A few new Saul like stocks to explore

Investment Analysis Clubs Saul’s Investing Discussions
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In the last few months a few people have mentioned a number of stocks that when I have looked closer seem pretty interesting and lead me to other interesting stocks in the same company.

I haven’t had the time to do the research but I would like to get around to looking closer into the following plays in case anyone has had the chance to check these out or is interested to:-

  1. Green Dot
    Omni-channel personal banking fintech player growing earnings by 40% with a PE of 33
    Profile: https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/GDOT
    Earnings track record: https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/GDOT/earnings
    Latest results: https://seekingalpha.com/news/3355301-green-dot-soars-sizzli…
    Blurb…
    Green Dot Corporation is a pro-consumer bank holding company and financial technology innovator with a mission to reinvent personal banking for the masses. Green Dot employs a unique “products and platform” operating model whereby it uses its robust banking and technology assets to design, build and distribute its own branded financial services products directly to consumers through a large-scale omni-channel national distribution platform; while also allowing qualified third party partners to access those same banking and technology assets to design, build and distribute their own bespoke financial services directly to their consumers through their own distribution platforms. Through its six revenue divisions plus Green Dot Bank, Green Dot is a leading provider of prepaid cards, debit cards, checking accounts, secured credit cards, payroll debit cards, consumer cash processing services, wage disbursements and tax refund processing services. With approximately 100,000 major name U.S. retail stores selling its products, several leading direct-to-consumer websites, thousands of tax preparation offices, several apps available in the two leading app stores and distribution through several enterprise-scale “Banking as a Service,” or BaaS, partnerships, Green Dot is one of the most broadly distributed banking franchises in the United States. Green Dot Corporation is headquartered in Pasadena, California, with additional facilities throughout the United States and in Shanghai, China.

  2. Upland
    Market cap only $600m, exploded this year with 50% growth and now profitable
    Profile: https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/UPLD
    Earnings track record: https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/UPLD/earnings
    Latest results: https://seekingalpha.com/news/3354837-upland-software-plus-6…
    Blurb…
    Upland Software is a leading provider of cloud-based Enterprise Work Management software. Our family of applications enables users to manage their projects, professional workforce and IT investments; automate document-intensive business processes; and effectively engage with their customers, prospects and community via the web and mobile technologies. With more than 4,000 customers and over 450,000 users around the world, Upland Software solutions help customers run their operations smoothly, adapt to change quickly, and achieve better results every day. To learn more, visit www.uplandsoftware.com.

  3. Docusign
    One of the latest IPOs. Ok this one I use and is invaluable for mobile app based digital signatures. As a non-exec or exec director needing to review and sign documents on the move it is essential as it must be for any field based, remote working or mobile staff
    Profile: https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/DOCU
    Review: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4169240-google-ventures-beh…
    Blurb…
    DOCUSIGN, INC.
    DocuSign accelerates the process of doing business for companies, and simplifies life for their customers and employees. We accomplish this by transforming the foundational element of business: the agreement.
    As the core part of our broader platform for automating the agreement process, we offer the world’s #1 e-signature solution. According to an October 2016 Forrester Research report, DocuSign is the “strongest brand and market share leader: the company name is becoming a verb.”
    Our value is simple to understand: the traditional, paper-based agreement process is manual, slow, expensive, and error-prone. We eliminate the paper and automate the process. Doing so allows companies to measure turnaround time in minutes rather than days, substantially reduce costs, and largely eliminate errors.
    Our cloud-based platform today enables more than 350,000 companies and hundreds of millions of users to make nearly every agreement, approval process, or transaction digital—from practically any device, virtually anywhere in the world, securely. Currently, 7 of the top 10 global technology companies, 18 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies, and 10 of the top 15 global financial services companies are DocuSign customers. Since our founding in 2003, our customers have completed over 650 million Successful Transactions on our platform. For additional information, see “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Results of Operation—Overview.”

  4. Zuora
    PAAS_SAAS for subscription businesses
    Profile: https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/ZUO
    Bert reviewed this and we have talked about this one already. I like the look and $2bn mkt cap
    Blurb…
    ZUORA BRINGS FREEDOM TO THE SUBSCRIPTION ECONOMY
    Zuora’s subscription management technology is designed to meet the needs of your modern subscription business. Now you can quote, order, bill, recognize revenue, report, and automate the entire customer lifecycle from a single platform

  5. Wirecard
    POS Payment solution provider
    Profile: Can never remember which one to use but charts of both formats look like tracer bullets!
    https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/WRCDF
    https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/WCAGY
    Latest results: https://ir.wirecard.com/websites/wc/English/3150/financial-n…
    Blurb…
    Wirecard AG is a global technology group that supports companies in accepting payments from all sales channels. As a leading independent supplier, the Wirecard Group offers outsourcing and white label solutions for electronic payments. International payment acceptances and methods with supplementary fraud prevention solutions can be provided via a global platform. With regard to issuing own payment instruments in the form of cards or mobile payment solutions, the Wirecard Group provides companies with an end-to-end infrastructure, including the requisite licences for card and account products.

  6. Stitch Fix
    Profile: https://seekingalpha.com/news/3338480-active-customers-31-pe…
    Latest results: https://seekingalpha.com/news/3338480-active-customers-31-pe…
    Blurb…
    Stitch Fix is reinventing the shopping experience by delivering one-to-one personalization to our clients, through the combination of data science and human judgment. Stitch Fix was founded in 2011 by CEO and Founder, Katrina Lake, and employs more than 5,800 employees nationwide. Since our founding in 2011, we’ve helped millions of men and women discover and buy what they love through personalized shipments of apparel, shoes and accessories, hand-selected by Stitch Fix stylists and delivered to our client’s homes.

Some others of interest:
Carbon Black
Next Era (Have you seen this 10 year chart?) https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/NEE

Ant

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Hey Ant,

I just read this article by Stitch Fix CEO, Katrina Lake
https://hbr.org/2018/05/stitch-fixs-ceo-on-selling-personal-…

She strikes me as an ultra elite leader:

brilliant
Stanford/Harvard
Charismatic, inspiring, attractive personality
Fanatic focus on core mission - merge data science with human touch to give people elite experience buying clothes

Her vision - to mix top-level data science with a sincere human touch seems dead on to me.

love that clothing is a core human need - literally and as an essential component of social status, increasing your economic value at work, attracting mates etc.

I might actually use this company in real life to up my man-game.

If this is not a classic Rule Breaker, dang it I don’t know what is.

If I have one investing skill to add to Fooldom it would be my Broadway Dan Ultra Elite Leader Detection System, it is going wild with this CEO. She also managed to attract a key strategist from Netflix. And I like the way she’s got a lot of high-level women in her company. I strongly suspect women are genuinely undervalued in the high levels of companies. I say this not to be PC or the like, but to suggest it’s an actual competitive advantage.

And when buying a house and you realize your real estate agent can just send you Docu-Sign and not burden you with endless paperwork to sign, scan, fax, ship, etc, etc. it is a great joy.

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Yeh - with you mate. Actually that reminds me I meant to add RedFin to the list.
Ant

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thanks Ant
always looking for new stocks. Though with me the problem is that I can only follow a max of 13 to 15 stocks, so every new one I add means another has to go. Like adding a new book to a full bookshelf .
As investors we are blessed that waves of innovation are coming in like a tide. If only they were cheaper…

Which one of the bunch do you like best?

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I like the sound of Zuora the most but I like Upland’s growth and profitability from an only 600m mcap position.
Ant

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5) Wirecard
POS Payment solution provider

Ant,

This article looks deeper into Wirecard :

…SNIP

"Having emerged from a reverse merger of a struggling dot-com era call-center operation, Wirecard shifted to payment processing. But it also owns a bank, has a low-tech prepaid payment card segment and still retains an even lower-tech call-center unit, all headquartered in a small suburb 10 miles from Munich.

Wirecard is a “rollup,” primarily built through the acquisition of smaller companies at a breakneck pace: Since late 2014 it has made 11 acquisitions. Critics argue that rollups use acquired revenue to mask broader troubles with organic growth." :

http://sirf-online.org/2018/01/23/wirecard-ag-the-great-indi…

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Interesting about Docusign - I have used it in the past - I believe they are big in the real-estate legal document space.

Our company uses Adobe’s offering (Adobe Sign) mainly because for $100/year, you can send unlimited contracts out for signature. Hard to beat that value proposition when you are the one originating (many small) contracts.

Adobe has an enterprise option which is priced on a per document (i.e. $1 per document to be signed). The cost being based on volume and you pre-pay for a bucket of documents is my understanding. I assume docusign has a similar model.

It will be interesting to see if the Adobe offering can compete with Docusign which is definitely the incumbent in the space. I know there are also other players like zipLogix.

PalmettoDude

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Hi PalmettoDude - nice to see you drop in round here. Yeh it will be interesting to watch.

I have Docusign up there as one of my most used business related apps (beyond office365/email/whatsapp/skype), alongside camcard for digitising name cards and reading them into your phone memory and “Tiny Scanner” that converts photos into PDFs. Other ones that I have seen used a lot also include “Sign Now” that works but that has a very low monthly limit to its # of free uses/month.

Ant

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Hi freecapital,

What do you think of the answer of Wirecard at the end of your article ?

I’m invested in wirecard and it’s up 35 % since my first buy in february and nearly 30 % after my second buy.

I was thinking about trimmimg my position because of the value getting rich, but I like the space where they are focused in (digital payments,e-commerce etc.)

I’m also questioning the company since your article and some other information I’ve found. Do you think this Roddy Boyd is a serious guy ?

Thank you for your answer,

Ascent

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I’ve been starting to watch this board over the last 3-6 months. (I wish I would have found it earlier!). I have been a Fool member since AOL days and remember meeting the Gardners at a Steakhouse get together in NYC during the “Iomega Days”.

I think Docusign should be considered in more depth here. There are some good fool articles that go through the financials.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/06/11/6-metrics-behind-d…

I work in the Salesforce.com consulting space and have worked for several large firms in the space. We all recommend Docusign and implement it all of the time for clients. No one recommends Adobe Echosign. Using Docusign reduces the length of the sales process for companies and probably results in more sales as it is easier (and can be done with less hesitation) to sign electronically then to sign the old school paper and pen way.

I like:

  1. They are a core platform for doing business (which means it applies to a huge audience)
  2. Their business model/product is super simple and easy to understand
  3. Their growth is incredible.
  4. They have virtually no competition
  5. They are really well branded (only company that usually comes to mind when you think of Electronic Signature)

Jeff

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Using Docusign reduces the length of the sales process for companies and probably results in more sales as it is easier (and can be done with less hesitation) to sign electronically then to sign the old school paper and pen way.

I like:

1) They are a core platform for doing business (which means it applies to a huge audience)
2) Their business model/product is super simple and easy to understand
3) Their growth is incredible.
4) They have virtually no competition
5) They are really well branded (only company that usually comes to mind when you think of Electronic Signature)

Jeff,

How does Docusign make money? Who are their customers? Do you anticipate significant new customers joining up? What types of customers need Docusign?

How has revenue grown? Are they profitable? I see that they are an 8.6 billion dollar market cap, which is large for a recent IPO.

Looks like Lockup Expiration is on 10/24/2018.

Thanks,
Bear