Weekly Stock List - chof 360 news

Summary

Argus believes that 2025 may be defined by 10 investment themes. Throughout the year, we will take a deep dive into these themes, providing updates and giving stock picks on the prominent companies whose businesses play out in each theme. In many cases, we believe these thematic factors will supersede industry characteristics and drive performance. Our Investment Themes for 2025 are: Theme 1: Management Signals; Theme 2: Artificial Intelligence; Theme 3: Clean Energy; Theme 4: Sustainable Impact investing; Theme 5: Innovation; Theme 6: Cybersecurity; Theme 7: Investing in the Cloud; Theme 8: Aerospace and Defense, All Systems Go; Theme 9: Uptick in Capex amid Declining Interest Rates; and Theme 10: Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology. For this week's Weekly List, we examine Theme 7: Investing in the Cloud. Cloud computing has transformed the technology landscape over the past decade. Created almost accidently as a means or organizing customer invoices, cloud has grown from the management of outsourced technology hardware resources to encompass tasks, up to and including software development, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI). Indeed, following availability of ChatGPT in November 2022, awareness of generative AI hit the business community like an electric shock, and has completely upended IT spending plans for the next several years. Given that delivery of AI will mainly occur within a hybrid cloud environment, emergence of AI-as-a-service represents a difficult-to-quantify, but undoubtedly positive driver of cloud service revenues in the coming years. The leading providers of cloud services tend to be large technology and communications services companies that provide many goods and services distinct from or adjacent to their cloud businesses. These companies include Amazon.com, Microsoft, Alphabet, and others in the U.S., along with Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and others in China. Collectively, participants in the cloud eco-system