Independent research on the U.S. markets, Baptista Research

Baptista Research

Independent research on the U.S. markets

Baptista Research is an independent financial research house focused on the U.S. markets. We provide equity research as well as credit research reports on the top-listed U.S. companies with most of our focus on technology, consumer goods and services, automobiles, industrials, oil and gas, pharma, and healthcare. Our research has served more than 3000 institutional investors including mutual funds, hedge funds, banks, family offices, and various buy-side firms. We operate a research subscription service where institutions, as well as retail investors, can have priority access to all our research. We also have a wide distribution of our research reports across some of the top global financial platforms. Apart from equity research and credit research, we also provide advisory services with respect to mergers & acquisitions (M&A), private equity/ venture capital fundraising, valuation reports, and investment management services for corporates.
Baptista Research is owned and managed by Ishan Majumdar, an ex-Venture Capitalist/ Investment Banker, a Chartered Accountant, and a Masters’ degree holder in Management from HEC Paris. Ishan has nearly a decade of experience in Mergers and Acquisitions, Leveraged Buyouts (LBOs), Venture Capital Investing, Corporate Strategy, and Valuation in front-office roles at the likes of BNP Paribas CIB, Credit Agricole CIB, Groupe Danone, and TIW Private Equity. He has worked on and closed multiple acquisition deals, leveraged buyouts, and start-up investment transactions.

Equity Bottom-Up

<ul><li>Apple’s spectacular 2024 has positioned it as a behemoth in the technology sector, with its stock climbing 30% compared to the S&P 500’s 23% gain.</li><li>It closed the year at $250 per share, giving the company a valuation exceeding $3.8 trillion, just shy of the $4 trillion milestone—a feat no company has achieved.</li><li>This growth was driven by new product launches, including the revolutionary Apple Vision Pro, advancements in AI with Apple Intelligence, and record-breaking revenue of $94.9 billion for the September quarter.</li></ul>

Apple’s spectacular 2024 has positioned it as a behemoth in the technology sector, with its stock climbing 30% compared to the S&P 500’s 23% gain.It closed the year at $250 per share, giving the company a valuation exceeding $3.8 trillion, just shy of the $4 trillion milestone—a feat no company has achieved.This growth was driven by new product launches, including the revolutionary Apple Vision Pro, advancements in AI with Apple Intelligence, and record-breaking revenue of $94.9 billion for the September quarter.

Apple's $4 Trillion Milestone: What Challenges Lie Ahead in 2025?

Technical Analyst, Vermilion Research

Joe Jasper

Technical Analyst

Technical and Quantitative Research

Vermilion Research

Vermilion’s objective is to deliver timely, actionable, and unique technical research to professional investors through the application of our various technical indicators.

Our research strategists seek to highlight securities which we believe are at major inflection points, based on our various technical and quantitative indicators, and offer asymmetric risk/return profiles. Our unique research methodology, centered on relative strength, enables our strategists to deliver superior investment recommendations.

Our process begins by organizing the universe of actively traded stocks into discrete sectors, then into industry groups. We then apply our technical and quantitative tools to identify developing price trends. Once attractive trends are identified within a selected sector or group, we screen for individual stocks which we believe offer the best risk/reward profile. We provide a historical perspective that often reveals, through our long-term charts, how price patterns often repeat themselves over time.

Technical Analysis

<ul>
<li>Our outlook remains bullish and the significant end-of-year rally that we have been expecting since mid-October is in progress.</li>
<li>There is little to do besides continue to ride the trend higher following our 11/5/24 and 11/19/24 Compass reports which both had "Buy the Pullback" in the title</li>
<li>We also continue to expect to see support at the 20-day MAs on the Russell 2000 (IWM), S&amp;P 500, and Nasdaq 100 (QQQ)</li>
</ul>


Our outlook remains bullish and the significant end-of-year rally that we have been expecting since mid-October is in progress.
There is little to do besides continue to ride the trend higher following our 11/5/24 and 11/19/24 Compass reports which both had "Buy the Pullback" in the title
We also continue to expect to see support at the 20-day MAs on the Russell 2000 (IWM), S&amp;P 500, and Nasdaq 100 (QQQ)


Improving Market Dynamics; Outlook Remains Bullish; MSCI EAFE, ACWI Ex-US, Europe to Join the Party?

Asia and Global Semiconductor and Tech Research

Andrew Lu

Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) / Equity Bottom-Up

<ul>
<li>TSMC reiterates 2024 sales y/y growth of 20-25% but revises down 2024 global semiconductor y/y sales from over 10% to 10% and global foundry sales growth from 20% to 15-19%.</li>
<li>
<strong>No more Moore's Law</strong>: After 3 years ramp up gap between N5-N3, TSMC confirms 10-11 quarters of ramp up gap between N3 and N2 due to longer production cycle.</li>
<li>Driven by stronger digital consumer (33% q/q), HPC (3% q/q), IoT (5% q/q) sales but weaker smartphone IC (-16% q/q), TSMC reports 1Q24 sales decline of only 5% q/q.</li>
</ul>


TSMC reiterates 2024 sales y/y growth of 20-25% but revises down 2024 global semiconductor y/y sales from over 10% to 10% and global foundry sales growth from 20% to 15-19%.

No more Moore's Law: After 3 years ramp up gap between N5-N3, TSMC confirms 10-11 quarters of ramp up gap between N3 and N2 due to longer production cycle.
Driven by stronger digital consumer (33% q/q), HPC (3% q/q), IoT (5% q/q) sales but weaker smartphone IC (-16% q/q), TSMC reports 1Q24 sales decline of only 5% q/q.


What Is TSMC Telling Us About Semi Supply Chain Stories at Its Investor Conference?

Equity Long-Short, Semiconductors, Fabricated Knowledge

Douglas O'Laughlin

Equity Long-Short, Semiconductors

Fabricated Knowledge

Learn more about the world's most important manufactured product. Meaningful insight, timely analysis, and an occasional investment idea.

<ul>
<li>"It is so much cheaper to do simulations than real experiments, so much more flexible in testing...we can even do things which cannot be done in any lab… So it’s inevitable this trend will continue for some time." - Richard Hamming, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Art-Doing-Science-Engineering-Learning/dp/1732265178" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Art of Doing Science and Engineering</a>.</li>
<li>Richard Hamming said this to the President of Bell Labs in the 1950s. And I think this insight rings more accurate than ever. Simulations of reality are much more flexible and cheaper than observing and interacting with reality.</li>
<li>I will assert that LLMs and “AI” are effectively the logical conclusion of this trend. A large language model is trained on the largest amount of data possible, often the entire crawlable Internet<a href="https://kili-technology.com/large-language-models-llms/9-open-sourced-datasets-for-training-large-language-models" target="_blank" rel="noopener">, all the books ever written, and so much more</a>.</li>
</ul>


"It is so much cheaper to do simulations than real experiments, so much more flexible in testing...we can even do things which cannot be done in any lab… So it’s inevitable this trend will continue for some time." - Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering.
Richard Hamming said this to the President of Bell Labs in the 1950s. And I think this insight rings more accurate than ever. Simulations of reality are much more flexible and cheaper than observing and interacting with reality.
I will assert that LLMs and “AI” are effectively the logical conclusion of this trend. A large language model is trained on the largest amount of data possible, often the entire crawlable Internet, all the books ever written, and so much more.


<ul>
<li>We see early signs of recovery in PC and smartphone markets, stable server market (strengths in AI server, stable in non-AI server market), but weaknesses in automotive and industrial.</li>
<li>We expect the PC semi market recovery of more than 10% y/y in 2024/2025, driven by inventory rebuild and silicon contents increase by adding AI into PC.</li>
<li>We expect the smartphone semi market recovery of 7-8% y/y in 2024/2025, driven by inventory rebuild and adopting 3nE foundry node. But, Huawei/HiSilicon will take some of the growth.</li>
</ul>


We see early signs of recovery in PC and smartphone markets, stable server market (strengths in AI server, stable in non-AI server market), but weaknesses in automotive and industrial.
We expect the PC semi market recovery of more than 10% y/y in 2024/2025, driven by inventory rebuild and silicon contents increase by adding AI into PC.
We expect the smartphone semi market recovery of 7-8% y/y in 2024/2025, driven by inventory rebuild and adopting 3nE foundry node. But, Huawei/HiSilicon will take some of the growth.


First Run of Global Semis' Guidances to Tell Early Signs of Recovery

United States

Apple Inc. designs, manufactures, and markets smartphones, personal computers, tablets, wearables and accessories, and sells a variety of related accessories. The Company also offers payment, digital content, cloud and advertising services. Apple Inc.'s customers are primarily in consumer, small & mid-sized business, education, enterprise and government markets worldwide.

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Apple (AAPL US)

Apple's $4 Trillion Milestone: What Challenges Lie Ahead in 2025?

Apple’s spectacular 2024 has positioned it as a behemoth in the technology sector, with its stock climbing 30% compared to the S&P 500’s 23%...

Baptista Research

Improving Market Dynamics; Outlook Remains Bullish; MSCI EAFE, ACWI Ex-US, Europe to Join the Party?

Improving Market Dynamics; Outlook Remains Bullish $SPX $IWM $QQQ; MSCI EAFE $EFA, ACWI ex-US $ACWX, and Europe $HEDJ $FEZ to Join the Party?...

Vermilion Research

What Is TSMC Telling Us About Semi Supply Chain Stories at Its Investor Conference?

What Is TSMC Telling Us About Semi Supply Chain Stories at Its Investor Conference? TSMC revises down 2024 global semi y/y sales from over 10% to...

Andrew Lu

Jensen's World: Compressing Reality

Nvidia is pursuing a strategy of broadening its software distribution on one of the largest installed bases in the world.

Fabricated Knowledge

First Run of Global Semis' Guidances to Tell Early Signs of Recovery

After the first Run of global semis' guidance, it tells early signs of recovery in PC and smartphone but weaknesses in automotive and industrial,...

Andrew Lu

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