It's hard to figure who won the night. Maybe it doesn't matter: Applied Materials (AMAT) , Salesforce (CRM) and Autodesk (ADSK) were that good.
The one that will be up the most is Autodesk, which remains the best tech story that nobody knows. That's because Autodesk, which makes software you badly need to make cellphone building and a host of other structures, gained 183,000 customers who now pay on a subscription model, 90% recurring revenue. That's an amazing transformation in just two years' time from a regular old software company.
Applied Materials portrayed itself as no longer cyclical, which is incredible because the semiconductor equipment business has been boom-bust forever. Why? Because of artificial intelligence and deep learning, and the equipment needed to make chips for them. Their chip machines make semis for phones, data centers and cameras.
Meanwhile, its traditional DRAM and NAND (flash) making machines are just on fire, with huge year-over-year rev gains because of scarcity -- 45%. Cash has built by 87%. Demand is extraordinarily strong. Just to be sure, the proper readthrough is to say this is fantastic for Nvidia, because there just aren't enough machines available to allow others to catch up with them.
Salesforce was all about picking up ecommerce business from retailers, basically giving them all access to the kind of Amazon (AMZN) -like interface -- if you like this, you might like that -- using artificial intelligence. This is a new and powerful vertical that they are beginning to take big share from -- witness the takeaway from SAP (SAP) of Ralph Lauren (RL) . The IDC numbers -- independent -- do show big share gains.
Which is best? They are all powerful, and here's the thing you must remember: when we have a reset day like we had two days ago, these three will attract money on the way down.
Oh, and not to spoil tech's ascendancy here, but Deere's (DE) report this morning shocked people with worldwide strength on agriculture.
Maybe it was the best of all.
