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2024-11-20 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Market Musings , 289 references Ignore this thread
A Tale Of The Market
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SMCI, specifically, Supermicro.

I know this firm's products quite well and have used them personally since the mid 2000s.  They are a motherboard manufacturer and have some very nice kit with features that make them particularly suitable for server machines (not so much for desktop computers simply because the extra cost doesn't bring you much except in very-specific circumstances.)

Specifically, most have "out of band" management so you can not only do things like toggle the power, check fan and temperature status, reset the box and such but in addition they have a "virtual console" capability using what is called "IPMI"  over a dedicated network interface (preferred for security reasons since that interface never leaves your data center "raw") and their boards typically support ECC memory, which is very important in larger server configurations with processors that also support it (specifically the Intel Xeon series) since random memory errors (e.g. cosmic ray hits, which can happen although they're very rare) could otherwise cause either undetected data corruption or even crashes.

But in the last couple of years they've been on a tear because they uttered the words "AI" and were buying quite a lot of Nvidia chips.

Just recently their auditor quit with a rather-amusing letter to the SEC (which of course is public) and drew a number of snickers, implying that they didn't like what they saw in the firm's financials.  The stock crashed, and is now trading around $30 (after trading as low as $17) -- off a fairly recent high of around $140!

This has brought many people out thinking its a screaming buy -- provided, of course, the books are not entirely-fraudulent.

As recently as mid 2022 the stock was trading at a split-adjusted $4.00/share!

So exactly what has changed in the company's forward prospects selling server boards that leads someone to believe that it is was ever worth thirty times what it was worth in 2022 (note -- this was not a "startup" that just started making money!) and why is it worth seven times what it was in 2022 right now?

Again -- this is a company that makes motherboards, a commodity product that has decent operating margins and it is an established player in that space.  Note that it was a strong player in the space the entire time "cloud" was taking over the world and while they made a nice amount of money and have excellent products how did the market turn around and revalue them up by thirty TIMES in the first place when their essential product is a commodity item in the computing space?

Does anyone really think we will be putting thirty times as many servers in datacenters over the next few years?

Just contemplate that in the market as a whole folks -- look at basically everything and you will find this sort of pricing in what equities go for these days.  How is that defensible?

I argue it is not.

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