$NET: I've heard from several contacts over the last two weeks that Cloudflare is meaningfully raising prices on their 'Enterprise' plans. The core driver is resource utilization, and clients are being told that this is because $NET is now a public company.

1/
On the one hand, it could be argued that $NET feels so confident about its moat that it can justify raising prices and these same clients will simply soak up the costs, allowing Cloudflare to push toward profitability.

2/
On the other hand, these same contacts have told me that the price raises (as much as 140% in some cases higher), have compressed their margins meaningfully. In some cases pushing them in to negative territory.

3/
After discussing this at length with a CTO of a not too small hosting company with thousands of clients, he mentioned that they will be moving away from $NET as the cost increase was not something they could justify.

They aren't alone, either.

4/
The core issue is the question of just how much of a moat $NET really has.

The main offerings vary from CDN to DDoS protection. Neither of which are particularly unique or hard to replicate from a technical perspective.

5/
There's also a WAF (web application firewall) feature which $NET offers and is widely touted, but it is essentially nginx (a web server/proxy/cache) with mod_security and other bells and whistles added on.

6/
There's competition, such as $AKAM, $FSLY, $AMZN, $MSFT, etc. But there's also the capacity for any company with decent brainshare to spin up their own cloud hosted CDN w/WAF and park it on a DDoS-resilient cloud hosting service, thus effectively replacing $NET.

7/
Whether or not the price increases on the 'Enterprise' plans help, hurt, or don't effect $NET is something that has yet to be determined.

If you know of companies using that same plan, it may be a good investment research experiment to reach out and ask how they're impacted.

8/
But ultimately one of the big value props for $NET was that they were a bit more resource utilization agnostic than an $AKAM, which charges on a usage basis. Does that value prop invert a bit now? Possibly. Certainly for those I've spoken to they are considering alternatives. 9/9

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More from @Mayhem4Markets

9 Sep
Remember that one time before the GFC when subprime lending was all the rage, and the companies which engaged in it, and selling the toxic paper, all looked amazing until they suddenly didn't?

Then ..

Notice how many "FinTech" companies are basically glorified subprime lenders?
This is worth paying attention to, in particular because the consumer looks quite vulnerable here insofar as reaching a new debt record, lower savings rates, high underemployment/low labor force participation, and many gov't stimulus packages trailing off. Defaults should rise.
Not only that, but the appetite for debt is likely to be reduced as consumer confidence hits 11 year lows, retail sales fade, and inflationary pressures undermine purchasing power across the board for discretionary spending by the bottom 60% of earners.
Read 6 tweets
8 Sep
I've been raising concerns about where we are with markets from a macro, valuation, positioning, and technical perspective for about a week now.

Apparently several leading Wall Street banks are sounding alarms now, too, about a near-term correction or slow decline over months.
I don't feel the end of the bull market is near, but I do think that there's an abundance of signs that the rally is less than healthy: narrow leadership, exuberant retail options and equity positioning, lack of sufficient 'sidelines' capital to buy a sizable dip, stretched techs
The other area of concern is that real rates are rising, and that's often harmful for many risk assets, including growth, tech, crypto, precious metals, junk debt, etc. Basically any competing duration asset becomes less appealing as those rates approach neutral/positive.
Read 7 tweets
7 Sep
Last September's quad witching window of weakness from VIXperation through OpEx (and just after) was quite volatile.

Will this year be different? 🤔

$SPX Image
A tale of two markets: institutional positioning in indices shows a rather extreme put/call ratio of 1.80.

Meanwhile, equities show the inverse, suggesting retail bullishness is getting ahead of itself.

Which opinion will prevail this quad witching?

$SPX $NDX $RTY ImageImageImageImage
These monthly windows of weakness have been practically like clockwork, with the only recent exception being April of 2021.

Each time the $SPX approached or graced EMA(50), sometimes after hours/pre-market, such as August's window of weakness.

They are driven by index options. Image
Read 4 tweets
29 Aug
A meaningful decline in consumer sentiment, and a softening of retail spend may portend to a compression in lending, softening related income streams. Important to watch if this trend continues, along with a reduction in homebuying demand, and auto unavailability/price increases.
In fact, business and consumer borrowing has already meaningfully slowed post-COVID crisis, which is one reason there has been such strong demand for Treasuries.

nytimes.com/2021/08/25/bus…
We also see mortgage origination demand slowing, this comes after homebuyer sentiment was among the worst on record.

morningstar.com/news/pr-newswi…
Read 6 tweets
28 Aug
The Fed *is* the market. 💸 Image
More chart crimes! The Fed *is* the market part deux: ImageImage
I've had a few claim that these charts are inaccurate due to scale variance. While there's truth to the statement, the charts aren't meant to be 1:1. QEternity gives commercials the capacity to scale up leverage in markets. Many seem to have missed this because of 2D thinking.
Read 10 tweets

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