Investment advice and predictions are always accompanied by the caveat that the past is not a sure guide to the future. Fair enough, but it can offer some strong hints. Coppock appears to work incredibly well with the leveraged Nasdaq 100 tracking ETF, QQQ3.
Decades ago, there was a chronic shortage of office space in London and the City, especially hard to find were offices offering the large open-plan trading floors that the investment banks were looking for. It was a licence to print money for property developers. Once planning permission was obtained, they did the development using money borrowed from the banks.
It was a partnership in which the banks took all the risk but only charged whatever the prevailing rate of interest was for the money. The developers walked away with almost all the profit, and many became rich in the process.
I remember going into a property developer’s office to ask how I could become one of these lucky people. He told me to go away and do some development. I said I didn’t have any money. He said, if you need to use your own money, it isn’t much of a development.
I have lived my life on that basis. I make the profit; the banks provide the money. This is why seed corn capital is so precious, because with no equity, it is hard to get the banks to play ball.
Silicon Valley works on the basis that the first cheques come from rich individuals ready to take big risks for big rewards. Private equity, venture capital and ultimately loan and bank finance come in later, and finally, with the IPO, any debts are paid off, and Joe Public gets to join the party.
Back to QQQ3. This is leveraged so it comes with built-in bank finance, as it were. The investor needs to know how to time his investment to make QQQ3 a surefire winner.
One way is $-cost averaging. Buy some every month, and the long-term charts suggest that you will win in the end. The bad news is that there will be periodic wipeouts. As long as QQQ3 trends higher long-term, any buying strategy will work.
A failsafe strategy, on past evidence, is to buy on a Coppock buy signal (when the curve turns higher, ideally from around or below zero) and then either sell or have a strong bias to selling when Coppock turns down.
Looking at the chart above, it looks like a licence to print money, and we all need one of those. Note that this is not about catching the bottom or the peak. It is about holding while Coppock is climbing (blue to red smiley on the chart), a strategy which, on past evidence, has never failed to deliver significant profits.
Share Recommendations
QQQ3
Nvidia. NVDA
ServiceNow. NOW
Crowdstrike. CRWD
A separate question is to ask whether QQQ3 has already bottomed out. The argument here is that Trump has laid out an incredibly aggressive protectionist stance, especially as it involves China, but this is not where he wants to be. It is a negotiating position, the Art of the Deal.
It makes sense for a hustler like Trump. Your opening bid is miles away from what your negotiating partner will accept and ends somewhere around the middle or wherever, with concessions on both sides. It could work. China needs to let the West in and play fair with everybody.
As far as stock markets were concerned, accustomed to the polite diplomacy of a lost era, Trump’s opening bid on tariffs came as a terrifying shock, and share prices plummeted. Maybe, with hindsight, that was the darkest hour before the dawn.
Stock markets would react badly if they thought the technology-focused US and global investment boom was seriously faltering, but it makes sense that it won’t. Planet Earth and its 8 bn-plus denizens seem to have an infinite requirement for ever more powerful computers. As the CEOs of the tech superstars keep saying, this incredible adventure is just beginning.
Shares in companies that play key roles at the heart of this journey seem likely to continue to flourish, and the tech behemoths of the future will be even larger than the tech behemoths of today.
This is good news for QQQ3 as an investment and implies that the end game for Nvidia is a much higher valuation. Jensen Huang is not going to take his eye off the ball. The shares have been trading broadly sideways for 14 months. A hiccup in the investment boom would send them lower, but ultimately, the big picture is $10T, here we come.
Let us look at the Nvidia chart (below) with a bullish hat on. Including the present one, there have been three periods when Coppock was declining and each time the share price traded sideways to lower. But after each of these corrections, the price moved sharply higher into all-time high ground. The odds are good that this will happen again.
The implied best strategy for Nvidia is to wait for a buy signal if you are a new investor in Nvidia, but otherwise it looks sensible to hold the shares through any correction and fill your boots with more on the next buy signal.
Such a strategy saves a great deal of head scratching and accepts that we don’t know what the shares are going to do shortly, but can have great confidence that the long-term trend is onwards and upwards.
In the short term, Nvidia’s progress depends heavily on buoyant data centre demand, but longer-term, the group’s opportunity is to build a more complex and diversified business at the heart of everything important happening as the global technology boom rolls on. Ten years from now, Nvidia may be unrecognisable from the current company.
Strategy – The Big Picture Is Bullish
I have been stressed because the charts point down while the fundamentals, especially the unfolding global technology boom, are bullish. Charts are temporary but have their uses; the technology boom is a rolling snowball gathering mass at an exponential rate.
Disregard anything negative that I have said or implied about ServiceNow. Bottom line, it is an incredible company with one of the world’s great CEOs. Latest results made it clear that it is onwards and upwards for the business.
Whatever Coppock and the share price have been doing, the fundamentals are on fire.
A privileged platform has a privileged position in the enterprise. Let’s start with ServiceNow’s Q1 results. This was our biggest Q1 ever for net new ACV [annual contract value].
Subscription revenue grew 20% year-on-year in constant currency, slightly above the high end of our guidance range. RPO [remaining performance obligations] grew 22% year-on-year in constant currency, a stunning 150 basis points above our guidance. Operating margin was 31%, approximately 100 basis points above our guidance.
Free cash flow margin was 48% (and operating margin was 31pc, together making 79pc), putting us once again significantly above the Rule of 50 [revenue growth + ebitda margin] for the quarter. We had 72 deals greater than $1 million in net new ACV, up from 63 a year ago. Of these large deals, nine were greater than $5 million in net new ACV. We crossed the 500 plus customers billing greater than $5 million in ACV milestone, up from 425 a year ago.
Our remaining performance obligation is now $22 billion growing 25.5% year-over-year. We saw strength across the full ServiceNow solutions portfolio. Technology workflows had 36 deals over $1 million including two over $5 million. All segments ITSM, ITOM, ITAM, Security and Risk were in more than one half of our top 20 deals.
Yes, CEOs are mindful that the global economy is in a fluid state. No, they are not standing still. In all industries, we see a renewed focus on cost takeout by rooting out inefficiencies, modernizing outdated tech stacks and restoring an integrated enterprise. ServiceNow has never been more relevant given our alignment to these precise business priorities and the unmatched speed to value from deployment that our technology delivers. We are built for this moment.
One of the biggest growth areas ever is the Enterprise AI market. Gartner describes this trend as the start of the intelligence super cycle, which is expected to run for at least the next 10 years. So we’re only in the early days and a lot of companies are hearing Agentic AI pitches right now. And what sets ServiceNow apart is simple, our platform. We integrate across the entire tech stack, ERP, CRM, HCM, bringing all that data into a single model.
Bill McDermott, CEO, ServiceNow, Q1 2025, 23 April 2025
The mystery, against this background, is why the shares were falling so sharply before the results. The truth is that shares go up and down in a random way for much of the time, but the truth will out eventually and determine the longer-term trend. One of the most spectacular examples of a share losing all contact with reality on the downside was Amazon in the 2000-2001 bear market. In round numbers and adjusted for share splits, the shares fell from $6 to 25 cents. Bezos said afterwards that at no point in this period did the company’s explosive growth even slow down.
One, with great fundamentals and a promising chart, is Crowdstrike.
Crowdstrike is one of those companies that operates behind the scenes.
CrowdStrike was founded in 2011 to reinvent security for the cloud era. Realizing that the nature of cybersecurity problems had changed but the solutions had not, we built our CrowdStrike Falcon platform to detect threats and stop breaches. With our Falcon platform, we created the first multi-tenant, cloud native, intelligent security solution capable of protecting workloads across on-premise, virtualized, and cloud-based environments running on a variety of endpoints such as laptops, desktops, servers, virtual machines, and Internet of Things, or IoT, devices. We offer 30 cloud modules on our Falcon platform via a SaaS model that spans multiple large security markets, including corporate endpoint security, security and IT operations, managed security services, observability, cloud security, identity protection, threat intelligence, data protection and cybersecurity generative AI.
Crowdstrike website
In July 2024, CRWD experienced a major outage.
In July 2024, CrowdStrike experienced a major IT outage due to a faulty software update, not a cyberattack, which caused millions of Windows systems to crash. This widespread disruption affected numerous industries and was estimated to cost Fortune 500 companies $5.4 billion. While not a cyberattack, this incident highlighted vulnerabilities in the software update process and raised concerns about the reliance on technology.
AI Overview (whatever that is)
The shares almost halved on the news and have only just recovered to where they were. The company has learned important lessons, and security in the world of technology is no less vital with so many bad actors out there, from hackers to would-be blackmailers to hostile nation states.
Crowdstrike is an awesome growth story.
I have always thought Crowdstrike was a wonderful company. In 2021, it was my largest holding. There is no loss of momentum in the business.
We find ourselves placed at the epicenter of a rapidly evolving demand environment. A new administration, a new wave of technology, and a new threat landscape necessitate all businesses to evolve their cybersecurity programs. Consolidation, cost reduction, and automation are now the accepted enterprise and federal priorities. These priorities are accelerating the shift from ineffective, narrow, or duplicative point products.
I’d like to share AI-specific trends on the broader demand environment and how these trends relate to CrowdStrike. First, AI experimentation is just starting to evolve into AI outcomes. Second, we’re in the midst of a rapidly accelerating geopolitical AI arms race. And third, winning the AI war requires the very best data and a battle-tested innovation engine.
Commenting on the shift from AI experimentation to AI outcomes, we’re still in the early, but rapidly evolving innings of the AI revolution. Businesses and governments across the globe are looking for their AI investments to yield both improved efficiencies and novel outputs. At CrowdStrike, we’re requiring every team and function to leverage the power of AI. We expect these investments to play critical top- and bottom-line roles on our path to $10 billion in ARR.
George Kurtz, cofounder and CFO, Q4 2025, 4 March 2025
Crowdstrike is at the heart of an escalating threat environment. It sounds like Palantir talking about making sure the good guys are going to win, as they (CRWD) reference the cyber war raging around the globe.
Q4 was our largest threat intelligence quarter in company history. Governments and enterprises increasingly turned to CrowdStrike, especially in a competitive environment where M&A activity has subsumed many existing threat intelligence vendors.
We’re the market’s leading threat intelligence authority discovering and naming the adversaries to unite cyber defenders in stopping them. The democratization of destruction, AI in the hands of more adversaries, intensifies the market need for CrowdStrike. And lastly, my third point, CrowdStrike is manufacturing the instruments to win the AI war. We have the innovation engine and the security data to fuel it.
Finally, in this AI fueled demand environment, the point product vendors and those that have failed to deliver open and native single platforms increasingly fall short. CrowdStrike is cybersecurity’s AI native SOC [system on a chip]. Our greatest asset is our role as the creator of cybersecurity’s richest data. We’ve curated this dataset with millions of Falcon Complete analyst annotations, making threat data contextualized and actionable.
No one else has this. Our data is liquid gold for creating new agentic models for continuously improving protection. Falcon is purpose built to win the AI war with market leading protection.
George Kurtz, cofounder and CFO, Q4 2025, 4 March 2025
If these shares move convincingly above $400, they are going to be a screaming buy.
