Today I am opening my 9th trade of the year in what has so far been a good year. As is always the case, you can see past 2016 (and previous years) trades here:

http://www.intelligentspeculator.net/livetrades

Let’s start off by looking at the numbers:

Revenue growth for TWTR is in freefall while CRM remains steady:

Long Salesforce (CRM)

Today I am taking the rare step of trading 2 names that could end up seeing M&A activity. In many ways, Salesforce is in a very tough spot as it continues to compete with the likes of Microsoft (MSFT) and Oracle (ORCL), two giants that among other benefits, already have strong and deep corporate relationships making it more challenging for Salesforce to get its foot in the door. For that reason, Salesforce has been rumored to be for sale and has also tried to make its own splash by (among other moves), making a bid for LinkedIn, strongly looking at acquiring Twitter, etc. In the end, CRM remains in a solid position thanks to an extremely solid offering and like many other SAAS product, it has tremendous loyalty from its customers over time. I do think it’s valuation is tricky and would hesitate to go long outright but I do think that when compared with Twitter, this is a solid trade opportunity.

Next earnings: May 25th 2017

Short Twitter (TWTR)

What a mess… I wrote an in-depth article about Twitter recently on SeekingAlpha:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/4043423-sad-story-twitter-told-recent-headlines

The company now seems serious about combating abuse but it is likely too little too late to stage a big turnaround. I do think that Twitter might end up being bought and as a user I’d like that to happen sooner than later to give it a better shot but as last year’s action clearly showed (where Salesforce the one serious bidder ended up not making an offer), finding a solid acquisition seems unlikely for the time being.

Next earnings: April 25th 2017