UBNT Q4 earnings

Overall, revenues and earnings have flatlined. There is promise for future growth, but they have said that before. They announced they discovered a fraud and are bringing in a consulting firm to clean up the finance department. The Audit Committee does feel that the internal controls around finance is not effective, so that’s not good. In the meantime they continue to look for a CFO.

They stated they bought back $20M shares recently and authorized a new buyback program of $100 million (about 12% of the float or 3.6% of outstanding shares assuming they buy around $31 per share).

The call was fairly short. Pera admitted the financial performance was disappointing due to execution issues, but he thinks there should be improvement over the next year. When asked about the next 12 months he stated:

I think we’re at kind of a transition period to get to the next stage of revenue growth. The drivers in the service provider segment will be, of course, airMAX ac and airFiber. airMAX ac right now is less than probably a few percent of our overall airMAX volume and it is 2x, 3x performance increase. The results we’re seeing in the field are phenomenal.

What’s holding it back right now is a couple things. One is, we haven’t gone full force to market with low-cost CPE solutions for multi-point networks. And the other thing is backwards compatibility with older legacy airMAX equipment so operators could continue to build out their networks without creating completely different Point-to-Multipoint networks. And we’re right at solving both of those issues, addressing both of those issues. So I think you’ll start seeing airMAX growth accelerating again towards the end of this year.

On the UniFi side, we’ve poorly executed on our 802.11ac plan. To put it in perspective, the market leaders in enterprise wireless LAN, 802.11ac access points probably account for two-thirds or more of their total volume today. In our case and in UniFi’s case, it’s very minimal. And what’s amazing is we’re shipping I guess around 2 million per year of vanilla 2.4 gigahertz 11 access points, which is pretty phenomenal. So that shows you the strength of the UniFi brand and the user experience.

Now, we’re going to soon introduce a 11ac UniFi AP line. We have taken our time with it. It’s going to be ready this quarter and it’s going to be far superior performance at the same or lower price points than UniFi today. So I think you will also see an acceleration of UniFi revenues heading into next year.

In addition to those two main drivers, airMAX ac and UniFi ac, we have AirFiber picking up, EdgeMAX picking up and we have a wave of all new technologies I will talk about in our September conference.

More on UniFi:

To your question regarding UniFi, it’s been pretty disappointing. That business is $150 million, $200 million a year business right now, it should be $0.5 billion plus. And we just mis-executed. You look at the controller features, we moved far too slow. The ac strategy we had was a complete trainwreck.

And we’ve worked hard in the past six months. I’ve personally led this team in the past six months and the hope is, starting within the next quarter, you should see a big turnaround with that UniFi AC platform, with UniFi in general. And it shouldn’t be a matter of looking at what regions are up versus down in UniFi. The whole thing should accelerate. And if it doesn’t, I’m going to be really disappointed.

On UniFi voice and video:

I think the vision of both of those products is dead on. If you look at the Voice-over-IP market today, I think it’s 30-million-plus phones per year and they’re dinosaurs like Polycom, Cisco, Avaya, with mechanical push button phones dominate that market. There should be no reason why if you have a disruptive, very high-end user experience Android-based solution, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t take a significant percentage of that market.

And I think the reason it started off slow is because we tried to create our own solution completely, which was a little too ambitious. We tried to be become with our own PBX on a proprietary platform. And that wasn’t executed well.

So we took a step back and we said, okay, well, let’s just offer the Android phones and let’s offer management for the Android phones but allow it to interoperate with third-party PBXs. And I think under that market strategy, it will do very well, but we are missing critical features that are needed for provisioning with these third-party PBXs, like redirect servers and TR-069 is a big standard in provisioning.

And we’ve been working really hard to implement those and we are going to re-launch with something even more disruptive for Voice-Over-IP. I know that’s a big market and I know we’re going to get it right eventually. The same goes for video. We’re really, really close. We’ve been at this for, I don’t know, five years or six years. Three generations of hardware, three generations of software and controllers. And the stuff we have now is great. I don’t think there’s anything on the market at the price points with the features and the power and scalability. It’s just not completely polished and packaged and I think you’ll see that within the next quarter or two quarters.

So to answer your question, no, they’re not contributing materially up to now. But next year, I feel very confident they’re going to materially contribute.

On the fraud:

So, first of all, it’s an embarrassing situation. I’ve been through stages of denial, disbelief, frustration. It hits me probably the hardest of anyone.

And just some facts about it. We discovered it on June 5. Initial losses, $46.7 million. We took a accounting loss of $39.1 million, which takes into account our recovery to-date. And we believe we’ll recover a lot more of that.

The results of the investigation. We concluded it July 17. There was no criminal involvement or fraud from internal employees. There’s no evidence of that. It seems to be an isolated incident that basically a couple individuals within the accounting group displayed incredibly poor judgment and incompetence. We’re taking it really seriously. It’s embarrassing.

All I can say is everybody knows how big of an issue it is. I’ve inserted myself into the finance team and I will have more presence there moving forward to make sure that this can’t happen again.

Well, after an incident like this, you’ve got to really question the overall culture and accountability of our finance group in general. So I think the responsible move was to bring in independent experienced accounting consultants to audit the group internally and look at our controls and help establish a better culture and more accountability moving forward.

On India and China:

Yeah, China and India, they’re growing slowly. We definitely can do a lot better. And I think we need to look into some kind of country-specific strategy with potentially a country leader or a general manager to drive a business plan for those markets. They are a little more special than, say, areas like South America or Eastern Europe, where we just were able to organically grow without a single person on the ground just because our products were disruptive.

In India and China, I believe you can use this disruption and evangelism approach. There are companies like Xiaomi or Flipkart in India that have used this approach and bypassed traditional relationships. But it does take more, let’s say, it does take some hand-holding, more hand-holding than I thought. So I think we could benefit by having local guys on the ground there. I’m looking into it right now.

Guidance for Q1:

Revenues of between $145 million and $155 million
GAAP diluted EPS of $0.46 - $0.51
Non-GAAP diluted EPS of $0.47 - $0.52

9 Likes

Overall, revenues and earnings have flatlined. There is promise for future growth, but they have said that before. They announced they discovered a fraud and are bringing in a consulting firm to clean up the finance department.

I feel sorry for anyone still in UBNT. I certainly have been telling people for probably six to nine months why I was getting out and staying out. If you are still in, there are better places for your money.

Saul

For Knowledgebase for this board
please go to Post #9939.

A link to the Knowledgebase is also at the top of the Announcements column
on the right side of every page on this board

11 Likes

While this was a bad quarter for the numbers, it was not quite as bad as it appears.

  1. The $39.1MM charge for fraud is (hopefully) a one-time event. Without it, adjusted earnings would have been $0.50/share. However, one wonders how something like this could happen. Apparently, they got bogus emails, which looked like they came from execs, directing somebody to transfer funds to a bank account. So while it’s not as bad from an earnings perspective, it’s really bad from a management perspective. Do their business partners find it this easy to screw them too?

  2. Both COGS & SG&A have gone down as a percentage of revenues. This bodes well if they actually increase revenues as Pera said they should.


 	  6/2015      6/2014	
Rev	$145,267    $156,007	
COGS	  79,129      87,146	
GrPr      66,138      68,861	

R&D	  14,672      10,155	
SG&A	   5,039       5,912
Fraud     39,137	—	 	 	 	 	 
OpEx      58,848      16,067
OpInc	   7,290      52,794

Diluted	  89,110      89,821

At $31.31, the P/E is now at a relatively low rate, albeit at lower revenue and earnings performance.


Month	EPS	TTM EPS	QoQ Gr	Hi	Lo	Close	P/E	P/E Hi	P/E Lo
Dec-11	0.27	0.81		$23.04	$16.25	$18.23	22.5	28.4	20.1
Mar-12	0.30	0.98	130.8%	$33.97	$17.33	$31.63	32.3	34.7	17.7
Jun-12	0.30	1.10	66.7%	$35.99	$11.19	$14.25	13.0	32.7	10.2
Sep-12	0.15	1.02	-34.8%	$15.26	$7.80	$11.90	11.7	15.0	7.6
Dec-12	0.20	0.95	-25.9%	$13.15	$9.97	$12.14	12.8	13.8	10.5
Mar-13	0.24	0.89	-20.0%	$16.66	$11.39	$13.72	15.4	18.7	12.8
Jun-13	0.33	0.92	10.0%	$20.89	$12.81	$17.54	19.1	22.7	13.9
Sep-13	0.46	1.23	206.7%	$37.40	$17.17	$33.59	27.3	30.4	14.0
Dec-13	0.48	1.51	140.0%	$46.88	$33.61	$45.96	30.4	31.0	22.3
Mar-14	0.50	1.77	108.3%	$56.85	$37.50	$45.45	25.7	32.1	21.2
Jun-14	0.56	2.00	69.7%	$47.92	$30.50	$45.19	22.6	24.0	15.3
Sep-14	0.48	2.02	4.3%	$50.00	$36.98	$37.53	18.6	24.8	18.3
Dec-14	0.53	2.07	10.4%	$37.92	$26.98	$29.64	14.3	18.3	13.0
Mar-15	0.47	2.04	-6.0%	$32.97	$25.67	$29.55	14.5	16.2	12.6
Jun-15	0.50	1.98	-10.7%	$34.28	$25.50	**$31.31**	15.8	18.3	13.0

The **$31.31** reflects the price as of a few minutes ago. 

Cash has gone down marginally. But it would have gone up a lot had it not been for the fraud screw-up (and they re-purchased $19MM in shares). So they generate cash really well.


Cash	Mar	Jun	Sep	Dec
2011		$76		
2012	$94	$122	$132	$148
2013	$16	$228	$280	$306
2014	$346	$347	$391	$389
2015	$451	*$446*

Although they recovered some of the fraud money, more than half of it may be impossible to get back.

Their two business segments

Service Provider revenue is going down (about 15%) QoQ while Enterprise Revenue is going up (about 26%). Too bad the Enterprise segment is the smaller one.


SPRev	Mar	Jun	Sep	Dec
2013	75.5	90.1	94.2	111.5
2014	121.0	124.0	107.3	99.7
2015	106.2	104.8		

Grth	Mar	Jun	Sep	Dec
2014	60.3%	37.6%	13.9%	-10.5%
2015	-12.2%	-15.5%	
==============================================	

EntRev	Mar	Jun	Sep	Dec
2013	7.7	11.1	35.5	27.0
2014	27.3	32.0	42.8	53.4
2015	41.2	40.5		

Grth	Mar	Jun	Sep	Dec
2014	256.0%	188.2%	20.7%	98.0%
2015	50.7%	26.5%		

I’m trying to be a better investor using Saul’s methods by selling companies (over the last few days) that I’ve held for too long and buying much better companies.

For example, I’ve sold most of my Tile Shop and bought Amberella and Skyworks. No matter how often I buy Skyworks, it keeps going down. But my analysis in the business and the numbers give me confidence that I’m doing the right thing, although there is still a lot of potential downside due to the vageries of market prices.

On the other hand, I sold only about a third of my Ubiquity Networks position today, and I am planning to keep about half. Despite the business being run poorly right now, I want to believe a turnaround is coming. Such a belief will probably turn out to be really stupid.

So while I may not have completely learned my Saul lessons yet. I feel that I’m getting closer.

Hope this post helps.

DJ

12 Likes

While this was a bad quarter for the numbers, it was not quite as bad as it appears…The $39.1MM charge for fraud is (hopefully) a one-time event. Without it, adjusted earnings would have been $0.50/share.

DJ, Giving then the 50 cents they were down from 56 cents the year before. Their last eight quarters (that’s EIGHT!) have been, in cents.

46
48
50
56
48
53
47
50

That’s going nowhere! Their Revenue, of $145 million, is down from $156 million a year ago, and down from $147 million sequentially, and that 147 was down from $153 million the quarter before. That has nothing to do with the fraud. It’s falling revenue!

And one of my big reasons for getting out of the stock was that Pera couldn’t answer basic questions about the business in the conference calls. I felt he was spending all his time and energy on micro-managing his NBA team. How can a CEO not know that $41 million is missing in a small company? What kind of management is that?

A turn-around may be “coming” someday. It really may. But is this the best place for your money?

Just asking…

Saul

For Knowledgebase for this board
please go to Post #9939.

A link to the Knowledgebase is also at the top of the Announcements column
on the right side of every page on this board

12 Likes

A turn-around may be “coming” someday. It really may. But is this the best place for your money?

No! But there is a great quote from Rob that you posted that pretty much sums up my current state of investment capabilities. “Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing.”

I’m still pretty ignorant.

In the past, I would have purchased UBNT based upon the Fool recommendations, watched it go up (cheering all the way up), and then watched it go down, frozen like a deer in the headlights until holding the stock makes me sick to my stomach. I would have to get to this point before I’d sell. This behavior cost me a lot of my hard-earned money over the years.

Now, I purchased UBNT based primarily upon my own analysis (reading the earnings releases & reports and boards). The simple format you use to present data helped me remove a bunch of noise and focus on the most important elements.

At the end of the day, there are better places for my money. But I feel okay leaving some money with UBNT until I figure out where I should put it while I deal with my ignorance. This board helps a lot.

DJ

7 Likes

I forgot to include the link to the spreadsheet I created for my analysis. This is a lot more than I would have done in the past.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17xCSeHcfs-KsfTGCY0OM…

At least I think that there is a lot of upside to be had if they do turn it around and not nearly as much downside.

Now it’s up to me to get better at, and be more confident in, such analyses so that I can put my money where I think it’s best. It will take a lot of effort. But I keep getting better at it day by day.

DJ

3 Likes

DJ,
I think you are being very smart about this. You should only sell a stock because you think it is worth selling. I think when a down turn comes you will understand the companies you are invested in and this will keep you from getting scared out of the good ones. You might be hurt now by some of the ones you hold but the education will be worth it.

Andy
Just my opinion and not a reflection on any stocks discussed on this board.

1 Like

Andy,

This is a long post. But writing it helps me (perhaps somebody else as well) just a little bit to come to terms with my investing deficiencies.

I’ve gone through getting hurt twice now. The first time was the tech crash of 2000 and the second in 2008.

During the tech crash in 2000, I was loaded with companies like Juniper Networks, Sun Microsystems, Analog Devices, Texas Instruments and a lot more. My analyses consisted of thinking I knew a lot about tech, because of my job in Enterprise Software, only to discover later that I was really ignorant when it came to thinking about profitability and how a company gets there. Unfortunately, I didn’t think about how to sell. Fortunately, most of what I lost was gains and I had a big chunk of my money in my company stock, bought via a generous stock purchase plan.

After having this learning experience, thereafter, thorough 2005, I did okay. But somehow, I was earning less than market returns. So I decided to make a change and become a better investor. I tried a Motley Fool service or two and stayed ever since. Like many other Fool customers, I simply relied upon the analyst recommendations and bought the companies with which I felt most comfortable. But I really got hammered by not only buying them, but buying them on the way down (First Marblehead, for example), losing a lot of money. When I look back at what I did at the time, I realize just how stupid I was. I didn’t even understand the basics of the business and kept shoveling money into the furnace.

By 2008 when the market crashed, I was making fewer mistakes, because I was analyzing companies. I wasn’t doing it very well. But it was a lot better than in the past. When the market crashed, I was fortunate or maybe even smart enough to move all of my money out of mutual funds and invest a big chunk of it into Chipotle, Buffalo Wild Wings and Middleby, which (these, together with BOFI make up about ½ of my portfolio). My understanding of these companies and their prospects was pretty good and far superior to how I used to invest.

Today, I make a lot fewer mistakes than I did in the past. Perhaps I’m making a mistake with my investment in Ubiquity. But I’ve done my analysis, read virtually all the conference call transcripts, have a basic understanding of the products, the industry they’re in and their prospects.

What I see with them right now is that if they execute better, they can really accelerate earnings. They are controlling their costs pretty well and are pretty cheap on an earnings basis. Pera, however, seems to be distracted with his basketball business, which is a problem. He says he is focused on making it right. If there is one thing the Fool has helped us learn is that one should not invest in companies with questionable leadership. Pera’s management is questionable. But he’s got a lot of skin in the game and wants to do the right thing.

Of course, there are other companies that better deserve my money. But I can only analyze so many. Right now, I have put most of my analysis time into the companies I mentioned above as well as Bank of Internet, Skyworks, Ubiquity Networks, Tile Shop, Nuance and a couple of others. My day job keeps me from doing more.

I chose not to analyze Sketchers and didn’t invest, because of my personal experience with them. The shoes I bought were okay. But they were of inferior quality to other brands, despite being a lot more fashionable. I viewed them as a cheap retailer selling product from a warehouse.

Earlier this year, I was in Vegas and saw a Sketchers store in the Miracle Mile Shopping Center, and last week, I saw Sketchers with a lot of shelf space at Intersport. It looks like they are doing a lot of things right in real stores (not warehouses) and it shows in the numbers. Naturally, I missed out on investing in a great company.

Right now, I’m trying to put money into recommendations for which I’ve done some analysis, which is why I sold TTS & WFM over the last couple of months and put it primarily into Skyworks as well as Criteo, XPO and First Internet Bancorp.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m continually learning and getting better at it as time goes by. The Motley Fool and especially this board (Saul’s Knowledge Base is now a spiral notebook with a cover and extra pages for notes and graphs) have helped me more than anything else. This year, I’m up about 25% +/- a couple of percent. It pales in comparison to Saul’s performance. But I’m happy.

I’d like to put all of my UBNT money into companies like CMG, MIDD, BOFI or BWLD. But they are relatively expensive right now, and I just recently kept moving money into Skyworks (I’m down about 10% on my entire position despite buying more on the way down) and First Internet Bancorp.

One day, I’ll have the confidence and lack of ignorance to concentrate my investments better. But right now, I’m still learning and, despite Saul’s decision to sell UBNT, I want to give Pera a little more time to turn things around or hope that one of my core companies gets whacked for no good reason so that I can move the money there.

DJ

16 Likes

DJ,

I appreciate your input regarding UBNT. I, too, still hold a small position for similar reasons as you. First, I like their business model based on quality products at disruptive price points. Second, I believe they are at an inflection point.

Pera has done a miserable job overseeing growth after hitting about $150M in sales. Product development has been botched, and they were a victim of fraud this quarter costing the company $39.1M. One thing I like about Pera is that he is taking the blame directly on his shoulders and committing to change. He has cleaned house as reported on the conference call by cutting heads that weren’t increasing productivity. It isn’t true that more people makes a company more productive. Without the right people, the opposite may be true.

They are developing a slew of new products and holding a conference in Las Vegas in Sept or Oct. I’m excited to see what they have developed. There is, of course, a concern of stretching themselves too thin. Further, Pera needs to prove that he can execute on their initiatives to grow. They still generate a lot of cash and are keeping costs in line. I believe we should start to see growth in the next two to three quarters. However, I won’t get out and try to come back into the stock as I’m no good at timing these things.

I’ll keep watching and listening for the time being.

Lastly, don’t be so sure you missed the boat on Skechers. Even at today’s stock prices, they still have a 1YRPEG less than 1.

Take care,
A.J.

4 Likes

One thing I like about Pera is that he is taking the blame directly on his shoulders and committing to change.

Look back over the conference calls. He’s done that almost every quarter recently and there’s no change.

He has cleaned house as reported on the conference call by cutting heads that weren’t increasing productivity.

Wow, AJ, aren’t you missing the key point here??? The top head who hasn’t been increasing productivity, and which needs to be cut, is obviously Pera’s. Isn’t it clear that UBNT needs a new CEO who isn’t just a tech guy with a bright idea, but someone who knows how to run a company? When a couple of quarters ago Pera didn’t know the answers to most of the analyst’s basic questions about the company and its sales patterns, etc, and seemed annoyed that the analysts were asking him (the great god), who was above all that, it was clear he wasn’t the guy to be CEO. There are people who are good at starting companies, and others who are good at running them. Often the founder will realize it and hire someone else to take over past a certain point (I think that recently happened at IPGP, for instance), but sometimes the board has to push him out. Pera just doesn’t seem to get it. He had a great idea, but it’s time to move on and let someone who knows how run the company.

JMO

Saul

13 Likes

Isn’t it clear that UBNT needs a new CEO who isn’t just a tech guy with a bright idea, but someone who knows how to run a company?

Saul,

Not to dispute your assertion in the case of UBNT and Pera but that statement really took me back to when John Scully was brought in to run Apple and Steve Jobs was pushed aside. As we know, Scully nearly killed Apple even though he supposedly knew how to run a company much better than Jobs, who was just a tech guy with a bright idea. Success in tech companies can be more dependent on good ideas than counting beans. :wink:

If I think about it for a few seconds, I think I’d be more likely to sell/not buy UBNT if they DID boot Pera (on whom I have no opinion) and bring in an “expert” CEO. Not necessarily the smart move, but would likely be my inclination which is probably warped by history mentioned above.

Steve

7 Likes

I know this is kinda beating a dead horse, but the $46M was called a ‘Cyberheist’ by one of my favorite security writers/investigators Brian Krebs.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/08/tech-firm-ubiquiti-suffer…

Not a whole lot new, but written in a way most can understand with a lot of references to other businesses having the same experiences.

Robert
no position in UBNT

2 Likes

Look back over the conference calls. He’s done that almost every quarter recently and there’s no change.

I’ve listened to all of the calls. This one was different in that Pera has openly blamed flat lining growth on poor execution across the board. They added a lot of heads as they grew and realized the productivity wasn’t increasing in step with the additional heads.

Wow, AJ, aren’t you missing the key point here??? The top head who hasn’t been increasing productivity, and which needs to be cut, is obviously Pera’s. Isn’t it clear that UBNT needs a new CEO who isn’t just a tech guy with a bright idea, but someone who knows how to run a company?

There is certainly an argument to be made for bringing in a CEO to handle all aspects of the business and allowing Pera to focus on products. They are currently searching for a CFO to replace the one who left/got fired (not sure which it was). The new CFO will likely take on and understand the granular aspects of the business.

The fact is, they need to start growing the business. Pera remains excited about the market opportunity despite their recent missteps. I realize you have no faith in anything he says, however, I’m not in that boat and agree with him on the market potential.

My position in UBNT remains small at 1.5%. So it is smaller than what I consider a small position which is around 3%. I’m willing to hang on to that position for the next several quarters to see where the business is headed.

While many hate Pera’s motus operandi, I like it. He is bucking the trend and taking on the “big boys”. He believes that excellent products and disruptive pricing will win in the long run. He’s not concerned about why South America had a good quarter, or why the Middle East is lagging. He’s concerned about the big picture. And for the sake of the analysts questions on the conference call, let’s hope a new CFO can take on that responsibility.

Just thought I’d provide more input on how I see this company.

Hope everyone is doing well!

Take care,
A.J.

7 Likes

I feel sorry for anyone still in UBNT. I certainly have been telling people for probably six to nine months why I was getting out and staying out. If you are still in, there are better places for your money. - Saul

I’m very slow in responding to this, but it’s been in the back of my mind since reading it. I don’t mean to judge whether Saul was right for his decision to get out, he quite possibly did better wherever he put those funds. Either way, it was the right decision for him. What those statements made me wonder is whether I really should be sorry for still owning some UBNT or if I should have listened more at the time and made a different decision. Is there something to learn?

Well, I did some minimal research and found that Saul owned some UBNT on 3/28 in his end of the month report, but was out by 4/25 in the next report. I did not run across the discussion where he expressed his doubts about Pera’s attention to the company. I, of course, have no idea at what price Saul sold, but the price range over that period was $27.66 - $31.77. As I write this today, the price is just over $34, but it has been as high as $35.93. That makes the possible gain from the period when Saul got out to the high in the range of 13% - 29.8%, which seems like pretty decent gains. I’ve also noticed that UBNT was hardly phased by this recent market setback. I’m not sure what that might mean. In the end, I’m NOT sorry for holding, but I’m not sure if there was any lesson to really learn either. I did trim some in recent months, but still hold most. It is one that I can see trimming more or eliminating if/when I feel the condition is right.

Steve

5 Likes

I sold UBNT long ago at 30 and took my losses. Put the money to work with SKWS,AMBA,SEDG and INFN and have more paper losses so far. After yesterday my entries were poor so to speak. I will give it 6 months and see if things look better.

Robert

Hi Steve, I got out of UBNT long ago, then suckered myself into taking a tiny position for a month or less, which you were referring to, and got out again. I got out because their earnings have been flat for eight quarters, and their revenues for six, and their 12-month trailing earnings for the last five quarters have read like this:

2.00
2.02
2.07
2.04
1.98

It’s hard to be flatter than that. And the CEO was arrogant in his ignorance of the basics of the company in response to analyst’s questions, like “How could you expect me as the CEO to know the answers to those questions and to bother answering your piddling concerns?”

And because he was busy micro-managing his NBA basketball team and obviously oblivious to what was going on with his company.

Now that doesn’t mean that the company may not turn around and pull out of this, or that you won’t make money holding it, but I try not to look back once I’m out. I pay attention instead to the companies that I’m in. However, let me ask you: "AREN’T there better places for your money than that? In all the universe of stocks we talk about, is that the one that sings to you the loudest?

Just wondering…

Saul

5 Likes

Hi Saul…and I appreciate your response.

I got out of UBNT long ago, then suckered myself into taking a tiny position for a month or less, which you were referring to, and got out again.

That explains why I didn’t run across those discussions I remember. I didn’t go back far enough.

Now that doesn’t mean that the company may not turn around and pull out of this, or that you won’t make money holding it, but I try not to look back once I’m out.

Right, I decided to look because I AM still in. It’s been okay that I am for the period I looked at…but it could retrace back down or continue to go up from here…or just sit in this range. Your point about flat earnings is a good one to think about.

However, let me ask you: "AREN’T there better places for your money than that? In all the universe of stocks we talk about, is that the one that sings to you the loudest?

Good question. I’m glad you ask because I need to consider that.

Of course, the best answer is to go back 6-9 months when you sold and buy SKX. :wink:

Thanks,
Steve

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Of course, the best answer is to go back 6-9 months when you sold and buy SKX. :wink:

Let me know if you figure out how to make that trade …

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Well the stockmarket seems to be making that happen as UBNT has moved from 30 to 34 and Skechers has rewound from 160 to 131.

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Ant,

I’ve noticed that every time UBNT drops into the low 30s it pops back up. This has been going on for weeks, pretty much since the conference call. I have a feeling the floor is a result of the buybacks, because it’s so unusual for UBNT to hold its ground in a downdraft. In fact it usually falls faster than the indexes.

-Sameer

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