So I'm the professor on Twitter
that apparently has gotten all you folks so riled up.
I'm actually not sure how to authenticate myself, other than posting this first, and then tweeting a link to this post from my twitter account. I guess that's the best I can do.
Someone tweeted me that there was lots of discussion on here following some of my tweets. Clearly a lot of folks here have $ and time invested in $ANY either long or short. I think the second or third hand relays of my conversations on twitter were somewhat incomplete. So let me try to explain my thoughts on $ANY so far.
First, I am an academic who has zero interest in $ANY. I was approached on twitter by some folks I follow on biotech stocks, and their mentions of $ANY got me intrigued, mostly because of my personal interest in virtualization and related research. Some of my friends were the founders of Xensource and the inventors of the hypervisor that is now in use by all the virtualization companies. If $ANY had some new cool advances in virtualization, then I wanted to learn about it.
Second, I have zero financial interest in $ANY, $MSFT, or any company in this sector. I personally invest mostly in consumer discretionary, and biotech. The closest any of my stocks come to $ANY is Facebook, and I honestly don't think they have anything to do with each other. I am not paid, or consulting with any of these related firms. I don't have time for all that with my day job. Doing research and advising students is my first priority (after my kids).
Third, I do not claim to be an expert on $ANY's products. I don't have the interest or time to go run commercial software for the hell of it. My opinions are based on my knowledge of virtualization tools and platforms.
Fourth, I am not super bullish or super bearish on $ANY. I originally thought this was particularly interesting from a research perspective. At first glance, the MSFT connection looks good. But it's a very volatile stock and obviously a lot of short interest.
I will say that the materials I have read from $ANY is very confusing. There's lots of chatter about how it provides seamless emulation for legacy MSFT products (very plausible), but that's getting mixed up with claims of containers and super efficient virtualization platforms etc. Seamless emulation is plausible, and would be quite useful to MSFT, hence the collaboration etc. But it's not a huge market, because it is dependent on old code written for long gone machines. Mentions of COBOL, FORTRAN etc are all fine, but the products that use that code is shrinking, not growing. So thats a shrinking market. Second, it is hard to claim that you perform much better than existing hypervisors, because hypervisors already achieve near 95%+ of the ideal efficiency. In other words, running a hypervisor gives you 95% of the performance of running on the barebones hardware. 100% is the limit, so the benefit you can get over existing hypervisors seems quite limited.
That said, I don't claim to know what MSFT or any other company has planned. MSFT could buy it, just to save itself from having to build some tools to run old code. That's plausible, but I doubt it will be because it's a breakthrough tech that's going to change the world. So I don't want to be long the stock, nor would I be short it.
As a bystander with no interest in $ANY, I find some of the documents online to be full of hype. I saw an article from howtofindbigstocks.com, which seemed to be near zero technical content, and full of hyperbole and redundant claims. Obviously $ANY the company is not responsible for whatever junk is published about them online, but this just tells me there is too much misinformation out there on this stock. I worry for less technical folks who may be pulled in by some of this stuff on either the bull or bear side.
Sorry for the long post. If you don't want to read all that, my summary is:
- Too risk for longs, lots of hype literature online, I would stay away
- Also risky for shorts, because they're tiny and buying them would be pocket change for MSFT, even if the tech was no good. I would stay away from shorting it also.
