull market mode, powered by the excitement around generative AI, as best embodied by Nvidia's smashing earnings report of late May 2023. There's a lot to be l...

It’s been a funky start to the year, as a dash for trash rally has extended into a not as bad as expected earnings rally, and now it’s easy to be wrongfooted. We dive into this market, including how markets don't go straight to zero, no matter what December felt like; how recessions take a long time to play out; what we can learn from moves in Twilio and Meta; and why the rise of AI has complicate...

On this week's The Razor's Edge, we talk about software as a service and how the market seems to repeat the same patterns over and over. Those patterns include: Taking the last three months and the next three months and extrapolating far into the future Ignoring valuation until it's too late to ignore valuation Searching for silver bullet explanations and one-size-fits-all theories This time aroun...

All-star guest Compound248 joins us to follow up on a wild week in the markets. We talk Elon Musk’s high volume start as owner of Twitter and the SBF, FTX, crypto crisis. Akram's Razor and Compound go back and forth on the import for the cryptosphere, why Elon and team could have taken easier shots on goal, and break down what breaking the buck means, among other topics.  It's a story of the Hinde...

Last week was a big week in tech, so we’re back with an episode on two of the biggest stories. First, (2:40 minute mark) we break down Meta Platforms’ bummer of an earnings result and why it shouldn’t have been so surprising. What choice does Zuck have and where is the business heading? We then (57:00) get into Amazon and AWS’s disappointing quarter, and the future of public cloud. That opens up s...

Q2 earnings season has delivered many surprises on the one hand and continuations of trends on the other hand. For SaaS companies, that has meant continued drifting. Last week, Okta, MDB, and Veeva reported, and we break down each of those companies on this week's the Razor's Edge (you can also read Akram's take here ). We get into the challenges each of those companies face, but also the broader...

Roku's dud of a quarter echoed both Snap's report from the week earlier and the start of the pandemic as the sudden advertising slowdown hit them as well. The issues with Roku go beyond the quarter, starting primarily with how much harder it is to understand the details of their business. Will this quarter force a change? And what else does the advertising slowdown mean for the market? We discuss...

It’s all happening: Elon Musk filed to terminate his deal to buy Twitter, Twitter sued him for specific performance, and now the trials begin. Today, not a trial actually but a hearing to see whether the trial should take place on Twitter’s requested timeline, in September, or Musk’s requested timeline, in February. Still, the two sides are starting to show their hands. While much of this ‘negotia...

On this week’s The Razor’s Edge, we talk about the bear market. It’s here, it’s real, so now what? Neither Akram nor Daniel are in an apocalyptic mood, so we explain why we’re not, what green shoots there are on the supply side, what risks there are on the demand side, how this echoes 2020 (or not), how much crypto contagion worries us, and why it’s tricky picking individual names. Topics Covered...

This week's episode picks up where last week's The Razor's Edge episode left off. We talk the current whipsaw/whiplash macro environment, where a smaller, often over optimistic social media company can trigger a panic, and then news that is no worse than expected can fire up a bear market rally. We discuss tech stocks, retail stocks, and whether it's possible to be too bearish or too bullish as th...

In part two of our recording this week, we get to Elon Musk and Twitter. Both because how can we not at this point, as the drama continues to unfurl, and also because Akram makes the case for this as a good merger arb play given the strength of contract law. We talk about whether Musk can work his way out of this and why Akram thinks he can’t, and what the next steps of the saga should be, along w...

Markets are in turmoil, and we almost busted out the siren. But instead of commemorating the second bear market in the Razor's Edge's lifetime, we focused on whether, actually, growth stocks might have bottomed. In an episode recorded Sunday, May 22nd, we talk about the growth stock washout, whether sentiment or operating momentum has bottomed, whether ZoomInfo makes sense as a short and Zoom Vide...

Tech as a sector has been a theme of the Razor's Edge from the beginning. Tech as a sector to avoid has been a theme of the Razor's Edge for at least the last few months. While there have been exceptions and nuances to the sector, the market has shown little interest in nuance, as this week's earnings have made clear. Juniper Networks, an old dot com bubble victim and survivor, has been an excepti...

We planned to do another episode this week, but on a different tech stock. We did indeed record that episode, but at the same time, with all the developments around Twitter - the board's adoption of a poison pill, Elon Musk's discussion of his bid during a Ted talk, and Jack Dorsey's subtweets of the board, among other things - we decided to discuss the situation. Akram's Razor posted a case for w...

A lot has happened since we last published a Razor’s Edge episode: the outbreak of war, increased Fed hawkishness, and continued market volatility. We pick up the thread we’ve been following for some time, though: how to understand ‘normalized’ earnings power and behavior amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, the global response, and all the knock-on effects. We focus this time on the consumer goods secto...

Last week was a wild one. Given we’re not in a period of acute crisis, and that the market finished higher on the week, the swings from Wednesday to Thursday to Friday were especially pronounced, even before you throw in Monday’s comeback rally. The triggers to those moves? At least on the surface, big tech earnings. To figure out what’s happening there and what these outsized moves say about the...

Happy New Year! Though this week’s The Razor’s Edge touches on what may not be the happiest start for people investing in software names or tech more generally. So what’s going on? We throw together a bit of recent and longer-term history, a bit of market sentiment analysis, and some opinions on what might still work, to see why a shift has been coming for a while and why there might be more to co...

We pick up this week's conversation where last week's (and so many of our past episodes left off) - what about Twitter, at this price, in this economy? We talk about the succession decision and why the set-up for the incoming CEO, intentionally set or not, is pretty attractive. We talk about Elliott Management's role in all this, and what they might be thinking about Twitter at this stage. We talk...

Docusign’s sell-off on Friday and the corresponding market (and Nasdaq) sell-off are the latest sign of market uncertainty. No one knows anything – as Monday’s rally reminds us – but the question is whether we know we don’t know. In this week’s The Razor’s Edge, we focus on the uncertainty in the market, the importance of valuation even when growth stocks work, and how to handle the volatility. Th...

We wrap up our Future of Compute series with a leading force in the field, Naveen Rao. Rao founded Nervana Systems, the first next-gen AI chip company, which he sold to Intel. He then drove Intel's AI road map before stepping down from the company in 2020, and just recently announced the founding of MosaicML, an AI startup focused on making algorithms more efficient through what he calls here a 'b...

This week we take a break from our Future of Compute series on the Razor’s Edge to talk Peloton. In an earnings season full of big moves and surprises, Peloton's downhill fall has been one of the headline events. As we mention on the call, who would imagine that COVID would still be a part of our lives, but Zoom and Peloton shares would be flat from June 2020? And yet, here we are. We break down h...