We recently published a list of Jefferies’ Top Crowded Software Long Positions: Top 10 Stocks. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) stands against other Jefferies’ top crowded software long positions’ stocks.
After the post-pandemic rush and the subsequent inflation and glut-driven crash experienced by technology stocks, the sector is now fully bathing in the tailwinds and headwinds generated by artificial intelligence. Yet, unlike the pandemic, inflation, and interest rate-driven effects, AI has grown the addressable market for technology companies and shaken up several of them as well.
Within technology, one sector that has been shaken by AI is the software industry. Before AI, software firms were content with generating stable subscription-driven recurring revenue, but with AI, investors are not only focused on their ability to deliver AI products and monetize them but also on the fact that the firms themselves might be made redundant because of the new technology.
Nowhere else is the latter effect clearer than on software as a service (SaaS) stocks. These stocks offer software products on a subscription basis, and their narrative is based on their ability to deliver technologically complex products that businesses are unwilling to develop because of costs. The impact that AI has made on the SaaS sector is driven by the opinion that as AI enables users to easily create their software, several SaaS companies might not be needed in the business world.
To understand how AI has impacted software stocks, consider data from hedge fund Coatue Management. It shows that booming AI interest has led to software stocks taking the back seat as semiconductor stocks bask in investor attention. During the SaaS peak of 2022, the difference between the returns offered by a SaaS stock index and the semiconductor index were at their highest for the past decade. But, as of June 2024, the difference between the semi and the SaaS index is at the highest for the past decade in a 180-degree paradigm shift driven by AI.
These returns have also been driven by the beefy margins delivered by the semiconductor firms. Margins are a key valuation driver of SaaS stocks, and one popular valuation tool among investors is the Rule of 40. This rule sums up a SaaS stock’s revenue growth rate and profit or operating margin and checks whether the new value is greater than 40. As a result, margins play a key role in SaaS valuation, as a 40% or higher margin means that the firm can get away with little to no growth.
Why is 40% important? Well, according to Coatue, as of June 2024, Wall Street’s top AI GPU stock pick and the stock that ranked 6th in our list of the 10 Most Profitable Stocks of the Last 10 Years had operating margins of 65% and 49%, respectively. On the flip side, the largest software company in the world known for its Windows operating system had a margin of 44%. For chip stocks, new products drive margins since they can charge a premium through high prices. Whether these margins are sustained is another matter, and it was also part of the reason that the GPU firms’ shares fell by 6% as its full-year margin gross guidance of mid-70 % fell short of analyst expectations of 76.4%.
Coming back to software stocks, another metric used in their valuation is the price-to-sales ratio since several software and SaaS firms are unprofitable. In the era of AI, the SaaS index quoted by Coatue is trading at 5.5x price to forward sales. This is well below the long-term median of 7.2x and just a quarter of the 2021 peak of roughly 22x. This valuation compression is accompanied by lower revenue growth estimates. As mentioned above, growth is a fundamental tenet of SaaS and software valuation, and as of June 2024, just one percent of software companies had a next twelve-month revenue growth rate greater than 30%. At the peak of the software boom, 30% of firms faced similar expectations. Digging deeper, several factors are driving this trend.
AI is affecting SaaS stocks by making them shift to a consumption-driven model that charges customers for the services used instead of seat-based packages that simply sell capacity. Additionally, software stocks are also reckoning with the fact that their customers might end up using AI to cost-effectively develop their software instead of relying on expensive third-party options. As Jensen Huang shared in a 2021 interview with Time Magazine, well before his firm’s stock posted 1,100% in share price gains:
“AI is a watershed moment for the world. Humans’ fundamental technology is intelligence. We’re in the process of automating intelligence so that we can augment ours. The thing that’s really cool is that AI is software that writes itself, and it writes software that no humans can. It’s incredibly complex. And we can automate intelligence to operate at the speed of light, and because of computers, we can automate intelligence and scale it out globally instantaneously. Every single one of the large industries will be revolutionized because of it. When you talk about the smartphone, it completely revolutionized the phone industry. We’re about to see the same thing happen to agriculture, to food production, to health care, to manufacturing, to logistics, to customer care, to transportation. These industries that I just mentioned are so complex that no humans could write the software to improve it. But finally we have this piece of this new technology called artificial intelligence that can write that complex software so that we can automate it. The whole goal of writing software is to automate something. We’re in this new world where, over the next 10 years, we’re going to see the automation of automation.”
So, as the software industry undergoes a once-in-a-generation shift, it’s important to see how institutional investors are positioning their trades. Its latest survey is historic as it shows that just 19% of institutional investors are overweight in software stocks, the lowest reading recorded since the survey started. The figure sat at 51% in January and dropped to 28% in July. Yet, even though investors are less overweight, they’ve also reduced their short exposure as they’ve shorted 54 software stocks as of October 11th – down from 73 in July. So, let’s take a look at the stocks that they persist to be long in.
Our Methodology
To make our list of Jefferies’ top overcrowded software long positions, we ranked the top ten crowded long positions from the latest Trading Positioning Survey by their shares short as a percentage of outstanding shares.
For these stocks, we also mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points. (see more details here).
A customer service team in an office setting using the company’s Customer 360 platform to communicate with customers.
Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders In Q2 2024: 117
Shares Short % Of Outstanding: 1.72%
Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM), as its ticker might suggest, is a customer relationship management software provider. It is one of the largest players in its industry and commanded 21.7% of the market in 2023. Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM)’s scale is evident by the fact that it offers customers a whopping 8 trillion data points to run their campaigns. This is a key advantage in today’s AI driven industry, as data is the oil for artificial intelligence training. However, despite its considerable strengths, Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM)’s shares are down 12.6% year to date. This is driven by a sizeable 19.7% drop in May after the firm’s fiscal first-quarter earnings disappointed on the growth front of SaaS stock valuation. Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM)’s revenue grew by 11% to $9.13 billion in the quarter but analysts had penciled in $9.17 billion. Its Q2 higher-end guidance of $9.25 billion also missed broader consensus estimates of $9.37 billion. Another worrying factor for investors is Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM)’s inability to increase the portion of large deals in its deal portfolio.
Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM)’s management shared details about its plans to increase deal value during the Q1 2025 earnings call:
“Data Cloud gives every company a single source of truth and you can securely power AI insights and actions across the entire Customer 360.
Now let me tell you why I’m excited about Data Cloud and why it’s transforming our customers and how it’s preparing them for this next generation of artificial intelligence. Data Cloud was included in 25% of our $1 million plus deals in the quarter. We added more than 1,000 data cloud customers for the second quarter in a row. 8 trillion records were ingested in the Data Cloud in the quarter, up 42% year-over-year and we processed 2 quadrillion records, that’s a 217% increase compared to last year. Over 1 trillion activations drove customer engagement, which is a 33% increase year-over-year. This incredible growth of data in our system and the level of transactions that we’re able to deliver, not just in the core system but especially in data cloud is preparing our customers for this next generation of AI.”
Overall, CRM ranks 4th on our list of Jefferies’ top crowded software long positions’ stocks. While we acknowledge the potential of CRM as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than CRM but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.