Claude Cowork, with its industry-specific plugins, spooked the SaaS crowd – Salesforce, Intuit, Atlassian. Investors figured, why pay a fortune for streamlining when a machine might do it for peanuts? A reasonable fear, in a world obsessed with cutting corners. But the sell-off spread, snagging a name that didn’t quite fit. Alphabet. Google. A 6% drop. A slight cough for a giant, but a cough nonetheless.
The SMB, as I understand it, deals in municipal bonds—essentially, loans to cities and towns. Think school construction, sewer repairs, things that require a lot of paperwork and disgruntled taxpayers. The IGSB, on the other hand, is all about corporate bonds—loans to companies, the kind that might lay you off with a polite email and a severance package just large enough to cover your cat’s vet bills. The difference, as far as I can tell, is one is marginally less likely to leave you staring into the abyss, and the other offers a slightly better return. A trade-off, really. Like choosing between a lukewarm cup of tea and a slightly chipped mug.
To speak of ‘cheapness’ in relation to these entities feels… discordant. A misnomer, perhaps. Yet, the valuations, once soaring into the stratosphere, have begun to… settle. Not to a level of genuine affordability, understand, but to a point where a dispassionate assessment, stripped of the prevailing narrative of endless growth, becomes… permissible. We must, therefore, undertake a meticulous examination, a sifting of the numbers, to discern whether a flicker of opportunity exists within this seemingly impenetrable fortress of capital.
Consensus estimates project fourth-quarter earnings per share of approximately $1.35 on revenue of $2.87 billion, figures aligning with prior management guidance. While these metrics suggest modest, single-digit growth in both revenue and gross merchandise volume (GMV), they demonstrate continued operational momentum, even amidst macroeconomic uncertainties.
Both charge a perfectly reasonable, if ultimately futile, fee. The one-year performance is, shall we say, disheartening. HODL’s smaller size might be a consideration for those who prefer a more… intimate relationship with their losses.
The past three years, of course, have been… generous to those who held faith in the company. A surge, a veritable flood of capital, poured into the building of data centers, vast cathedrals dedicated to the worship of artificial intelligence. The processors, the very heart of these digital deities, sold like blessings in a time of drought. Sevenfold returns, they say, though Mateo always suspected the true measure of wealth wasn’t in the numbers themselves, but in the stories they concealed.
A snapshot, if you will, of their comparative virtues and, shall we say, limitations:
Now, some folks are saying this is a disaster. They’re wringing their hands and predicting doom. To them, I say: relax! Have a pastrami on rye! This isn’t the end of the world; it’s a temporary hiccup. A little indigestion for a company with a seriously healthy appetite for growth. It’s like worrying about a hangnail when you’re about to win the lottery.
I’m talking about Dutch Bros (BROS +4.68%) and On Holding (ONON +2.16%). Both have taken a bit of a beating lately, which, as any seasoned investor (or anxious relative) knows, is often when the interesting things happen.
Both ETFs nibble at your returns with a 0.50% annual fee – a small price to pay for the privilege of participating in a market driven by irrational exuberance and occasional panic. The ‘Beta’ figure, which measures volatility relative to the S&P 500, is a bit like trying to measure the speed of a thought – interesting in theory, but ultimately unhelpful. (It’s calculated from five-year weekly returns, which, given the inherent chaos of the universe, is roughly equivalent to predicting the weather on Jupiter.) SLV, with its considerably larger ‘AUM’ (Assets Under Management), has been around longer. Which, in market terms, is like saying it’s had more time to accumulate dust…and investors.