Latest / Bloomberg Intelligence / Roblox Shares Fall on Daily Active Users, Bookings Miss
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- 0:02Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. You're listening to the
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- 0:23Speaker 2: One of the big movers in the marketplace today is Roadblocks.
- 0:27Speaker 2: The game company stock is down eleven percent. It was
- 0:29Speaker 2: down more than twenty percent early in the trading day.
- 0:32Speaker 2: Bookings missed outlook a little bit softer than expected. Let's
- 0:35Speaker 2: get some details on now we can do that. The
- 0:37Speaker 2: man Deep singing, he's a senior technology channels for Bloomberg Intelligence.
- 0:40Speaker 2: Man Deep Talk, describe what Roadblocks does, and then what's
- 0:45Speaker 2: happening with the stock today.
- 0:47Speaker 3: I mean, this is a platform think fit as a
- 0:50Speaker 3: Bold garden where you can play any user generated game
- 0:55Speaker 3: as well as you know, the Triple A titles and
- 0:58Speaker 3: all sorts of game content hosted inside Roadblocks platform where
- 1:04Speaker 3: multiple users can play the game. And it's been quite popular,
- 1:09Speaker 3: you know, with that demographic, the nine to seventeen eighteen
- 1:13Speaker 3: year old.
- 1:13Speaker 4: It's a great way to entice somebody to do their homework.
- 1:18Speaker 4: It really is.
- 1:19Speaker 5: Yeah, the use cases beyond gaming.
- 1:22Speaker 4: You spent twenty minutes doing this, you know, after you
- 1:24Speaker 4: do your homework or whatever.
- 1:26Speaker 3: Yeah, and so I think again user growth of twenty
- 1:30Speaker 3: percent plus and anytime you see a company missing on
- 1:33Speaker 3: user growth, the reaction is pretty strong. Now, if you remember,
- 1:38Speaker 3: there was a report from Hindenberg talking about how the
- 1:41Speaker 3: user and engagement metrics are inflated, so pretty much the
- 1:45Speaker 3: company has been you know, doing the cleanup post that report,
- 1:50Speaker 3: even though they didn't really acknowledge, you know, there were
- 1:54Speaker 3: a large number of users.
- 1:55Speaker 4: Were they faking those numbers. They're just so difficult too.
- 2:00Speaker 3: With online platforms, is it's so hard to figure out exactly,
- 2:05Speaker 3: you know, what's bought activity and where are the user
- 2:08Speaker 3: metrics inflated or engagement And there's always scope to you know,
- 2:15Speaker 3: clean up and have real users being reflected on the platform.
- 2:19Speaker 3: In the case of roadblocks, brand safety is a big
- 2:22Speaker 3: aspect because you know, we were talking about kids using
- 2:24Speaker 3: the platform. So they've really, I think done a lot
- 2:28Speaker 3: since that short thesis from Hindenburg, and that's partly the
- 2:33Speaker 3: reason why they missed in terms of the user and
- 2:36Speaker 3: engagement metrics. But they called out Eastern Europe being weak
- 2:40Speaker 3: and Turkey being weak. To me, this is really the
- 2:43Speaker 3: quarter where the impact was the most obvious, and then
- 2:46Speaker 3: it will gradually get better because they've cleaned up.
- 2:49Speaker 2: So it seems like at least the partial vindication for
- 2:52Speaker 2: the Hindenburg research.
- 2:54Speaker 3: Well, I could make the case even for you know,
- 2:57Speaker 3: a platform like snap where you may have they have
- 3:01Speaker 3: shown hundred million daily active users every quarter. Now do
- 3:05Speaker 3: they really have one hundred million or is it more
- 3:07Speaker 3: ninety seven million because three million are just captured in
- 3:10Speaker 3: their metrics. So no one has a consistent approach to.
- 3:14Speaker 2: A third party like a Nielsen for TV ratings.
- 3:17Speaker 5: There's no third party to airfact, there is no third party.
- 3:20Speaker 5: It's the company that's giving you the metrics.
- 3:22Speaker 3: And I don't think there is like a consistent approach
- 3:26Speaker 3: that every company uses in terms of giving out their
- 3:28Speaker 3: daily active usercount.
- 3:30Speaker 4: Beyond the daily active users, what are the other important metrics.
- 3:34Speaker 5: That engagement also was like kind of a slight.
- 3:39Speaker 4: Message and radio it's time spent listening. Is that this
- 3:42Speaker 4: sort of the same thing.
- 3:43Speaker 3: Yeah, So again I look at you know, what they
- 3:47Speaker 3: are doing on the AI side. They are looking to
- 3:50Speaker 3: develop their own foundational model. So think of it as
- 3:53Speaker 3: you know what the LLLM companies are doing. It's a
- 3:56Speaker 3: walled garden where they will create all of tools to
- 4:01Speaker 3: enable more content. It's similar to YouTube in some sense.
- 4:05Speaker 3: YouTube has got a lot of video content, Roadblocks has
- 4:08Speaker 3: got a lot of gaming content and other things for
- 4:11Speaker 3: that demographic. So net I mean, this seems to be
- 4:16Speaker 3: justified reaction because they missed on their numbers, But has
- 4:20Speaker 3: a thesis really changed because they're losing share?
- 4:22Speaker 6: I don't think so real quick.
- 4:24Speaker 4: Have the safety concerns as a parent have they been
- 4:27Speaker 4: fully addressed?
- 4:28Speaker 3: That's what they're trying to address, and that's why you
- 4:31Speaker 3: know they missed on these metrics. So they're using a
- 4:34Speaker 3: combination of AI tools as well as just focusing more
- 4:38Speaker 3: on brand safety because they want to ramp up ADS.
- 4:41Speaker 5: And the way you ramp up ADS is you.
- 4:42Speaker 3: Want to make guarantee the advertisers that it's a safe
- 4:46Speaker 3: platform to advertise on.
- 4:47Speaker 6: Man Deep Seeing, thank you so much. We appreciate that.
- 4:49Speaker 6: Man Deep Seeing.
- 4:49Speaker 2: Senior technology channels for Bloomberg Intelligence. Join us here on
- 4:52Speaker 2: a bloomerg interactive broker studio.
- 4:55Speaker 1: You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence podcast. Catch us live
- 4:59Speaker 1: weekdays ten am Eastern on Apple coarcklay and Android Auto
- 5:02Speaker 1: with the Bloomberg Business app. Listen on demand wherever you
- 5:06Speaker 1: get your podcasts, or watch us live on YouTube.
- 5:10Speaker 2: Right next, guest, nice exposure to technology. And one of
- 5:14Speaker 2: my questions is is technology going to continue to lead
- 5:17Speaker 2: this market?
- 5:18Speaker 6: Hire have a little bit of a hiccup so far
- 5:19Speaker 6: in it.
- 5:20Speaker 4: Was the only sector to decline in the month of
- 5:23Speaker 4: January exactly, and it's.
- 5:24Speaker 6: Just kind of underperforming here.
- 5:25Speaker 2: So Nancy Tangler John's She's the CEO and CIO of
- 5:29Speaker 2: Laffer Tangler Investments based in Get this right now. She's
- 5:33Speaker 2: calling from Scottsdale, Arizona. One of my all time favorite.
- 5:36Speaker 4: Play there is snow, snow and ice on the.
- 5:39Speaker 6: Ground, snow as Royal Palms Hotel is my go to place.
- 5:42Speaker 2: They love me there lots of good stuff to do
- 5:45Speaker 2: out there, exactly. Nancy, thanks so much for joining us here.
- 5:49Speaker 2: Deep Seek was a story a couple of weeks ago.
- 5:52Speaker 2: We've now kind of forgotten about it, but I think
- 5:54Speaker 2: that costs a lot of tech investors to kind of
- 5:56Speaker 2: maybe rethink a little bit their AI trade. Here, how
- 6:00Speaker 2: did you kind of view that news and did it
- 6:03Speaker 2: kind of change in anyway your view of big tech.
- 6:08Speaker 7: Well, Paul and John, I'm dressed in sympathy for you
- 6:10Speaker 7: this morning in a down vest because it is actually cold.
- 6:14Speaker 6: Here to find cold, Nancy, Well, not really cold yet.
- 6:21Speaker 4: I was going to whip out my violins.
- 6:23Speaker 6: Plan well, listen.
- 6:26Speaker 7: I think there was a couple of things with the
- 6:28Speaker 7: Deep Seak announcement. Remember on the Friday before we had
- 6:30Speaker 7: Projects Stargate where the President had Larry Ellison, Sam Maltman,
- 6:34Speaker 7: and Masassan in the White House announcing a five hundred
- 6:37Speaker 7: billion dollar investment in AI and whether or not it's
- 6:42Speaker 7: going to be five billion dollars. We could talk about
- 6:44Speaker 7: that all for quite some time, but it generated enthusiasm.
- 6:48Speaker 7: And then the next Monday we had the story break
- 6:50Speaker 7: that Deep Seak had developed a more efficient AI model
- 6:55Speaker 7: for a five point six million I don't think that's correct,
- 7:01Speaker 7: and I think there was timing involved, And then we
- 7:04Speaker 7: had Ali Baba come out. What we know is that
- 7:06Speaker 7: the system is not as reliable, it's censored, it crashed.
- 7:10Speaker 7: And we also know that at Dagos, where this was
- 7:13Speaker 7: being talked about and for months before Deep Seek that
- 7:17Speaker 7: is that they allegedly have fifty thousand h one in
- 7:22Speaker 7: Vidio chips, which costs forty thousand dollars each. So I
- 7:25Speaker 7: think the whole thing is a bit suspect, but good
- 7:28Speaker 7: for the overall AI market because what we know from
- 7:31Speaker 7: Jevon's rule is that what you will see is the
- 7:34Speaker 7: cheaper technology gets, the more the usage and the use
- 7:37Speaker 7: case demand goes up. And we're seeing that across all
- 7:41Speaker 7: sectors in earnings reports for the last nine months and
- 7:45Speaker 7: also this most recent.
- 7:46Speaker 4: Quarter, Nancy, what do we learn from the earnings reports
- 7:50Speaker 4: so far? I mean they're kind of backward looking, I
- 7:54Speaker 4: guess more specifically the earnings calls that we've had.
- 8:00Speaker 7: Yeah, John, No, you're absolutely right. So it is backward
- 8:02Speaker 7: looking when you look at earnings beats. But what we
- 8:05Speaker 7: listen to is the guidance, and what we're hearing is
- 8:09Speaker 7: pretty optimistic. So if I'm going to look at my
- 8:12Speaker 7: notes just a little bit, because we cover a lot
- 8:13Speaker 7: of companies, but we're hearing things from companies as diverse
- 8:17Speaker 7: as next Era Energy, raytheon Xylum water treatment company, and
- 8:23Speaker 7: pro Logis, for example. So old economy companies that are
- 8:26Speaker 7: benefiting from the usage of AIRE in their well in
- 8:32Speaker 7: their businesses and then the margin improvement is showing up
- 8:36Speaker 7: in margins and we're getting guidance that's pretty optimistic. And
- 8:39Speaker 7: so you see that in the markets. What we also
- 8:42Speaker 7: see is volatility because we have Trump two point zero
- 8:44Speaker 7: and we know from Trump one point oh that volatility
- 8:47Speaker 7: will be with us. He's going to make bold statements,
- 8:50Speaker 7: some of which will come through, many of which won't,
- 8:53Speaker 7: but it'll rile the markets, and it'll rile the algos
- 8:56Speaker 7: and the short term traders. As an investor, it's great
- 8:59Speaker 7: news for me because we're Volatility is the friend of
- 9:02Speaker 7: the long term investor.
- 9:04Speaker 6: Names.
- 9:04Speaker 2: I'm looking at your twelve Best Ideas portfolio, very very
- 9:08Speaker 2: heavily weighted with the big tech names everybody knows Spotify, Amazon, Broadcom,
- 9:14Speaker 2: Microsoft and the like. Talk to us about your thesis
- 9:17Speaker 2: there behind that portfolio.
- 9:19Speaker 7: Yeah, So we run a growth strategy pall, and then
- 9:21Speaker 7: we also run a dividend growth strategy, which is more
- 9:25Speaker 7: value and we always pull from there our twelve best
- 9:28Speaker 7: ideas because there was a study done decades ago that
- 9:30Speaker 7: said optimal diversification is twelve names, and we have found
- 9:34Speaker 7: that to be true over the years. That portfolio has
- 9:36Speaker 7: done better than everything else. So we look for the
- 9:39Speaker 7: companies that are generating earning's growth at a reasonable not
- 9:43Speaker 7: a cheap, but a reasonable valuation. In determining that, we
- 9:47Speaker 7: look at relative price to sales ratio, So what am
- 9:49Speaker 7: I paying for a future unit of sales and then
- 9:53Speaker 7: the price earnings to growth ratio, And these are the
- 9:56Speaker 7: names that we have confidence in.
- 10:00Speaker 6: In fact, it has shown up in the performance.
- 10:03Speaker 7: So I think it's also got a heavy exposure to
- 10:06Speaker 7: consumer discretionary, modest exposure to industrials via Uber, and then
- 10:12Speaker 7: some one healthcare name, and I think one financial Goldman Sachs.
- 10:17Speaker 4: I learned from Paul this morning that there's high dispersion
- 10:20Speaker 4: in the market. I want to answer for a detailed
- 10:24Speaker 4: explanation of that. But does are we all writing the
- 10:28Speaker 4: same our investors all writing the same wave.
- 10:32Speaker 7: Well to some extent, you know, and that's driven by
- 10:36Speaker 7: the ETFs. John, So you know, when you see a
- 10:40Speaker 7: big sell off in a stock like Apple, a lot
- 10:42Speaker 7: of times that's because retail investors or financial advisors are
- 10:46Speaker 7: exiting ETFs, many of which own Apple, So you have
- 10:50Speaker 7: to keep that in mind. But what we're looking at
- 10:54Speaker 7: is an analogy to the nineteen nineties, and I think
- 10:57Speaker 7: we're in the early years of this anal Internet as
- 11:01Speaker 7: a technology was super cool, but we were measuring eyeballs.
- 11:05Speaker 7: I wasn't but analysts for eyeballs on a website. This
- 11:09Speaker 7: technology is much more robust. And you've heard John Chambers,
- 11:12Speaker 7: who was the CEO of the poster child of overvalued
- 11:16Speaker 7: stocks in the nineties, say that generative AI and AI
- 11:19Speaker 7: computing is more powerful than cloud computing and the Internet combined.
- 11:24Speaker 7: So in some periods of time it makes sense to
- 11:28Speaker 7: be part of the consensus as long as you're not
- 11:31Speaker 7: buying companies with multiples of one hundred times peak earnings,
- 11:34Speaker 7: which is what people were paying for Cisco in the day.
- 11:37Speaker 7: And the buyers of the infrastructure are the hyperscalers who
- 11:41Speaker 7: have robust balance sheets.
- 11:43Speaker 6: Many of them were.
- 11:43Speaker 7: Spending fifty sixty seventy five billion dollars this year in capex,
- 11:47Speaker 7: but they're still generating fifty sixty seventy five billion dollars
- 11:52Speaker 7: in pre cash flow, so these are really sustainable, strong company.
- 11:57Speaker 6: Nancy, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.
- 11:59Speaker 2: Nancy Tangler's CEO and chief investment office Laffer Tangler Investments,
- 12:02Speaker 2: and oh, by the way, forecast at high for Scotts Sale,
- 12:05Speaker 2: Arizona today seventy eight degrees.
- 12:08Speaker 6: So there you go.
- 12:08Speaker 4: That's tough.
- 12:09Speaker 6: Is they have a nice golf tournament there.
- 12:11Speaker 2: The PGA is there in Scotts Sale this week in
- 12:13Speaker 2: Phoenix area, so they're gonna have been good weather.
- 12:16Speaker 1: You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live
- 12:20Speaker 1: weekdays at ten am Eastern on Applecarplay and Android Auto
- 12:23Speaker 1: with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever you
- 12:26Speaker 1: get your podcasts, or watch us live on YouTube.
- 12:30Speaker 2: All right, let's talk to these markets here. Let's talk
- 12:32Speaker 2: tech technology in these markets. This technology is still a
- 12:35Speaker 2: leader for these equity markets as it has been forever.
- 12:38Speaker 6: Shana Cisel joint says. She's the president and CEO.
- 12:40Speaker 2: Of Bondrin Capital Management, joining us here. Shana, you know,
- 12:45Speaker 2: a couple of weeks ago, it seems like a lifetime ago.
- 12:47Speaker 2: There's this thing we all learned about deep seek, and
- 12:51Speaker 2: I know you guys spend a lot of time thinking
- 12:53Speaker 2: about investing in technology broadly defined. How did you guys
- 12:58Speaker 2: think about this deep seek and what may mean for
- 13:01Speaker 2: technology investing?
- 13:03Speaker 8: So my general rule of thumb with any kind of
- 13:07Speaker 8: news is if it makes me have a very visceral
- 13:13Speaker 8: response that I should step back and read, and so
- 13:17Speaker 8: that was my initial response. The market, however, does not
- 13:20Speaker 8: have the focus and the ability to necessarily do that,
- 13:26Speaker 8: so it freaks out. As I learned more, I became
- 13:30Speaker 8: less concerned about the deep seek threat and what that
- 13:33Speaker 8: means for China as a competitor in the AI space.
- 13:38Speaker 8: There's a number of things that stood out to me
- 13:40Speaker 8: that made me think, like, Okay, this is no different
- 13:44Speaker 8: than any time a Chinese company knocks off a American
- 13:48Speaker 8: shoe brand or anything else. It's very similar, But there's
- 13:53Speaker 8: more of a concern here. If we thought TikTok was
- 13:55Speaker 8: a concern from national security perspective, this is an even
- 13:58Speaker 8: greater concern with its connection to the CCP through their app.
- 14:02Speaker 8: So while there's definitely some interesting aspects of the open
- 14:06Speaker 8: source code that can be used by Amazon or anybody
- 14:10Speaker 8: to leverage the actual app itself and the things that
- 14:15Speaker 8: related to that, I'm less concerned about in terms of
- 14:18Speaker 8: what it means for the US companies in the tech space.
- 14:22Speaker 5: This shouldn't be a surprise. It was always the.
- 14:24Speaker 8: Greatest risk to technology companies in the US was having
- 14:28Speaker 8: somebody disrupt the market. But I think it's a bit
- 14:32Speaker 8: overblown and quite frankly, I think we've been complaining about
- 14:36Speaker 8: valuations forever and this solved our problem pretty quickly.
- 14:41Speaker 4: All right, let's move to treasury yields. I heard the
- 14:44Speaker 4: new treasure secretary say yesterday that he's kind of focused
- 14:48Speaker 4: on the tenure and bringing that down. Now, I'm kind
- 14:52Speaker 4: of a student of history, and I have to go
- 14:54Speaker 4: back to the early sixties and beyond right up to
- 14:58Speaker 4: present day. The ten here seems to follow economic activity.
- 15:03Speaker 4: And if you want to bring the ten year lower,
- 15:05Speaker 4: a sure way to do it is to lessen economic growth.
- 15:10Speaker 4: I'm sure it doesn't want to do that.
- 15:13Speaker 8: Yeah, that's the conundrum here, right, You want to bring
- 15:16Speaker 8: rates down, but you know, at the end of the day,
- 15:19Speaker 8: there is correlation there between the strength of the economy
- 15:23Speaker 8: and the interst rate environment and the yield curve and
- 15:25Speaker 8: how the yeld curve behaves. You know, the FED doesn't
- 15:28Speaker 8: have the power things it has to control that. I mean,
- 15:31Speaker 8: we've seen that in recent months with the FED cutting
- 15:35Speaker 8: and yet the yield curve not behaving like rates have
- 15:41Speaker 8: been cut. In fact, it's to be expected, right, because
- 15:44Speaker 8: you want to get out of an inverted yield curve,
- 15:46Speaker 8: which requires the longer end to go up even in
- 15:49Speaker 8: a cutting cycle. But I think that the problem here
- 15:53Speaker 8: and what they're trying to kind of fix, is related
- 15:56Speaker 8: to mortgage rates in the housing market, and I don't
- 16:00Speaker 8: know that there's an easy fix to that. But I
- 16:04Speaker 8: am concerned that there's this belief that if they just
- 16:06Speaker 8: cut rates enough, they can fix this problem, because I
- 16:09Speaker 8: think it's not that black and white, and there's a
- 16:14Speaker 8: high probability of a potential mistake being made if they
- 16:18Speaker 8: go in with policy decisions thinking that it is that easy.
- 16:22Speaker 7: Chan.
- 16:22Speaker 2: I know you work with your clients talking about alternative investments. Here,
- 16:26Speaker 2: where do you see the greatest opportunity in alternatives here?
- 16:29Speaker 2: Private equity, private credit, hedge funds.
- 16:33Speaker 6: Where are you spending most of your time these days?
- 16:35Speaker 8: So more hedge fund like strategies, private equity, private credit
- 16:39Speaker 8: are kind of sensitive to the interest rate environment and
- 16:42Speaker 8: also sensitive to public market betas in the hedge fund world,
- 16:47Speaker 8: especially if you believe that there's going to be increased volatility.
- 16:51Speaker 8: Hedge funds and hedge fund like strategies are great diversifiers. So,
- 16:55Speaker 8: for example, last week, there's a ETF PTL, the ADF
- 17:01Speaker 8: us Anti Beta fund long low beta short high beta
- 17:05Speaker 8: that that product did remarkably well when we had the
- 17:09Speaker 8: big deep seek threat threat sell off, And that's exactly
- 17:14Speaker 8: what you want and those types of products, and that's
- 17:17Speaker 8: what hedge fund like strategies can do is provide you
- 17:21Speaker 8: that downside protection when the market is under significant stress.
- 17:27Speaker 8: Managed futures is another example, like a CTA et F.
- 17:31Speaker 8: And then when you move into the hedge fund space
- 17:33Speaker 8: where they can use leverage more as a tool, you
- 17:37Speaker 8: can get even greater benefit as a diversifier and as
- 17:40Speaker 8: a downside protector. But it's not sexy and people get
- 17:43Speaker 8: forget that, like these aren't meant to outperform the market.
- 17:46Speaker 8: There they serve a purpose in your portfolio.
- 17:49Speaker 5: I like to think of it as.
- 17:51Speaker 8: Like home insurance, like you hope you never have to
- 17:54Speaker 8: use it, but it's you would never not have it
- 17:57Speaker 8: because you need to be able to manage the risk.
- 18:00Speaker 8: And that's exactly how I see those types of strategies.
- 18:03Speaker 8: This year, I think is the year where these types
- 18:06Speaker 8: of strategies are really going to show their worth because
- 18:10Speaker 8: I think the markets are going to be quite polatile.
- 18:12Speaker 2: Shana, thank you so much for joining us. Always appreciate
- 18:15Speaker 2: getting a few minutes of your time. Shana Sissel, president
- 18:17Speaker 2: and CEO of a Bondrion Capital Management, joining us, you're
- 18:21Speaker 2: talking about the broader market.
- 18:22Speaker 1: This is the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast, available on Apple, Spotify,
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