Is the SASpocalypse over? Salesforce quarter good, Okta crushed it, Crowdstrike business accelerating. Where is this, where is the proof that Anthropic and OpenAI are killing these businesses?

I I agree with you. I I'm actually writing this up on my one big uh investment idea and it's going to be published later today or tomorrow. and I'm looking at various segments of the software industry. What's really interesting to see is cyber security really never got dinged that hard. And so crowd strike, it's had its ups and downs, but a lot of these cyber leaders uh until very recently, remain leaders and they kind of led the software comeback off of uh those March, April, May lows.

Um, Salesforce, you know, I'm looking at the Wi-Fi interactive right now, specifically Crowdstrike versus Salesforce and you can see we got some pretty big jump ups here. But what was interesting to me is that Crowdstrike along with most cyber security stocks took a bit of a dip since the middle of August. August 13th seemed to be a key pivot uh where we saw some institutional rotation.

But you're going to see here after I clear these marks that both of these are ups uh significantly. So Crowdstrike back to those August highs and then Salesforce, if we take a look at a longer term chart, you're going to see Salesforce has been depressed. so they're still negative on the year by about 10%, but coming back quickly.

Nancy, I I I'm still not sold on this salesforce quarter and their ultimate roll over time with AI. but I look at a company like Crowdstrike. How could you be uh how can you not like a company like that clearly playing or protecting companies in the age of AI AI?

Yeah, well I'm with you, Brian, on this one and I've talked about it for a long time. We exited Salesforce a couple of years ago. Um they recently bought a company that is going to allow them to measure volume uh instead and and change pricing and move away from uh the seat model. But uh it for me, we own Crowdstrike and we own Palo Alto in our growth and 12 best ideas portfolios.

And I I think you have to own these names. Now Crowdstrike's trading in a pretty demanding valuation, but they delivered an amazing quarter and you see you're seeing it reflected in the price of the stock. So, I I think there are going to be winners and losers. I'm not saying that Salesforce is going away anytime soon, but I think accelerating earnings growth is in other portions of the SAS um space and we we don't want to own Adobe, we don't want to own Salesforce uh because we think there's an opportunity cost to that relative to the other players.

Brett, SASpocalypse over?

Um, I I think the whole conversation that you're having is a a reality of the unknown impacts of AI overall and who are going to be the winners and losers. And maybe just back to the voice of reason because I don't cover tech stocks. Uh that would be along the lines of just diversifying and making sure that your portfolio isn't invested all in one theme because at least historically those themes do change and winners often become losers. And that's where I do think AI is a benefit to the entirety of the economy and and more importantly the companies that use it. And that's where I think you're seeing more of a repricing today where you're seeing those companies uh that are using it or the broader companies in the United States do much better as AI continues to work itself through the value chain to bring it to life and ultimately the end users that use it to increase the productivity and the profitability of their employees.