OP
Stock Market (22 Viewers)
- Thread starter AFL_ITALIA
- Start date
OP
Why Snowflake staged a record software IPO and is now worth more than $70bn
https://www.economist.com/business/...-software-ipo-and-is-now-worth-more-than-70bn
Apparently they're pretty reliant on AWS right now, but Amazon is at the same time investing heavily in their competitor, Redshift per CNBC.
But competition in the database business is heating up
CATCHING SNOWFLAKES is fun. It has also become lucrative. Many investors scrambled for shares in Snowflake, a maker of database programs, when it went public on September 16th. The eight-year-old firm more than doubled its valuation the first day of trading from about $33bn to just under $71bn, making its initial public offering the largest ever for a software firm. Even Warren Buffett, abandoning his customary tech-shyness, got in on the action. The legendary investor’s conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway, invested $735m in the firm, through a separate private placement and by purchasing shares from a former chief executive—a stake that is now worth $1.56bn.
The excitement shines a light on an obscure corner of the information-technology ecosystem: software for managing corporate data. This database market already generates $55bn a year in sales. It is expected to expand rapidly as data become if not the new oil, then at least an important input for most companies. And it is changing in intriguing ways—not all of them good news for Snowflake.
A database used to be best understood as a digital steam engine. Before electricity came along, a factory’s machines sat near a single power source. Similarly, corporate applications—programs that keep track of a firm’s finances or its supply chain, for example—were built around databases that housed all of a firm’s important information. Hard disks were pricey and had limited capacity so the best way to store it was in lean “relational” databases. Max Schireson, who used to run MongoDB, a database maker, and now works for Battery Ventures, an investment firm, likens these to “a parking garage where, to save space, you put all the seats in one place, the tyres in another and so on”. The industry quickly became dominated by a few firms, with Oracle leading the pack.
As storage has grown cheaper and data volumes have exploded, however, so has the number of startups erecting new kinds of digital carpark. Many focus not on tracking specific transactions but on analysing all manner of a firm’s data to glean relevant knowledge about its business, such as where certain products sell best. These more cluttered “data warehouses”, as they are known, were pioneered in the late 1970s by a firm called Teradata. Their latest iteration are “data lakes”, which take in all sorts of unstructured information, including text and pictures.
Snowflake has gone a step further. It was one of the first firms to lift both the data stockpiles and the software to trawl them from companies’ in-house data centres and into the computing clouds, the biggest of which are operated by Amazon, Google and Microsoft, a trio of tech giants. Snowflake’s customers can add capacity as needed—and pay depending on their use rather than a fixed price for a software licence, as was typical for relational databases. Better yet, its “multi-cloud” service works across the big three computing clouds, so customers need not get locked into any one of them. Recently Snowflake has also added features that let customers share and sell data, setting itself up as a data exchange of sorts.
This has convinced many that Snowflake could be the next Oracle. The firm is certainly on a roll. Although it is not yet making money, its losses, of $171m in the six months to July, have declined even as revenue has more than doubled year on year, to $242m. On current trends sales could reach nearly $1bn in the next 12 months.
Despite these promising numbers, and Mr Buffett’s blessing, Snowflake has its work cut out. The company’s uniqueness will not last much longer, says Donald Feinberg of Gartner, a research firm. Rival firms, in particular the big cloud providers, have been beefing up competing products and even dabbled with the multi-cloud. A few startups are already offering cheaper and more flexible “open-source” alternatives such as ClickHouse, a particularly zippy data-management system marketed by a startup called Altinity.
Other challengers are building more specialised digital repositories. Data generated by websites, for instance, are often stored on “document-oriented” databases that, in the garage analogy, keep cars intact rather than strip them for parts. MongoDB is the market leader in this segment. Confluent, another startup, is big in “streaming” databases that garner information from sources like sensors. These are more akin to a motorway service station: data are quickly checked to see if action is needed.
Much as today’s assembly lines are driven by dispersed electric motors rather than a single steam engine, then, corporate IT systems will increasingly rely on sundry specialised databases, predicts Zane Chrane of Bernstein, a broker. That—and the fact that data will increasingly be analysed in real time, rather than saved in a conventional database—will limit the power and profits of any single supplier. So Snowflake is unlikely ever to become as dominant as Oracle. Snowflakes fly high in a flurry. They also melt.
CATCHING SNOWFLAKES is fun. It has also become lucrative. Many investors scrambled for shares in Snowflake, a maker of database programs, when it went public on September 16th. The eight-year-old firm more than doubled its valuation the first day of trading from about $33bn to just under $71bn, making its initial public offering the largest ever for a software firm. Even Warren Buffett, abandoning his customary tech-shyness, got in on the action. The legendary investor’s conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway, invested $735m in the firm, through a separate private placement and by purchasing shares from a former chief executive—a stake that is now worth $1.56bn.
The excitement shines a light on an obscure corner of the information-technology ecosystem: software for managing corporate data. This database market already generates $55bn a year in sales. It is expected to expand rapidly as data become if not the new oil, then at least an important input for most companies. And it is changing in intriguing ways—not all of them good news for Snowflake.
A database used to be best understood as a digital steam engine. Before electricity came along, a factory’s machines sat near a single power source. Similarly, corporate applications—programs that keep track of a firm’s finances or its supply chain, for example—were built around databases that housed all of a firm’s important information. Hard disks were pricey and had limited capacity so the best way to store it was in lean “relational” databases. Max Schireson, who used to run MongoDB, a database maker, and now works for Battery Ventures, an investment firm, likens these to “a parking garage where, to save space, you put all the seats in one place, the tyres in another and so on”. The industry quickly became dominated by a few firms, with Oracle leading the pack.
As storage has grown cheaper and data volumes have exploded, however, so has the number of startups erecting new kinds of digital carpark. Many focus not on tracking specific transactions but on analysing all manner of a firm’s data to glean relevant knowledge about its business, such as where certain products sell best. These more cluttered “data warehouses”, as they are known, were pioneered in the late 1970s by a firm called Teradata. Their latest iteration are “data lakes”, which take in all sorts of unstructured information, including text and pictures.
Snowflake has gone a step further. It was one of the first firms to lift both the data stockpiles and the software to trawl them from companies’ in-house data centres and into the computing clouds, the biggest of which are operated by Amazon, Google and Microsoft, a trio of tech giants. Snowflake’s customers can add capacity as needed—and pay depending on their use rather than a fixed price for a software licence, as was typical for relational databases. Better yet, its “multi-cloud” service works across the big three computing clouds, so customers need not get locked into any one of them. Recently Snowflake has also added features that let customers share and sell data, setting itself up as a data exchange of sorts.
This has convinced many that Snowflake could be the next Oracle. The firm is certainly on a roll. Although it is not yet making money, its losses, of $171m in the six months to July, have declined even as revenue has more than doubled year on year, to $242m. On current trends sales could reach nearly $1bn in the next 12 months.
Despite these promising numbers, and Mr Buffett’s blessing, Snowflake has its work cut out. The company’s uniqueness will not last much longer, says Donald Feinberg of Gartner, a research firm. Rival firms, in particular the big cloud providers, have been beefing up competing products and even dabbled with the multi-cloud. A few startups are already offering cheaper and more flexible “open-source” alternatives such as ClickHouse, a particularly zippy data-management system marketed by a startup called Altinity.
Other challengers are building more specialised digital repositories. Data generated by websites, for instance, are often stored on “document-oriented” databases that, in the garage analogy, keep cars intact rather than strip them for parts. MongoDB is the market leader in this segment. Confluent, another startup, is big in “streaming” databases that garner information from sources like sensors. These are more akin to a motorway service station: data are quickly checked to see if action is needed.
Much as today’s assembly lines are driven by dispersed electric motors rather than a single steam engine, then, corporate IT systems will increasingly rely on sundry specialised databases, predicts Zane Chrane of Bernstein, a broker. That—and the fact that data will increasingly be analysed in real time, rather than saved in a conventional database—will limit the power and profits of any single supplier. So Snowflake is unlikely ever to become as dominant as Oracle. Snowflakes fly high in a flurry. They also melt.
https://www.economist.com/business/...-software-ipo-and-is-now-worth-more-than-70bn
Apparently they're pretty reliant on AWS right now, but Amazon is at the same time investing heavily in their competitor, Redshift per CNBC.
OP
It will continue to print long after we have all died.
- - - Updated - - -
But in other news, Nikola
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-founder-abruptly-resigns-amid-fraud-allegations/
- - - Updated - - -
But in other news, Nikola
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-founder-abruptly-resigns-amid-fraud-allegations/
Last edited:
OP
Me too. 
Hope you're massively green today. We hit a lot of support today and launched off the yearly open in SPX, so hopefully the pain is over with for now and we go higher next week. Bought some short term SPY calls this morning and I'm holding them for continuation into Monday.
Hope you're massively green today. We hit a lot of support today and launched off the yearly open in SPX, so hopefully the pain is over with for now and we go higher next week. Bought some short term SPY calls this morning and I'm holding them for continuation into Monday.
.You don't think October and November will be turbulent?
Very much so, but I wanted to wait until close just to be sure .
You don't think October and November will be turbulent?
.You don't think October and November will be turbulent?
- - - Updated - - -
I really hope we have a bit of a rally in tech the next few weeks so my INTL trade can play out. I bought a lot of $60 calls for cheap after their earnings dip, but it needs to start filling the gap before they expire in October. I should have bought closer to the money calls and further out expiry, but is what it is. Very high risk and even higher reward if it plays out, which is looking very unlikely now. Needs to get above the daily pivot at 51.
Last edited:
@AFL_ITALIA if you're looking to get into some oil you're not going to find a cleaner "buy the blood" weekly chart than this, sitting on major weekly support and creating a possible double bottom. I'm getting into some calls for the month of October.
OP
@AFL_ITALIA if you're looking to get into some oil you're not going to find a cleaner "buy the blood" weekly chart than this, sitting on major weekly support and creating a possible double bottom. I'm getting into some calls for the month of October.
OP
@Bjerknes
If you're wondering why OXY is down, it's only because I bought 10 shares. Sorry about that, their bankruptcy is now assured.
If you're wondering why OXY is down, it's only because I bought 10 shares. Sorry about that, their bankruptcy is now assured.
OP
Nah, crude down almost 4% today. OXY can't close much lower than 9.90 this week otherwise that play is invalidated. But it's a falling wedge in major weekly support, if it doesn't pop then it's a dogshit stock.
I read that they have a metric shit ton of debt and wouldn't be able to survive another oil price drop, but I don't know anything about anything so
At least SQ is doing well, will probably see ATH again in that one. I also got into NIO for the short term but long-term it's interesting as well. Other than that, I have short term SPY puts through tomorrow hoping the gap is filled in SPY, then I'm looking to go long again. Apple starting to look interesting with some accumulation going on, but everything is still spooky with the elections, of course.
Last edited:
OP
This is why I was hesitant to really get into energy in the first place, there's so much geopolitical influence involved. But gotta take some risks I guess, right? Ideally I'd like to get into renewables at some point to not be so directly exposed to oil prices and with more liberal states looking to become carbon neutral.
AMD as well
. I need to buy more SQ in the near future, maybe next paycheck. NIO scares me, but I hope you make money with them 
AMD as well
. I need to buy more SQ in the near future, maybe next paycheck. NIO scares me, but I hope you make money with them