Report
Dave Nicoski ...
  • Ross LaDuke
EUR 233.15 For Business Accounts Only

Vermilion Compass: Weekly Equity Strategy

Market remains in purgatory

Purgatory is a reference we have used to describe the state of the market numerous times throughout 2019, and we believe this remains the case. Technical signals continue to suggest that while there are little-to-no signs for us to expect impending doom (economic data notwithstanding), there is also little to suggest an imminent broad market rally. Until these signals begin leading us one way or the other, our neutral outlook remains appropriate.

• Small-caps, Transports, Banks. Small-caps underperforming large-caps remains on our list of concerns as it has for most of the year because it is a clear signal of risk aversion. However, the Russell 2000, Transports, and Banks have yet to break down on an absolute basis -- it is hard for us to get too bearish if these cyclical/risk-on areas continue their horizontal consolidation... see charts below.

• Sector Relative Strength Rankings & Weighting Recommendations. Defensives remain clustered at the top of our ranks, however growth Sectors including cap-weighted Services, Technology, and Communications are close behind and are making a comeback. We continue to recommend a barbell strategy of growth and safety, particularly as growth is moving back into a leadership position relative to value... see pages 2-4.

• Semiconductors & Homebuilders remain leadership. These are two of the most cyclical areas of the market -- leadership in these areas is not something we would expect to see if the market was heading into a bear market... see page 4.

• Signs of life within EM? Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM, 2330-TW) and Samsung (005930-KR) are two mega-caps in the EM space that exhibit bullish price and RS inflections, giving us hope that EM (EEM) can bottom... see page 5.

• Energy. Crude oil prices along with several of the popular Energy Sector/Industry ETFs remain above key support despite giving up all the gains (and then some) that were achieved following the attack on Saudi oil facilities... see page 6.

In today's report we highlight attractive Groups and stocks within Technology and Transportation: TE-01 Semiconductors, Large-Cap, TE-04 Semiconductor Equip., Large/Mid-Cap, TR-08 Shipping, Dry-Bulk, and TR-09 Shipping, Energy... see pages 14-33.
Underlyings
Analog Devices Inc.

Analog Devices is an analog technology company. The company designs, manufactures, and markets a portfolio of solutions, including integrated circuits, algorithms, software, and subsystems. The company's analog products include data converter that translate real-world analog signals into digital data and also translate digital data into analog signals, amplifiers that condition analog signals, and power management and reference products that include functions such as power conversion, driver monitoring, sequencing and energy management. The company's digital signal processing products are designed to execute software programs, or algorithms, associated with processing digitized real-time, real-world data.

Applied Materials Inc.

Applied Materials provides manufacturing equipment, services and software to the semiconductor, display and related industries. The company's segments are: Semiconductor Systems, which develops, manufactures and sells a range of manufacturing equipment used to fabricate semiconductor chips; Applied Global Services, which provides integrated solutions to support equipment and fab performance and productivity; and Display and Adjacent Markets, which is comprised of products for manufacturing liquid crystal displays, organic light-emitting diodes and other display technologies for TVs, monitors, laptops, personal computers, electronic tablets, smart phones, and other consumer-oriented devices.

Ardmore Shipping

ASML Holding N.V.

Atlas Corp.

Seaspan Corporation is an independent charter owner and manager of containerships. The Company charters pursuant to long-term, fixed-rate time charters with various container liner companies. As of February 20, 2017, it had operated a fleet of 88 containerships and had entered into contracts for the purchase of an additional eight new building containerships. Its operating vessels include YM Wish, YM Wellhead, YM Witness, COSCO Glory, COSCO Development, COSCO Harmony, COSCO Excellence, COSCO Hope, COSCO Fortune, Seaspan Yangtze, CSCL Zeebrugge, CSCL Long Beach, CSCL Oceania, COSCO Vietnam, MOL Emissary, Seaspan Chiwan, Seaspan Ningbo, Seaspan Felixstowe, CSCL Brisbane, Seaspan Santos, Seaspan Loncomilla, Seaspan Lingue, CSCL Montevideo, CSCL Callao, Guayaquil Bridge and Calicanto Bridge. The Company is engaged in the operation and management of vessel, including maintaining the vessel, periodic dry-docking, cleaning and painting and performing work required by regulations.

Broadcom Inc.

Broadcom, via its subsidiaries, is a designer, developer and supplier of a range of semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions. The company develops semiconductor devices with a focus on digital and mixed signal complementary metal oxide semiconductor based devices and analog III-V based products. The company provides products that are used in end products such as enterprise and data center networking, home connectivity, set-top boxes, broadband access, telecommunication equipment, smartphones and base stations, data center servers and storage systems, and factory automation. The company has three segments: semiconductor solutions, infrastructure software and intellectual property licensing.

Costamare Inc.

Costamare is an international owner of containerships. Co. is engaged in chartering vessels to many of the world's liner companies. As of Feb 23 2018, Co. has a fleet of 71 containerships with a total capacity in excess of 466,000 twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs). Co.'s strategy is to time charter its containerships to a geographically diverse, financially strong and loyal group of liner companies. Co.'s containerships operate primarily under multi-year charters and therefore are not subject to the effect of seasonal variations in demand. Some of Co.'s customers are A.P. Moller-Maersk, MSC, Evergreen, Hapag Lloyd and COSCO.

DHT Holdings Inc.

Dorian LPG

Eneti Inc.

Scorpio Bulkers is an international shipping company based in Monaco. Co.'s vessels transport a range of major and minor bulk commodities, including ores, coal, grains, and fertilizers, along worldwide shipping routes, and are, or are expected to be, employed primarily in the spot market or in spot market-oriented pools of similarly sized vessels. As of Dec. 31, 2017, Co.'s operating fleet of 56 vessels consists of 55 wholly-owned or finance leased drybulk vessels and one chartered-in drybulk vessel. Co. also has contracts for the construction of 1 newbuilding drybulk vessel.

Euronav NV

Euronav is a provider of maritime shipping and offshore services engaged primarily in the transportation and storage of crude oil. As of Apr. 4, 2017, Co. owned and operated a modern fleet of 55 vessels (including four chartered-in vessels) with an aggregate carrying capacity of approximately 13.7 million deadweight tons, or dwt, consisting of 31 very large crude carriers, one ultra large crude carrier, 21 Suezmax vessels, and two floating, storage and offloading vessels. Co. has two operating segments: the operation of crude oil tankers on the international markets (tankers) and the floating production, storage and offloading operations.

Frontline Ltd.

Genco Shipping & Trading Ltd.

International Seaways Inc.

Kirby Corporation

Kirby operates tank barge. The company's marine transportation segment provides marine transportation services, operating tank barges and towing vessels transporting bulk liquid products. The company transports petrochemicals, black oil, refined petroleum products and agricultural chemicals by tank barge. The company's distribution and services segment, sells genuine replacement parts, provides service mechanics to overhaul and repair engines, transmissions, reduction gears and related oilfield services equipment, rebuilds component parts or diesel engines, transmissions and reduction gears, and related equipment used in oilfield services, marine, power generation, on-highway and other industrial applications.

KLA Corporation

KLA is a supplier of process control and yield management solutions for the semiconductor and related nanoelectronics industries. The company provides process control and process-enabling solutions for manufacturing and testing wafers and reticles, integrated circuits, packaging, light emitting diodes, power devices, compound semiconductor devices, microelectromechanical systems, data storage, printed circuit boards (PCBs), and flat and flexible panel displays, as well as general materials research. The company has four reportable segments which include Semiconductor Process Control; Specialty Semiconductor Process; PCB, Display and Component Inspection; and Other.

Lam Research Corporation

Lam Research is a supplier of wafer fabrication equipment and services to the semiconductor industry. The company designs, manufactures, markets, refurbishes, and services semiconductor processing equipment used in the fabrication of integrated circuits. The company's customer base includes semiconductor memory, foundry, and integrated device manufacturers that make products such as non-volatile memory, dynamic random-access memory, and logic devices. The company's services include customer service, spares, improvement, and refurbishment of its deposition, etch, and clean products. The company sells its products and services to companies in the United States, China, Europe, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and Taiwan.

Micron Technology Inc.

Micron Technology provides memory and storage solutions. The company's portfolio of memory and storage technologies include Dynamic Random Access Memory, Not And, 3D XPoint? memory, and Not Or. The company's segments are: Compute and Networking Business, which includes memory products sold into client, cloud server, enterprise, graphics, and networking markets; Mobile Business, which includes memory products sold into smartphone and other mobile-device markets; Storage Business, which includes Solid-State Drives and component-level solutions sold into enterprise and cloud, client, and consumer storage markets; and Embedded Business, which includes memory and storage products.

MKS Instruments Inc.

MKS Instruments is a provider of instruments, subsystems and process control solutions. The company has two segments: Vacuum & Analysis, which provides instruments, components, subsystems and software which are derived from its knowledge in pressure measurement and control, flow measurement and control, gas and vapor delivery, gas composition analysis, residual gas analysis, leak detection, control and information technology, ozone generation and delivery, radio frequency and data communication power, reactive gas generation and vacuum technology; and Light & Motion, which provides instruments, components and subsystems which are derived from its knowledge in lasers, photonics and optics.

Navios Maritime Acquisition Corp.

Navios Maritime Partners

Navios Maritime Partners L.P. is an international owner and operator of dry cargo and container vessels. The Company is engaged in the seaborne transportation services of a range of dry cargo commodities, including iron ore, coal, grain and fertilizer, and also containers, chartering its vessels under medium to long-term charters. It focuses on providing seaborne shipping services under long-term time charters. As of December 31, 2016, it controlled 12 Panamax vessels, nine Capesize vessels, three Ultra-Handymax vessels and seven container vessels. Panamax vessels are vessels capable of carrying a range of dry cargo commodities, including iron ore, coal, grain and fertilizer and being accommodated in various discharge ports. Capesize vessels are dedicated to the carriage of iron ore and coal. Ultra-Handymax vessels are similar to Panamax vessels although with less carrying capacity, and have self-loading and discharging gear on board to accommodate undeveloped ports.

Nordic American Tankers Limited

NVIDIA Corporation

NVIDIA engages in graphics processing unit (GPU)-based visual computing and accelerated computing platforms. The company has two segments, GPU and Tegra Processor, which are based on a single underlying architecture. The company's GPU product brands are aimed at markets including GeForce for gamers; Quadro for designers; Tesla and DGX for artificial intelligence data scientists and big data researchers; and GRID for cloud-based visual computing users. The company's Tegra brand integrates an entire computer onto a single chip, and incorporates GPUs and multi-core CPUs to drive supercomputing for autonomous robots, drones, and cars, as well as for game consoles and mobile gaming and entertainment devices.

NXP Semiconductors NV

NXP Semiconductors is a holding company. Through its subsidiaries, Co. is engaged as a global semiconductor company and a long-standing supplier in the industry. Co. provides High-Performance Mixed-Signal and Standard Product solutions. Co.'s product solutions are used in automotive, identification, wireless infrastructure, lighting, industrial, mobile, consumer and computing applications. Co. engages with original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and sell products in all major geographic regions.

Scorpio Tankers Inc.

SFL Corporation Limited

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. Sponsored ADR

Teekay Offshore Partners L.P.

Teekay Tankers

Teradyne Inc.

Teradyne is a global supplier of automation equipment for test and industrial applications. The company designs, develops, manufactures and sells automatic test systems used to test semiconductors, wireless products, data storage and electronics systems in the consumer electronics, wireless, automotive, industrial, computing, communications, and aerospace and defense industries. The company's automatic test equipment and industrial automation products and services include: semiconductor test systems; defense/aerospace test instrumentation and systems, storage test systems, and circuit-board test and inspection systems; industrial automation products; and wireless test systems.

Texas Instruments Incorporated

Texas Instruments designs and makes semiconductors that it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers. The company has two reportable segments: Analog and Embedded Processing. The company's analog semiconductors change signals, such as sound, temperature, pressure or images to a stream of digital data. The company's analog segment primary product lines includes: power, signal chain, and high volume. The company's embedded processors are designed to handle specific tasks and can be optimized for various combinations of performance, power and cost, depending on the application. The company's embedded processing segment primary product lines includes: connected microcontrollers and processors.

Tsakos Energy Navigation Ltd.

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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