Hey Snackers,
Congrats on finally purging those 56 remaining "3 Hours Left Of Cyber Monday!" emails from your inbox.
Remember that trade deal with China we all hope would wrap up soon? The Dow dropped a hefty 280 points Tuesday after President Trump casually mentioned it may not happen until after the 2020 election.
Roku may have just become the most polarizing stock on Wall Street
There's a battle in your living room... TV dominated family attention for the last 60+ years — now cord-cutters are moving in. Roku's adorable dongle is the #1 streaming stick in the US, but its competition includes Amazon's Fire stick, Apple TV, and even Comcast (the cable OG offers a streaming box to all internet customers). They're the 700-channel bundles to Roku's single antenna.
If you think House of Cards got boring... just watch Roku's stock instead. We noticed that shares dropped 15% Monday, but then bounced up 6% on Tuesday. That's because 2 analysts at 2 different banks had 2 completely opposite interpretations of where Roku shares are going:
- Down?: A Morgan Stanley analyst blamed "overall exuberance over all things streaming” for his Roku stock downgrade.
- Up?: An analyst at Needham thinks Roku is the YouTube of streaming — just like YouTube became the default for homemade cat videos, Roku is cord-cutters' future go-to destination for Chef's Table.
Roku reveals the nuances of analyst ratings... One is a stock upgrade and one is a downgrade, but they're basically arguing whether Roku is great or incredible. Roku controls TV sets for 32M households and the stock has already quadrupled this year to $145. One analyst thinks it's worth $110/share, the other says $200/share — either way, it's a top stock of 2019.
Alphabet loses Sergey Brin and Larry Page... the co-founders of Google
End of an era... Alphabet (aka Google's parent company) suddenly/shockingly announced that Google's co-founders will retire as CEO and President of Alphabet. ASAP. They're replaced by Sundar Pichai, an Indian-born, Wharton-educated 15-year Google vet who worked on the hugely important Chrome and Android divisions — then he became Google CEO in 2015. Here's Sergey and Larry's take on their new roles as mere board members and muggle shareholders:
- "We believe it’s time to assume the role of proud parents — offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!"
DON'T BE EVIL... It's right there on page 5 of Google's S-1 document from their 2004 IPO. Sergey and Larry founded Google to enable moonshot ideas to change the world (and to help people cheat at trivia). But Google's highly googleable motto conflicts with its recent controversial moves:
- Project Maven involved Google's artificial intelligence helping military drones.
- 4 Googlers were just fired, and they claim it was for trying to organize a labor union.
- Thousands of Googlers protested the company's soft handling of sexual harassers last year.
- Project Dragonfly was Google's attempt to make a special censored search engine for China.
Alphabet needs 1 decisive leader... Larry and Sergey founded Google in 1998 under the religion of do-gooder-ness, collaboration, and trust falls. Today, it's picket lines, political scrutiny, and employee unrest. That recent chaos requires 1 leader, not the awkward trio it had until yesterday. Wall Street rewarded the fresh CEO by inching shares higher Tuesday night after news broke.
What else we’re Snackin’
- Injured: Peloton stock dropped 9% after this awkward/bad/kinda-messed-up TV ad
- Bloated: America is now threatening a 100% tariff on $2.4B of indulgent French goods you'd probably want on your table right now, including cheese and champagne
- Overheard: Spotify whips up its top songs of 2019 and the last decade (Drake won)
- Blush: Glossier already got Insta-famous with skincare and makeup — now it's trying mini-shops packed with perfume within Nordstrom stores
- Bites: AirAsia's food at 30K feet is so good that the airline just opened up its first not-on-a-plane restaurant...serving actual plane food
Wednesday
- Earnings from Slack, Restoration Hardware, Campbell Soup, and Five Below
Disclosure: Authors of this Snacks own stock of Amazon and options of Peloton
ID: 1027382