$Palantir(PLTR.US)$ Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp said Tuesday that the recent trend of major companies leaving California will ultimately help the state, arguing that the competition will drive innovation.
The chief executive at Palantir also defended the company's generous stock compensation program, which has received criticism for diluting shareholders.
Karp took a long view on the compensation question, contending that attracting top talent will lead to better products, which, in turn, will support long-term stock growth.
"We've hired the best and most interesting and eclectic people in the world. ... They are very fairly compensated and we will continue to develop these products and continue to comp people," he said.
On California, Karp, who moved PLTR's headquarters from Silicon Valley to Denver, argued that California "has a lot of advantages for building tech" but will benefit from a more diverse corporate climate.
"Long-term, this will help California. Short-term, it's a huge problem," he said of the recent exodus from the state.
PLTR is one of many high-profile companies that have left California for other states recently, including Elon Musk's Tesla, which announced a move to Austin, Texas.

$NVIDIA(NVDA.US)$ is a great company and has been a great stock, up over 1,200% in 5 years.
But make no mistake…with a 100 PE, this stock is grossly overvalued along with the rest of the Technology sector.
If and when we have a correction, If the bubble finally pops, if the 10 year bond goes over 4%, NVDA will crash, and crash hard.

Central banks could drive stocks higher all the way through to the middle of 2023, but that would create a serious economic risk when the bubble bursts, according to Stifel.
"We calculate that a bubble driven by current central bank real yield repression may take the $SPDR S&P 500 ETF(SPY.US)$to 5,500 mid-2022 and 6,750 mid-2023, creating a systemic risk when it bursts," Stifel says.
Real rates saw a jump higher yesterday, but are still historically low. The 10-year inflation-protected $iShares TIPS Bond ETF(TIP.US)$is at -0.98%.
There have been just two equity bubbles in Wall Street's history: 1928-1928 and 1998-1999 and "neither ended well for stock or economic conditions," Stifel says.
Now, a third bubble is "percolating," the team adds.
The question is whether the Federal Reserve will lean against the risk of a bubble or just let asset prices rip, "magnifying financial risk when it bursts."
What can the Fed do? Watching the 10-year real yield is key to assessing market risk and the possibility of an S&P correction, Stifel says.
Stifel says that to forestall risk, the Fed may "tilt more hawkish while at the same time the Biden/Yellen duo may support the stronger dollar ( $USD(USDindex.FX)$) that accompanies such a Fed shift (a strong dollar subdues energy & food inflation in a supply-constrained inflation environment and improves the chances that BBB overcomes inflation concerns among Senate moderates, while also affecting the timing of a reconciliation bill to lift the U.S. debt ceiling)."
"This combination of factors may raise U.S. real yields and lower the S&P 500 P/E."
Watch Cyclicals and Defensives. Cyclical stocks have led the market rebound from the pandemic low on an equal-weight basis.
Actions like the above by the Fed and administration would cut into the reflation that favors Cyclicals over Defensives.
Stifel recommends going overweight some defensive stocks in sectors like Utilities ( $Utilities Select Sector SPDR Fund(XLU.US)$), Consumer Staples ( $Consumer Staples Select Sector SPDR Fund(XLP.US)$) and Health Care ( $The Health Care Select Sector SPDR® Fund(XLV.US)$) for the current quarter and Q1 2022.
They underweight some cyclical subsectors in Financials ( $Financial Select Sector SPDR Fund(XLF.US)$), Energy ( $Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund(XLE.US)$) and Materials ( $Materials Select Sector SPDR ETF(XLB.US)$).
BMO says that the still-hot tech sector can outperform next year, even with rising rates.

I am not a $NVIDIA(NVDA.US)$ shareholder.
Nobody's perfect.
But if I did own it, I certainly would never sell it.
NVIDIA has been an outstanding long term investment.

Two of China's biggest and best-known Internet companies are facing more pressure from the government, this time over the practices of their cloud business units.
The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said Tuesday it has told $Alibaba(BABA.US)$ and $Baidu(BIDU.US)$ that those companies need to do a better job of preventing telecom fraud after the ministry determined their cloud platforms had been used to gain access to fake and fraudulent websites. According to a report from Reuters, the ministry said Alibaba and Baidu must "earnestly fulfill their main responsibilities for network and information security."
Initial reaction to the Chinese government's latest moves was muted, as both Alibaba and Baidu edged into positive territory in pre-market trading, Tuesday.
Over the weekend, China's State Administration for Market Regulation levied fines equivalent to $78,000 on Alibaba, Baidu and several other companies for failing to disclose some acquisitions made over the past decade.

$NVIDIA(NVDA.US)$ I will be selling half at $800 pr. share which is about a 2 trillion dollar market cap valuation for Nvidia. Should happen sometime in 2023 or 2024 at the very latest. Currently I consider Nvidia to be a steal at these prices. Not even 1 trillion yet. Sheesh!

$Apple(AAPL.US)$ on Tuesday filed suit against an Israeli company that it says is known for making and selling software that is used in state-sponsored surveillance and spying on individuals' phones and communications.
Apple filed the suit against NSO Group and its parent company, Q Cyber, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose. In its filing, Apple said NSO's products and services are used to target individual people, "including government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics and even U.S. citizens" for the company's commercial benefit.
"They design, develop, sell, deliver, deploy, operate, and maintain offensive and destructive malware and spyware products and services that have been used to target, attack, and harm Apple users, Apple products, and Apple," said Apple, in its suit. Apple wants a permanent injunction to be issued that would prevent NSO from using Apple software, services, or devices.
In a separate statement, Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said the company makes "the most secure consumer hardware on the market." However, Federighi said that companies that are developing state-sponsored spyware have caused Apple to take legal action to prevent more cyber attacks on individuals.
"While these cybersecurity threats only impact a very small number of our customers, we take any attack on our users very seriously," Federighi said. "And we're constantly working to strengthen the security and privacy protections in iOS to keep all of our users safe."
Apple said it would alert any iPhone users that might have been attacked with a form of software called FORCEDENTRY.
According to Apple attackers used the FORCEDENTRY software to create Apple IDs that were then used to send malicious data to a person's iPhone. Apple said this then allowed NSO, or its clients, to install a type of spyware called Pegasus on a person's phone without their knowledge.”
The company said its own servers were neither hacked, nor compromised, during the attacks.
U.S. government officials recently raised the issue of security risks in the matter of proposed European Union trade rules that would require American tech companies to share some trade secrets with their rivals.

$Netflix(NFLX.US)$ I've dabbled with streaming. There are things I like about it and things I don't. What I like is no commercials. What I don't like is having to hunt and peck for something to watch and all the dated stuff I've already seen.
Cable should move to ala carte packages and it would be hard to beat.
I think eventually someone just might move to an ala carte streaming package.
I definitely missed the boat on Netflix. I'll be honest when they jetisoned their videos by mail business I was suspect. To be honest I still am. I wonder at what point people start leaving Netflix too.

$Zoom Video Communications(ZM.US)$ might have been the poster child for tech companies that saw business boom during the Covid-19 pandemic as millions of employees worldwide fled their offices and began working at home. And that need for reliable communications technology in order for people to do their jobs drove demand for Zoom's (ZM) services so much that on Oct. 19, 2020, the company's stock price hit an all-time high close of $568.34 a share.
What a difference a year makes.
On Tuesday, Zoom's (ZM) shares plunged more than 16%, to around $200 a share. At that price, Zoom's market cap of $59.6 billion has fallen by approximately $77 billion over the past 13 months.
Zoom (ZM) suffered from a case of the company not being able to win for losing. The issue was Zoom (ZM) forecasting more growth ahead, but not at the levels that have driven its business over much of the last two years.
The company said that for its current, fiscal fourth quarter, it expects revenue to grow just 19% over the same period a year ago, to between $1.051 billion $1.053 billion. That growth forecast looks even more striking when noting that it is barely higher than the $1.051 billion Zoom (ZM) reported for its third quarter, which was 35% higher than year-ago period.
It's no surprise what's behind Zoom's (ZM) growth issues. More companies are planning on having their employees returning to the office on at least a part-time basis in early 2022. This could, in theory, result in less usage of Zoom's (ZM) video services since workers would be meeting more often in person. Just last week, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) said its employees would begin coming back to company offices starting Feb. 1.
Speaking on a conference call on Monday, Zoom Chief Financial Officer Kelly Steckelberg acknowledged some of the issues the company expects to face in the coming year.
"We're still having these online customers which are the most volatile [and] many of them are still on monthly contracts," Steckelberg said. "And as they are adjusting to the environment and figuring out how the future of work is going to be for them individually, We expect that to be the challenging headwind."
The number, and quality of Zoom's (ZM) customers raised some questions on Wall Street. For example, the company said that for its third quarter, it had 512,000 customers with more than 10 employees, an 18% increase from the third quarter a year ago.
However, Bank Of America Securities analyst Brad Sills noted that number of customers rose just 1% from the second quarter of this year, which Sills said was "a record low" for quarter-over-quarter growth.
Sills cut his rating on Zoom's (ZM) to neutral from buy, saying that "a broader slowdown in both new customer growth and expansion activity, and still heightened online [customer] churn provide little certainty as to the bottom for [customer] growth."
At Wells Fargo, analyst Michael Turrin left his equal weight rating on Zoom's stock unchanged, but cut his price target to $245 a share from $275. Turrin also said that the issues surrounding Zoom's (ZM) growth prospects are likely to linger well into 2022.
"We expect these headwinds to weigh on results over the next several quarters, keeping [Zoom] shares range-bound until clearer signs around what's next for Zoom post [its] hyper growth [to] emerge."
Still, not all views on Zoom (ZM) were completely negative. Mizuho Securities analyst Siti Panigrahi cut his price target on Zoom's stock to $300 a share from $350, but made no change to his buy rating. Panigrahi said that while Zoom's (ZM) post-pandemic growth profile "remains somewhat unclear", the company's Zoom Phone, Zoom Rooms and Video Engagement center "remain integral to hybrid work environments" for the foreseeable future.
"Zoom sees continued growth in enterprise offsetting the online segment amid continued adaptation to hybrid work norms," Panigrahi said. "We continue to expect online to decline as a percentage of revenue amid post-pandemic normalcy and greater enterprise [market] penetration."
In search of a new source of revenue, Zoom (ZM) recently said it would start running ads on its free, basic video service.

$Netflix(NFLX.US)$ Imagine a train doing 100 mph and the train next to it doing 40 mph. Then a year later the first train is doing 80 mph while the train next to it is joined by six other trains all doing various speeds of 10-25 mph.
Yes, Netflix's growth is slowing but still miles and miles ahead.