The stock market closed lower on Friday, as investors assessed a weak retail sales report. Retail sales declined by 1% last month, more than the 0.5% drop expected by economists. Meanwhile, a series of earnings from big banks came in better than expected, boosting some financial stocks.
Nevertheless, stocks logged weekly gains.
Overall, S&P 500 fell 0.2% to 4,138, while NASDAQ declined 0.4% to 12,123.
Tweet of the Day
US Asking Rents are lower than they were a year ago, the first YoY decline since March 2020. pic.twitter.com/k709zqgl5m
— Charlie Bilello (@charliebilello) April 14, 2023
Chart of the Day
Here is the one-year chart of Snowflake (SNOW) as of March 29, 2023, when the stock was at $137.
Snowflake provides organizations a platform for all their data, then gives managed secure access of the data to company users (or other organizations) without the need for the client to control the database infrastructure. It is a global data sharing network.
The company continues to deliver solid results, with revenue up a sparking 53% last quarter. Unfortunately, that’s “slowing growth” from the 67% it delivered two quarters ago. Customers are slowing their consumption rates, so sales growth is expected to continue to slow. The slow economy is obviously hampering SNOW’s growth rate.
For next qtr, management expects product revenue to grow 44% to 45%, in line with analysts’ estimates. That would be growth slowing further. But it is extremely difficult for large companies such SNOW to keep growing revenue 50%. So David Sharek thinks the stock is fine, and is selling around where it should be.
SNOW might be the fastest growing enterprise in the world. The stock is part of the Aggressive Growth Portfolio.
