Software & Payments Stocks Part II: Productivity Tools and Cybersecurity

Part 2 of a 6-Part Series Covering 50 Software & Payments Stocks

Since Part 1, I added four names – Synopsys (SNPS), Cadence Design Systems (CDNS), JFrog (FROG) and Samsara (IOT) – so the Cassandra Unchained software and payments universe is now 50 stocks, the SW50.

I tugged around the publishing order, so this Part 2 will cover Productivity Tools and Cybersecurity. I still expect the series will be 6 parts.

First a trading update: Yesterday I rolled my SOXX and QQQ puts at a debit, increasing my capital at risk in both cases. I executed both in roughly the same duration and strike range as previously disclosed. This roll was to recognize tax losses, and to add some short exposure, as I do believe we are witnessing a blowoff top. It is entirely possible that both go much higher, as has happened many times before. It is also possible that historic overvaluation exhibits some gravity.

Productivity Tools

Productivity tools are generally older software companies created around optimizing and converting human input into standardized information output for sharing or endpoint submission.

Adobe (ADBE) | $101 billion Market Cap | $24 billion Revenue | Chapel | P/IV15 0.91x | Rank 2/50 | Composite Score 64.7

Below is the Adobe chart over the past decade, with volume and price-to-sales (green).