Will Walgreens Rule the Land? 👑

Of the many companies that reported today, Walgreens had a shine unlike any other. ☀️ The drugstore company bested analyst estimates.

Walgreens reported EPS of $1.17 adjusted (vs. $1.02 expected) and revenue of $34.26 billion (vs. $33.3 billion.) Revenue in Q3 2020 was $30.37 billion, showing just how beefy the company’s revenue growth has been. 🥩 💪

Walgreens’ net income rose over $627 million in the quarter, nearly doubling YoY. Walgreens CEO Roz Brewer shared that the COVID vaccine campaign had a “halo effect” on business in stores — customers with vaccine appointments bought products while waiting for their shots. Brewer intends for Walgreens to continue offering vaccines in the future.

But impressive numbers weren’t all that Walgreens had to offer for investors. The company wants the public to know that it’s done being “just a pharmacy.” The company is starting a new division called Walgreens Health, which will allow many of the brand’s 9,000 stores to offer doctor appointments, medical tests, and the like.

The company also acquired stakes in “several healthcare companies,” including a primary care company called VillageMD, a home healthcare company called CareCentrix, and a specialty pharmacy company called Shields Health.

All the excitement feels deeply reminiscent of CVS Health, which acquired insurance company Aetna in 2018. CVS also owns a pharmacy and clinic biz. You can call Walgreens a copycat, but investors really like this end-to-end model. 🤷

$WBA caught a 7.4% rip today on the good news.

Gitlab (the top competitor to Microsoft’s ‘Github’) shares skyrocketed 35% today in the company’s public debut. 🚀 🤑

Gitlab initially priced its shares at $77, valuing the company at $11 billion. $GTLB closed the day at $103.89 with its market cap at $14.9 billion. 💪

Gitlab’s software enables users to build, package, and share code on ‘DevOps,’ its free platform. The company also offers premium subscription services from $19-99/mo — some customers even spend up to $100,000 each year on Gitlab’s services. The company commented:

“Our future success depends, in part, on our ability to convert users of our free product offering into paying customers by selling additional products, and by upselling additional subscription services.” 

$GTLB’s Q2 revenue soared 69% YoY and the company raised $650 million from its IPO. 🤭 Not too shabby.

Department store Macy’s is valued at over $7 billion, but one activist investor thinks Macy’s could be worth a lot more… contingent upon one little thing.

In a letter to Macy’s management, Jana Partners says that spinning off Macy’s e-commerce business could bode well for the department store. Macy’s online biz could get attention from firms that are interested in investing in a spinoff. 💰 💰

The company’s e-commerce sales are expected to be worth more than the company’s entire market capitalization this year, landing somewhere above $8.3 billion. According to CNBC, those figures have nearly doubled over the last four years.

Those hefty figures (and the sweet, sweet appeal of the words “tech” and “e-commerce” among investors 😋) could earn Macy’s a $14 billion valuation for its online business. In other words: Macy’s online biz alone could be worth 2x the value of the whole company right now. Crazy, right?!

Guess this will be a “wait and see” kind of situation, but Jana is picking up stock here. $M was up 2.85% today.

Coinbase has proposed the creation of a special regulator just for the cryptocurrency market. According to the WSJ, the trading platform suggested that Congress should create a new agency to regulate the industry under a new framework, which differs from conventional regulation. 

The proposal comes on the heels of the Wells Notice the exchange received from the SEC last month over its lending product. The company had to cancel the product launch because of the SEC’s demands.

“To avoid fragmented and inconsistent regulatory oversight of these unique and concurrent innovations, responsibility over digital asset markets should be assigned to a single federal regulator,” Coinbase said in its new publication, “Digital Asset Policy Proposal: Safeguarding America’s Financial Leadership.”

The company wants Congress to create a self-regulatory organization to “strengthen the oversight regime.” The organization would create rules overseeing a range of crypto topics such as digital asset trading, borrowing, and related services.

While some agreed to Coinbase’s proposal on Twitter, others took a dig at the company, claiming Coinbase wants to clear its way for launching crypto products without any interference from the SEC. 🤔

$COIN rose 5.3% today.

Boeing and Virgin Galactic came down with a fresh case of the aerospace blues today. 😔

Virgin Galactic, which beat Bezos’ Blue Origin to orbit earlier this year, announced that it would punt the start of commercial flights to Q4 2022. This was highly unpleasing to investors, who responded in-kind by punting the price of $SPCE stock in afterhours trading. Virgin Galactic lost 13.13%. 👎

This probably isn’t surprising to those who were clued in to Sir Richard Branson’s spaceflight company. In the aftermath of Branson’s daredevil flight, The New Yorker ran a story about how Branson’s flight was actually dangerous. After the story was published, the FAA temporarily grounded Virgin Galactic for investigation. 🕵️‍♂️ A month later, the FAA cleared the company to begin flying again.

It might make the Virgin Galactic team feel better to know that they weren’t the only aerospace company having a bad day.  Boeing was also down in the doldrums as a defect was found in the company’s Dreamliner 787. America’s leading aerospace company is still finding problems with passenger planes that started flying in 2009. 🤦

And in case you’re wondering — no, this has nothing to do with the 737MAX, which was grounded for over a year due to a software problem which crashed the plane on two separate occasions. Instead, Boeing admits that some of its titanium 787 Dreamliner parts were “improperly manufactured over the past three years.”

The problems are prompting even more inspections. Considering what’s turned up so far,  odds are that inspectors will continue to find problems. $BA fell 1.95% today.

It’s hard to tell if Virgin or Boeing will make it out of these messes unscathed. 😬