Report
Dave Nicoski ...
  • Ross LaDuke
EUR 203.26 For Business Accounts Only

Vermilion Compass: Weekly Equity Strategy

Sector trends continue to support a risk-on environment. Defensive sectors like Consumer Staples, Utilities, REITs, and Communications continue to lag, while cyclicals - notably Consumer Discretionary and Technology, remain near the top of our relative strength rankings. While this paints a bullish picture, mixed breadth indicators and sideways, sawtooth price action give us pause, lending to our neutral and unchanged outlook. Expect further consolidation and volatility.

• Cyclicals continue to dominate our relative strength rankings. The one exception is equal-weight Health Care - typically a defensive sector – which is being led by small-caps. Broadly speaking, defensive sectors continue to lag... see page 2.

• Focus on medical device stocks. Of our 6 Health Care Groups currently hitting 3-month relative strength highs, 4 are medical device-related. We highlight three attractive stocks: IDEXX Laboratories (IDXX), LeMaitre Vascular (LMAT), and Orthofix International NV (OFIX)... see page 3.

• Consumer Discretionary to Staples ratio points to risk-on environment. As alluded to above, defensives lagging and cyclicals leading is not something we would expect to see if the market was in for trouble... see page 4.

• Market cap and style. Given the weight of the evidence, we remain market cap neutral and continue to favor growth over value... see page 4.

• In today's report we highlight attractive and actionable groups within Materials and Technology: MA-30 Silver, Platinum, TE-17 Networks Security Services & Software, and TE-47 Software, E-Commerce... see pages 9-22.
Underlyings
ACI Worldwide Inc.

ACI Worldwide develops, markets, installs, and supports a range of software products and solutions primarily focused on facilitating real-time electronic payments. The company's payment capabilities, technologies, and solutions are marketed under the brand name Universal Payments. In addition to its own products, the company distributes, or acts as a sales agent for software developed by third parties. These products and services are used globally by banks, financial intermediaries, and a range of transaction-generating endpoints, including automated teller machines, merchant point-of-sale terminals, bank branches, mobile phones, tablets, corporations, and internet commerce sites.

Coeur Mining Inc.

Coeur Mining is a gold and silver producer, as well as a zinc and lead producer, with mines located in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and exploration projects in North America. The company operates the Palmarejo complex, and the Rochester, Kensington, Wharf and Silvertip mines. The company's dore, as well as the concentrate product produced by the Wharf mine, is refined into gold and silver bullion and then sells to multi-national banks, bullion trading houses, and refiners across the globe. The company's gold concentrate products from the Kensington mine and the zinc and lead concentrates from the Silvertip mine are sold under a variety of agreements with smelters and traders.

CyberArk Software Ltd.

Ebix Inc.

Ebix is a supplier of infrastructure exchanges to the insurance, financial, and healthcare industries. The company focuses on: expansion of connectivity between all entities through its Exchange family of products in the financial, travel, life, health, workers compensation, risk management, annuity and property and casualty (P&C) sectors namely the EbixCash and EbixExchange family of products; sales and support of P&C back-end insurance and broker management systems; sale, customization, development, implementation and support of its P&C back-end insurance carrier system platforms; risk compliance solution services; and e-governance/e-learning solutions in emerging world markets.

Endeavour Silver Corp.

Endeavour Silver is engaged in silver mining in Mexico and related activities including acquisition, exploration, development, extraction, processing, refining and reclamation. Co. is also engaged in exploration activities in Chile. Co. has three operating mining segments, GuanacevA, Bolanitos and El Cubo, which are located in Mexico as well as Exploration and Corporate segments. The Exploration segment consists of projects in the exploration and evaluation phases in Mexico and Chile.

FireEye Inc.

FireEye provides intelligence-based cybersecurity solutions that allow organizations to prepare for, prevent, respond to and remediate cyber attacks. The company's portfolio of cybersecurity products and services is designed to minimize the risk of cyber security breaches by detecting and preventing advanced, targeted and other evasive attacks, as well as enabling management of security operations, including alert management, investigation and response when a breach occurs. The company provides threat detection and prevention solutions, security orchestration, analytics and management solutions, threat intelligence subscriptions, on-demand and managed service subscriptions, and other services.

Fortinet Inc.

Fortinet provides cybersecurity solutions. The company's product offerings consist of its FortiGate product family and its non-FortiGate products. The company's FortiGate hardware and software licenses are sold with a set of security services. These security services are enabled by FortiGuard, which provides threat research and artificial intelligence capabilities from a global cloud network to deliver protection services to each FortiGate appliance. The company's non-FortiGate products include the Fortinet Security Fabric (such as FortiAP, FortiAnalyzer, FortiSwitch and FortiManager), certain cloud security products (such as virtual machines and cloud services) and other products.

Fortuna Silver Mines Inc.

Fortuna Silver Mines is engaged in the mining, exploration, extraction and processing of silver, gold and zinc mine properties in southern Peru and Mexico.

Imperva Inc.

Imperva is engaged in the development, marketing, sales, service and support of cyber-security solutions that protect data and applications whether in the cloud or on premises. The company's SecureSphere, CounterBreach and Camouflage product lines secure business-critical applications and data in physical and virtual data centers from hackers and malicious insiders. The company's Payment Card Industry certified Incapsula service delivers cloud-based Website Security, Distributed Denial of Service Protection and Load Balancing and Failover. The company also sells its ThreatRadar services as an add-on services to its SecureSphere appliances, which provides reputation and crowdsourced security intelligence services.

North American Palladium Ltd.

North American Palladium is engaged in the exploration, mining, acquisition and production of palladium, gold, platinum, nickel, copper and other precious metals properties in Canada.

Okta Inc. Class A

Okta is an independent identity management platform for the enterprise. The Okta Identity Cloud is the company's platform that enables its customers to connect people to technology, anywhere, anytime and from any device. The Okta Identity Cloud consists of a suite of products to manage and secure identities. Products used for workforce identity are consumed through web and mobile interfaces, and provide ways for Information Technology organizations to manage identities for their employees, contractors and partners. The company's products include: Universal Directory; Single Sign-On; Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication; Lifecycle Management; and Application Programming Interface Access Management.

Pan American Silver Corp.

Pan American Silver is engaged in the production and sale of silver, gold and other base metals including copper, lead and zinc as well as other related activities, including exploration, extraction, processing, refining and reclamation. Co.'s primary product (silver) is produced in Peru, Mexico, Argentina and Bolivia. Additionally, Co. has project development activities in Peru, Mexico and Argentina, and exploration activities throughout South America and Mexico.

Pegasystems Inc.

Pegasystems develops, markets, licenses, hosts, and supports enterprise software applications that help organizations transform the way they engage with their customers and process work across their enterprise. The company also licenses its low-code Pega Platform? for application development to clients to build and extend their own business applications. Pega Infinity? helps connect enterprises to their customers in real-time across channels, streamline business operations, and adapt to meet changing requirements. The company's applications and platform intersect with and encompass several software markets, including: customer engagement, digital process automation, and robotic process automation.

Proofpoint Inc.

Proofpoint is a security-as-a-service provider that enables organizations worldwide to defend, protect, archive and govern their data. The company's security-and compliance platform is comprised of an integrated suite of threat protection, information protection, and brand protection solutions, including email protection, threat protection, email authentication, data loss prevention, digital risk, web browser isolation, email encryption, archiving, phishing simulation and security awareness computer-based training. The company's platform services primarily consist of: threat detection, threat intel extraction, nexus threat graph, real-time detection, information classification and intelligent policy.

Q2 HLDGS INC

Q2 Holdings is a holding company. Through its subsidiaries, the company provides cloud-based digital solutions. The company's digital banking platform provides digital banking services to their end users. The company's Q2 Cloud Lending, digital lending and leasing platform is a cloud-based, end-to-end lending and leasing solution that allows to automate and digitize their lending and leasing activities, supporting digital lending and leasing applications, scoring, underwriting, servicing and collections for various assets classes. The company's Q2 Open is a portfolio of open application programming interface financial services which are designed to develop and support their own applications and digital financial services.

Qualys Inc.

Qualys provides cloud-based platform delivering information technology (IT), security and compliance solutions. The company's cloud platform consists of IT security, compliance monitoring, web application security, global IT asset management and cloud and container security solutions, which it refers to as the Qualys Cloud Apps, that utilizes its shared and extensible primary services and its multi-tenant cloud infrastructure. The company also provides open application program interfaces and other developer tools that allow third parties to embed its technology into their solutions and build applications on its cloud platform. The company's cloud platform utilizes physical and virtual sensors, and cloud agents.

Radware Ltd.

Radware sells application delivery and network security products, which it sometimes refer to as its devices, that are delivered on top of a unified hardware switching platforms family with various levels of processing power, throughput, port density, and speed depending on the selected model. Co.'s products run different configurations of embedded software to deliver features specific to the intended operation of the appliance. Multiple Radware devices can be managed through Co.'s common management tool and dashboard (Apsolute Vision). This market sector is comprised of a few solution domains, among which Co. focuses on two: Application Delivery and Network Security.

SSR Mining Inc

SSR Mining is engaged in the acquisition, exploration, development and operation of silver-dominant resource properties located in the Americas. Co.'s strategic focus is to optimize the production of silver from its Pirquitas mine in Argentina, and to advance other principal development and exploration projects including San Luis in Peru, Diablillos in Argentina, and Pitarrilla and San Agustin in Mexico. In addition to its principal projects, Co. holds a geologically-diverse portfolio of other predominantly silver projects in various stages of exploration.

VeriSign Inc.

Verisign is a provider of domain name registry services and internet infrastructure, enabling internet navigation for domain names. The company enables the security, stability, and resiliency of main internet infrastructure and services, including providing root zone maintainer services, operating internet root servers, and providing registration services and authoritative resolution for the .com and .net top-level domains, which support the majority of global e-commerce. The company operates the authoritative directory of and/or the back-end systems for all .com, .net, .cc, .tv, .gov, .jobs, .edu and .name domain names, among others. The company also provides internationalized domain name services.

Wheaton Precious Metals Corp

Wheaton Precious Metals is engaged in the silver mining business.

Provider
Vermilion Research
Vermilion Research

Vermilion Research delivers timely, actionable, and unique research inputs to professional investors. Our research strategists highlight securities which we believe are at major inflection points, based on our various proprietary technical indicators, and offer asymmetric risk/return profiles. We believe our research methodology, which is not limited by industry sector or market capitalization, enables us to deliver superior investment recommendations.

Our process begins by organizing all actively traded stocks into coherent sectors, then into logical industry groups. We then apply our proprietary relative strength tools to identify developing price trends. Once attractive trends are identified within a selected sectors or groups, we screen for individual stocks which we believe offer the best risk/reward profile. Vermilion offers U.S. and global equity market research products. Vermilion’s research team, which has received numerous awards and accolades, has a combined 70 year of experience in the analysis of investment securities.

Analysts
Dave Nicoski

Ross LaDuke

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