‘bought’ my 1st position via selling a 4/17 85 strike put for $1.50
If swks < $85 on 4/17, I buy 100 shares for $83.50 (-commission).
I’m emboldened reading Saul bought more recently. Maybe I’ll buy a little outright 
2 Likes
‘bought’ my 1st position via selling a 4/17 85 strike put for $1.50
If swks < $85 on 4/17, I buy 100 shares for $83.50 (-commission).
Herman,
A very likely outcome (IMO) is that you will pocket the premium and have no shares. If you want shares, it’s probably a good idea to just buy them (again just my opinion).
Chris
3 Likes
Thanks, Chris, for your response.
btw, your posts: ‘Invisible Workers’ and ‘SKWS: Is It Too Late to Buy’ are just tremendous! I shared them with my 18 yr.old son, who has been investing for 4 years.
Just read your ‘more risky’ trade(short May 110put/long Jan 2017 90 calls) with skws. I may follow you to some degree with this approach because I can take on some additional risk due to very good fortune selling AAPL puts this year.
I might do something with SWKS and or AMBA tomorrow too, maybe a couple sold puts. Right now I have 5% of port in SWKS and just smidge, 1.5% in AMBA.
Maybe a bought call would be good too. We’ll see.
Karen
Filled out a SWKS position yesterday to a full position.
Thanks to all of the informative posts to show that I didn’t “miss the boat”.
Nathan
SWKS is one stock I really like but I cannot treat as a LTBH / buy and forget type investment. Whilst I completely agree with Chris on the current valuation front with his post (http://discussion.fool.com/swks-is-it-too-late-to-buy-31666303.a…), what I cannot get my head around is:
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Semiconductors are notorious for producing shooting stars that are designed in, selling like hot cakes, then designed out. Skyworks has been going since 1962 - if you look at the long term chart (view here and click on max: http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=SWKS+Interactive#), this rise to 100 is a very recent success story accompanying some design wins in mobile - but Apple has a history of rotating its suppliers and Qualcomm has a history of substituting its own solutions.
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What they do sounds completely ordinary…“Skyworks Solutions, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, designs, develops, manufactures, and markets analog and mixed signal semiconductors worldwide.” Sure the end market of any connected device (across amplifiers, attenuators, battery chargers, circulators, DC/DC converters, demodulators, detectors, diodes, directional couplers, filters, front-end modules, hybrids, infrastructure radio frequency subsystems, isolators, LED drivers, mixers, modulators, optocouplers, optoisolators, phase shifters, phase locked loops/synthesizers/VCOs, power dividers/combiners, power management devices, receivers, switches, technical ceramics, and voltage regulators) sounds sexy but what they do is fairly standard stuff
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There are honestly not that many chip suppliers that are worth $20bn+. At some point customers or competitors are going to squeeze the value out of the market. Apple and other smart phone companies cannot keep handing over $5 per handset just to Skyworks alone - it doesn’t make sense.
I will be watching very carefully for margin deterioration or customer/flagship product design out losses.
Ant
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I am not a technology expert but I have been following Skyworks since July 2013. I don’t believe they are your typical semiconductor company (maybe they were but I believe the Internet of Things is changing everything).
If you haven’t already, I would recommend reading the transcript from the latest earnings report CC, it is very informative.
http://www.thestreet.com/story/13020631/1/skyworks-solutions…
Some excerpts from CEO Aldrich:
We increased revenue by 59% year over year. We grew EPS by nearly 90%, and we posted record cash flow, as we continued to efficiently convert our strong earnings growth into cash returns. These financial results reflect our success in capitalizing on a number of powerful industry dynamics, while expanding our addressable opportunities, and enhancing our value-add in the marketplace.
In particular, we’re benefiting from the proliferation of many forms of wireless data, as more and more applications leverage the power of connectivity. Along with this, we’re seeing a dramatic increase in analog complexity, driven by higher performance requirements, and these market dynamics have created greater content opportunities, closer engagements with our customers, and higher value solutions across the board, with a narrowing field of capable competitors.
He has stated before that the increasing complexity of design is eliminating competitors.
Looking ahead, we see our momentum continuing, and while March is normally a seasonal slower quarter in the mobile industry, our broadening market footprint, our new product ramps and an expanding solutions portfolio enable us to mitigate these seasonal patterns, a clear testament to our diversification.
They are moving away from mobile (Apple) being their sole driver.
Many of the drivers that support a strong 2015 are already in place, giving us a high level of confidence in our growth trajectory. We continue to see opportunities for sustainable margin expansion, as we leverage our ongoing capital investments and benefit from growing demand for our custom integrated solutions and precision analog products.
Margin expansion suggests they are not a commodity product (yet anyway).
In high end connected devices, performance is paramount for our customers to enable seamless, anytime access to on-demand content, social media, streaming services, and cloud data. At the same time, technical challenges like band proliferation, like the adoption of advanced uplink architectures, and the implementation of 802.11 AC and precision location services are resulting in an explosion in analog complexity, and the net result for Skyworks is an expanding addressable market, significantly outpacing unit growth.
So I think the positive dynamics that are going to continue to fuel this above-market performance for us, we’ll continue to see big content gains in mobile and connectivity, particularly 4G and 11 AC, by the way. We continue to see a small number of competitors and consolidation of share favoring those companies and led by Skyworks that can do a complete overall solution. And our broad markets and vertical segments continue to outperform. I think all of these will play out not only in Q1, Q2, but over the long haul.
I have heard Aldrich speak a few times and he consistently talks about this idea of Skyworks being able to provide these complex systems that are required for IOT.
Just my opinion, but I see Skyworks differentiating themselves from their competition and if IOT is as big as most are predicting, they will have a long ramp.
Brian
10 Likes
Interesting article on the opportunity ahead for Skyworks.
Not long ago, the typical smartphone only needed to operate on three or four different frequency bands.
Nowadays? That number is quickly approaching three or four dozen bands.
Translation: Today’s smartphones require a lot more RF parts.
Sure enough, the total dollar amount of RF content in high-end phones keeps rising.
Take the latest iPhone 6, for example. Total RF front-end content costs checked in at $15.89 per phone, according to Barclays’ analysis. That’s up a staggering 324%, compared to a typical 3G phone.
For mobile phone makers, these rising costs keep cutting into margins. But for RF component suppliers, the exact opposite is true – the trend represents a tremendous opportunity.
Or as MKM Partners put it, we’re living in “a golden age for smartphone suppliers.”
Sounds gimmicky. But it’s not.
Just look at the two-year chart for the market’s top RF front-end suppliers – Skyworks Solutions (SWKS) and Avago Technologies (AVGO).
http://www.trefis.com/stock/swks/articles/287217/unstoppable…
Brian
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This is what worries me about Skyworks…
If Samsung can do this to QCOM they and Apple can do the same to Skyworks…
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/teardown-samsung-galaxy-smartp…
Ant
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This is what worries me about Skyworks…If Samsung can do this to QCOM, they and Apple can do the same to Skyworks…
Hi Ant, It’s certainly something to keep an eye on. However, the last insider sale was 7 months ago, and $40 ago. No insider has sold a dollar worth of stock since $56, while the price has gone up 71%! And their operating margins are going UP, not being squeezed! I think we are safe for the present!
Best
Saul
1 Like
This is what worries me about Skyworks…If Samsung can do this to QCOM, they and Apple can do the same to Skyworks…
Hi Ant, It’s certainly something to keep an eye on. However, the last insider sale was 7 months ago, and $40 ago. No insider has sold a dollar worth of stock since $56, while the price has gone up 71%! And their operating margins are going UP, not being squeezed! I think we are safe for the present!
You know, having researched that makes me want to go out and buy some more SWKS, even though it’s my biggest position!
Saul
However, the last insider sale was 7 months ago, and $40 ago. No insider has sold a dollar worth of stock since $56, while the price has gone up 71%!
Help me out, please. What am I misunderstanding here?
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The Samsung thing is vertical integration. It may be a sign that they realize Samsung phones are not iPhones. In most cases they are commodities . And in a commodity business cost is almost everything,way ahead of marginal product improvement because your customers are satisfied with "good enough "
Sorry if this view annoys Samsung users but the fact is that Apple is the only non commodity player in mobile phones, proved by their high profit margins :
Help me out, please. What am I misunderstanding here?
NewEchota, you were right and I was wrong. I was using Sec Form 4 which I have always used before. Apparently now they attempting to force you to buy a membership, by giving you results with a SIX MONTH TIME DELAY!
http://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/4127.htm
SWKS Insider Trading Transactions for Skyworks Solutions Inc
Historical filings delayed by 6 months. New user? Sign Up for real time data. Existing user? Sign In
Sorry I fell for it and misinformed you.
Saul
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Sorry I fell for it and misinformed you.
No worries. I wasn’t looking for a “gotcha” moment… this is my favorite board on the Fool and I appreciate the time and effort you put into your postings here. I was just making sure I was not misunderstanding things.
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I’m not wanting to be a Debbie downer on SWKS (I haven’t sold my position and hope for more gains) but… I have heard this argument before most notably in my own industry in Pharma…
<1>Along with this, we’re seeing a dramatic increase in analog complexity, driven by higher performance requirements, and these market dynamics have created greater content opportunities, closer engagements with our customers, and higher value solutions across the board, with a narrowing field of capable competitors.
… where big pharma claims that in today’s research based pharmaceutical world only those companies with large R&D budgets and end to end capabilities can identify new blockbuster drugs. The fact of the matter is that actually most new drugs have come from smaller more nimble and innovative biotech or specialist biopharma players and not from Big Pharma. I can see the same happening in RF and chip sets despite the current wave of consolidation.
A
1 Like