Commanding a staggering $7.2 trillion in assets under management, Vanguard stands as an indomitable force in the mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) landscape.
Looking for broad exposure to the Technology - Internet segment of the equity market? You should consider the Invesco NASDAQ Internet ETF (PNQI), a passively managed exchange traded fund launched on 06/12/2008.
Meta (
NASDAQ:META
) and xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) startup, are competing for a partnership with Character.ai, the
Financial Times reported. Character.ai specializes in chatbots that use large language models (LLMs) to emulate various personas. In a separate development, xAI raised $6 billion in a second round of funding.
Coming back to the
Financial Times report, Meta had preliminary discussions with Character.ai about collaboration, focusing on pre-training and model development initiatives. Similarly, xAI has also explored the possibility of partnering with Character.ai.
Tech Giants Eyeing AI Startups
It’s noteworthy that major tech giants are increasingly investing in and partnering with AI startups to enhance their AI capabilities, meet growing demand, and stay competitive. For example, e-commerce and cloud computing giant Amazon (
NASDAQ:AMZN
)
invested $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic.
In a similar move, Alphabet’s (
NASDAQ:GOOGL
)
Google also invested in OpenAI-rival firm Anthropic. Further, there were reports that
Google is considering a substantial investment in Character.ai.
Currently, neither Meta nor xAI have reached a formal agreement with Character.ai.
xAI: Key Updates
xAI, which is also seeking a partnership with Character.ai, has developed Grok, a chatbot available to premium subscribers on X, Musk’s social media platform. According to a recent report by
The Information, xAI plans to build a supercomputer to power the next version of Grok.
Also, the AI startup has secured $6 billion in a second round of funding from investors, including Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Vy Capital, and Fidelity Management & Research Company, among others. The funds will be used to launch its first product, develop advanced infrastructure, and expedite research and development.
Meta’s AI Strategy and Stock Performance
Meta is investing aggressively in AI and integrating generative AI capabilities and chatbots into its social media platforms. The company is also exploring other AI partnerships as part of its broader strategy to become a leading AI company.
According to the TipRanks Stock Analysis tool, “
Bulls Say, Bears Say,” analysts bullish on META stock expect Meta to benefit from AI-driven content, driving higher user engagement and ad revenue.
However, Meta is providing its latest and most advanced AI models to the public at no cost, sparking worries about monetization and potential
short-term earnings pressure. This has
slowed the momentum in its stock, which is up about 82.36% year-to-date.
Is Meta a Good Stock to Buy?
Wall Street is upbeat about Meta’s prospects. The stock sports a Strong Buy consensus rating based on 37 Buys, three Holds, and two Sell recommendations.
Analysts’ average price target on META stock is $522.95, implying 9.35% upside potential from current levels.
Disclosure
Below is Validea's guru fundamental report for AMAZON.COM INC (AMZN). Of the 22 guru strategies we follow, AMZN rates highest using our P/B Growth Investor model based on the published strategy of Partha Mohanram. This growth model looks for low book-to-market stocks that exhibi
This has been a terrible year for Twilio (NYSE: TWLO) investors so far, as shares of the company have fallen 20%. The cloud stock's negative returns are in stark contrast to those of the broader technology sector, which has been heading higher this year following a stellar 2023,
Technology stocks have outperformed the broader market handsomely over the last decade -- illustrated by the fact that the Nasdaq-100 Technology Sector Index clocked a gain of 421% over the period compared to the S&P 500 index's 178% rise. The outperformance isn't surprising.
The Nasdaq Composite index has climbed about 118% over the last five years despite the COVID-19 pandemic and an economic downturn in 2022. The figure illustrates how lucrative investing in certain companies and holding even amid poor market conditions can be.
Warren Buffett doesn't like stocks -- at least, not many of them right now. He told Berkshire Hathaway shareholders earlier this month that he finds it "quite attractive" to sit atop a massive cash stockpile instead of buying stocks.
Short-term unpredictability has been the name of the game on Wall Street since this decade began. The first four years of the decade saw all three major stock indexes pivot between bear and bull markets in successive years, with no index enduring wilder swings than the innovation
Many investors lament missing out on Amazon. Few predicted it would evolve from an online bookseller into a retail behemoth. Nobody could have predicted that it would pioneer a cloud computing business.
Costco (NASDAQ: COST) has come a long way since starting out as one of the world's first retail warehouse clubs in 1983. Back then, the company called itself Price Club and was based in San Diego, California. The retail giant went public only two years later, in 1985, and the res
The list of businesses that have rewarded investors more than Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has in the past two decades is certainly very small. The tech juggernaut's shares have skyrocketed 4,760% since May 2004, making some people very rich along the way.
If you were able to identify in advance the rare stocks that could turn $1,000 into a cool million, you wouldn't have to do much to be set for life. But no one has a crystal ball, which is why diversification is just as important as picking top stocks. There are all sorts of fact
Over the past two decades, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has built up an unmatched e-commerce business. At the same time, it's constantly experimenting with new business ideas. One of those ideas, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has grown to become the largest cloud computing company in the w
Arm Holdings (
NADSAQ:ARM
) stock is up 52.7% year-to-date. In fact, the stock is up more than 100% since its listing on September 14, 2023, at $51 per share. It’s also the seventh most
valuable company in the UK. However, at 130x forward GAAP earnings, I feel that Arm Holdings stock might be priced for perfection. So, while I’d love this British success story to succeed further, I’m neutral on the stock.
Arm Holdings Is a Brilliant Business
Arm is a great business, and this is reinforced by its extraordinarily strong margins. Arms Holdings’s highest quarterly gross margin in recent years was 96.04%, and it rarely drops below 90%. This reflects the company’s business model, whereby it doesn’t actually produce the chips itself but licenses out its architecture.
It’s also a market leader in efficient chip design, and that’s reflected in its growing market share across most core segments. With increasing floorspace designated to artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators, Arm will likely continue to build out its position in the mobile and laptop market. Moreover, Arm’s chip design appears to be a clear winner with data centers, with hyperscaler capex (capital expenditures) representing a major tailwind for the British company.
Arm currently plays a major role in mobile and laptop processors, but it also helps design a lot of chips for the data center market. Tech giants including Microsoft (
NASDAQ:MSFT
) and Amazon (
NASDAQ:AMZN
) create chips based on Arm solutions. These big companies develop Arm-based chips tailored to their specific CPU design requirements.
Arm Holdings’ AI Chips
Arm Holdings is
set to develop its own AI chips, with a prototype expected by spring 2025. That’s according to Nikkei, which said the UK-based semiconductor designer was looking to increase its exposure to the booming AI segment. The report suggests that Arm Holdings will create its own AI chip division, which will later be spun off into its own company. The new entity would be owned by SoftBank (
OTCPK:SFTBF
), which holds a 90% stake in Arm.
While Arm has decided to produce its own AI chips through contract manufacturing, some suggest that continuing to license its AI chip architecture to other companies would align better with its traditional business model.
According to reports, however, initial development costs could reach hundreds of billions of yen, with contributions from SoftBank. Masayoshi Son has set aside JPY 10 trillion to turn SoftBank into an AI powerhouse, with some of that funding likely going towards the initiative.
Nikkei stated that Son had visited chip manufacturers in Taiwan and the U.S. to discuss available production capacity. SoftBank plans to build data centers equipped with its chips in the U.S., Asia, Europe, and the Middle East from 2026, alongside wind and solar farms to power them. Sadly for Brits like me, I doubt any of these will be in the UK.
So, what does this mean for Arm Holdings? Well, we know so little about it. It’s hard to say. However, if Arm’s funds are used to develop a new AI chip entity that is eventually spun off to be owned by SoftBank, it might not be beneficial for Arm shareholders. Of course, it wouldn’t be as straightforward as that, but it’s possible that shareholders in the UK firm could lose out depending on the way things play out. It could, however, be a win for shareholders depending on several factors. We just don’t know enough yet.
ARM Stock Is Priced for Perfection
Arm’s valuation is wild. It’s trading at 130x forward GAAP earnings and 72.3x forward non-GAAP earnings. It’s one of the most expensive stocks I’ve come across from a near-term perspective, and it’s very hard to justify such a valuation. Arm Holdings really does appear to be priced for perfection. Any earnings miss or
a drop in guidance could result in a serious drop in the share price.
Of course, so many of us are bullish on the chip sector, data centers, and AI at the moment — myself included. As such, it seems unlikely that Arm Holdings will drop its guidance. But sentiment can change quickly. Currently, Arm Holdings has a price-to-earnings-to-growth (PEG) ratio of 2.4x (1.0x or lower is generally seen as undervalued).
Is Arm Holdings Stock a Buy, According to Analysts?
On TipRanks, ARM stock comes in as a Moderate Buy based on 12 Buys, five Holds, and one Sell rating assigned by analysts in the past three months. The
average Arm Holdings stock price target is $117.60, implying 2.6% upside potential.
The Bottom Line on Arm Holdings
Arm Holdings is an excellent business with amazing margins. In fact, I can’t name another stock that comes close to those margins. However, with a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 130x (72.3x non-GAAP), I find it very challenging to get behind the stock. Its reported desire to enter the AI chip segment sounds interesting, but we need more information before we can truly understand what this means for the stock.
Disclosure
Looking at options trading activity among components of the S&P 500 index, there is noteworthy activity today in Ulta Beauty Inc (Symbol: ULTA), where a total volume of 5,140 contracts has been traded thus far today, a contract volume which is representative of approximately