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Michael Kamerman, CEO of Skilling, shares his opinion on what stock you should buy this week.

Intel

The pandemic unearthed many key trends, one being the demand for semiconductors and computer chips.

Part of this demand is due to the versatility of computer chips being used in various sectors including the automotive industry and with 5G rolling out around the world, this momentum will only increase.

Whilst Intel was once dominant in the industry, it has since been surpassed by competitors such as AMD and Nvidia, who innovated quicker and more effectively. 

Therefore, investors should consider Intel’s pace of innovation before taking bets on the stock.

Despite this, Intel is hedging on production to Asia being outsourced and has announced plans for a $17 billion production facility in Madgeburg, Germany.

By reducing the competitive edge of production in Asia, Intel is hoping to rediscover its success and market share. However, this will hinge on protecting their market share of existing chips, whilst innovating at the same time. Only then, might Intel stock be attractive for investors.   

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Not investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results

David Morrison, Senior Market Analyst at Trade Nation, shares his opinion on what stock you should sell this week, and what stock you should buy.

Sell: Intel

With the extended sell-off we’ve had since the beginning of this year there are fewer shorting opportunities now than two months ago. On top of this, my current investment thesis is that global stock indices, in particular the S&P 500, are close to bottoming and should soon start to bounce quite aggressively. But the semiconductor designer and fabricator Intel is currently out of favour and may remain so. Over the years there has been much criticism of the company’s direction which even the replacement of CEO Bob Swan by Pat Gelsinger last year has failed to halt. In a big change of direction, the company intends to spend over $43 billion on new chip fabrication plants, for Intel chips but also other chip designers. This may pay off over time but could weigh on the company in the near term. In addition, Intel sources vital raw materials such as neon and palladium from Ukraine and Russia respectively. If hostilities result in further sanctions and supply disruptions, then this could be a serious issue going forward. The stock is currently testing support at around $44. A sustained break below here could signal further weakness for the chip giant. 

Buy: Roku

While you wouldn’t know it from the current state of the markets, the fourth-quarter earnings season has been a great success so far. According to FactSet, of the 80% of S&P 500 constituents that have reported, 78% have beaten expectations for both revenues and earnings per share. That’s why the overnight collapse in the share prices of Netflix, Meta Platforms (Facebook) and Peloton following their earnings releases was such a shock. Netflix slumped 21%, Meta lost over 24% and Peloton plunged 33%. It was their weaker-than-expected subscriber numbers that did the damage, as active users are a key metric for tech companies. Roku also suffered. The streaming service fell 29% in the first few hours following its own update. That meant the stock was down around 75% since its peak last summer. It is yet another of those companies that outperformed during the pandemic and is now paying the price. But while the last quarter was disappointing in terms of missed revenue expectations and guidance for the current quarter, it’s possible to argue the reaction is overdone, with current market conditions playing a large part. The poor results were mostly down to supply chain disruptions, which, hopefully, are being ironed out. In addition, Roku beat expectations for new sign-ups, and the average revenue per user on a trailing 12-month basis was up 43% from the same time last year. By hours streamed, Roku is the top platform in the US, Canada, and Mexico. Lastly, the company reaffirmed its revenue guidance for 2022. The company is aggressively investing for growth with a long-term perspective. It’s certainly not Peloton. I know this is a bit of a punt, but it is hard to pass by this opportunity given the sharp selloff in the stock price. 

Disclaimer: The information contained within this article is for educational and entertainment purposes ONLY. The commentary provided is the opinion of the author and should NOT be considered as personalised advice or recommendation. The information provided in this article should NOT be a person’s sole basis for an investment decision. All investments are made at the reader’s own risk. 

Apple Inc. is planning to use its own chips in Mac computers beginning as early as 2020, replacing processors from Intel Corp., according to people familiar with the plans. Bloomberg's Ian King reports on "Bloomberg Markets."

You may have seen the headlines just a few weeks back: Intel computer processors at risk form hackers. The computer technology firm owned up to some serious flaws in their systems and began to implement patches. Below Rusty Carter, VP of Product at Arxan Technologies, explains the ordeal and touches on the detail of the vulnerabilities, from CPUs to mobile banking.

Earlier this year the appearance of two vulnerabilities, Meltdown and Spectre, which affected a significant proportion of the world computer processors, hit the headlines and gained serious attention across the security and application industries.

The critical vulnerabilities that were recently found in Intel and other Central Processing Units (CPU) represent a significant security risk. Because the flaw is so low level, the usual protections that web developers are accustomed to, do not apply. Due to the vulnerabilities existing in the underlying system architecture, they can be exceptionally long-lived, providing attackers with sufficient time to develop direct attacks aimed at the hottest targets, a big one being the mobile banking and payments industry.

Both Meltdown and Spectre can affect devices used within the banking industry, an obvious one being mobile banking applications. Although similar, the vulnerabilities do have their differences. They both affect Intel; must have code execution on the system; and can be managed or mitigated through software patching. However, they each have slightly different methods of attack – both use speculative execution, but Meltdown also uses Intel privilege escalation, whilst Spectre uses branch prediction. Thus, they each have slightly different impacts. Additionally, Meltdown only affects Intel whereas Spectre can affect Intel, ARM, and AMD.

The location of the vulnerabilities makes them particularly hard to protect against. This is because it is the processor, its registers, and also its memory, that are being attacked. This creates unique challenges for protection, however, does not make protection impossible. Meltdown has now been patched in most cases, therefore, Spectre is the more concerning of the two.

With both vulnerabilities, the exfiltration occurs via the registers or memory addresses of legitimate programs in use, meaning cryptography-related items such as decryption keys and API credentials will be the likely first targets. This is because the vulnerabilities go across users of an application and, therefore, can provide ‘keys to the kingdom’. Follow-on targets are likely to be individual users’ personal information managed by marquee applications.

The banking industry is likely to suffer the effects of both these vulnerabilities, especially with regards to mobile banking and payments. Customer data such as account numbers and user credentials are very likely to be exposed.

With the rising popularity of mobile banking, applications are seeing more and more security risks affecting them. Even well written applications are still vulnerable. Whilst most applications maintain security by encrypting data between the app and the data centre, this is not enough. In order to be fully protected, banks need to encrypt the data within their application, only decrypting it at the moment it is needed, and then encrypting it again. Further application protection that is highly recommended for banks to incorporate into the security of their applications is anti-reverse engineering and anti-tampering.

For customers using mobile banking, it is vital they remember to turn off JavaScript if possible and to ensure they exit applications they do not need, or are not using at the time. Ultimately the application is run on a processor, when there is a vulnerability there, nothing is really safe. However, if a mobile application is not running, these vulnerabilities cannot facilitate the stealing of data. Encrypting data and implementing application protection that uses a variety of different techniques, can make it much more difficult to read memory out of a register, or to leverage a vulnerability such as Spectre. By doing this, banks can put themselves ahead of others within the industry, as well as protecting their customers and overall reputation.

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