The Week Ahead: Omicron Uncertainty, Earnings, NASDAQ 50-DMA In Play
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I am most wary of any pronouncements on whether this virus leads to more severe disease or deaths. There can be so many biases in the early data and we really don’t have the numbers to say anything this early on.
— Kai Kupferschmidt (@kakape) November 26, 2021
The Omicron variant that hit financial markets on Friday has created an enormous amount of uncertainty and – as COVID-19 reporter Kai Kupferschmidt writes – that uncertainty is likely to persist for the next few weeks as scientists gather and analyze data about the virus.
In other words, we don’t know much about the virus right now and we won’t for a few weeks. That means that while Omicron will dominate the market narrative next week, it will be impossible to rationally price in its effects.
#earnings for the week https://t.co/lObOE0dgsr $LI $CRM $CRWD $DOCU $SNOW $AI $DG $MRVL $ZS $ASAN $OKTA $ULTA $AMBA $NTAP $SIG $EXPR $HPE $BBW $BQ $BNS $JKS $FRO $MOMO $HIBB $SPLK $SWBI $QH $RY $CHS $BZUN $FIVE $BOX $VERU $YJ $KR $CTRN $TD $VEEV $BIG $GMS $DOOO $CM $EMKR $PVH pic.twitter.com/ObblTlqLLf
— Earnings Whispers (@eWhispers) November 27, 2021
At the same time, we do have a number of significant earnings reports next week, beginning with Salesforce (CRM) on Tuesday afternoon. CRM has held up pretty well thus far, but at 65x ’21 EPS guidance the stock looks vulnerable to me in this environment.
Even more vulnerable are earlier stage tech companies Zscaler (ZS), Snowflake (SNOW), Crowdstrike (CRWD), and Okta (OKTA) which report Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon.
These four stocks – which have market caps between $30 billion and $100 billion – trade at price to current sales ratios of between 30x and 100x. They are exactly the kind of stocks that have been taken to the woodshed in the current environment. It will be interesting to see if that pattern continues.
Finally, on Thursday, cloud document software company Docusign (DOCU) reports. DOCU is more mature than the previous four as well as somewhat of a pandemic beneficiary, but its valuation also makes it vulnerable, in my opinion.
From a technical standpoint, I’m keeping my eye on the NASDAQ’s 50-DMA at 15,225, which is less than 2% below Friday’s close. Bulls are going to want to see that hold.