So… what’s going on this week?

A bit of news to pass along first… Shopify (SHOP) shareholders did approve the stock split and “founder share” issued to Tobi Lutke (to maintain his voting control at 40% of the company), so the 10-for-1 stock split will take place after the close on June 28 — you’ll wake up on the 29th to see the shares have fallen 90%, and your 10 shares have multiplied ninefold. Again, as with Amazon and Alphabet, no real change to the economics of share ownership… but investors typically like stock splits, and, on average, that’s reflected in good performance. As I noted last week, it would take a mountain of outperformance to let Shopify (or Amazon, or Alphabet) even keep up with the market at this point, let alone help to erase their collapses from the sugar highs of last year, so our hopes should be moderated… but if it’s news at all, it’s at least slightly good news. Even if it will be kind of strange to see SHOP shares down around $30-40 again, where they were when we first covered the stock in 2016.

And DocuSign (DOCU) posted strong revenue but weak earnings last night, which caused a knee-jerk reaction in the share price. We’ll see if that sticks, it essentially resulted in a give-back of the little bout of optimism the shares had seen for a few weeks recently, and particularly of a quick turnaround in sentiment after the good news about their deepening relationship with Microsoft (MSFT) a couple days ago. I’m writing these words before listening to the conference call, but it seems that the negatives are a drop in their “billings guidance” of a couple hundred thousand dollars, which has happened with DOCU a couple times before and always hurt the share price, as it conveys a softer future growth sentiment (billings includes contracted revenue that hasn’t hit the income statement yet, so it’s a little bit more forward-looking than revenue), though they are guiding investors to still expect about $2.48 billion in revenue for this year, and about $2.5 billion in billings.

They’re not growing nearly as fast as they did during the pandemic, when eSignatures were an urgent requirement instead of a nice convenience, and we should expect some areas (like real estate closings) to slow down, but people don’t easily give up the convenience of ...